consisted of a President and Senate, forming a close corporation, which had received from the founder all his own authority, and the right to supply their own vacancies.  The five faculties of law, canon law, medicine, theology, and the arts, were cultivated at the institution.  There was, besides, a high school for under graduates, divided into four classes.  The place reeked with pedantry, and the character of the university naturally diffused itself through other scholastic establishments.  Nevertheless, it had done and was doing much to preserve the love for profound learning, while the rapidly advancing spirit of commerce was attended by an ever increasing train of humanizing arts.

The standard of culture in those flourishing cities was elevated, compared with that observed in many parts of Europe.  The children of the wealthier classes enjoyed great facilities for education in all the great capitals.  The classics, music, and the modern languages, particularly the French, were universally cultivated.  Nor was intellectual cultivation confined to the higher orders.  On the contrary, it was diffused to a remarkable degree among the hard-working artisans and handicraftsmen of the great cities.

For the principle of association had not confined itself exclusively to politics and trade.  Besides the numerous guilds by which citizenship was acquired in the various cities, were many other societies for mutual improvement, support, or recreation.  The great secret, architectural or masonic brotherhood of Germany, that league to which the artistic and patient completion of the magnificent works of Gothic architecture in the middle ages is mainly to be attributed, had its branches in nether Germany, and explains the presence of so many splendid and elaborately finished churches in the provinces.  There were also military sodalities of musketeers, cross-bowmen, archers, swordsmen in every town.  Once a year these clubs kept holiday, choosing a king, who was selected for his prowess and skill in the use of various weapons.  These festivals, always held with great solemnity and rejoicing, were accompanied bye many exhibitions of archery and swordsmanship.  The people were not likely, therefore, voluntarily to abandon that privilege and duty of freemen, the right to bear arms, and the power to handle them.

Another and most important collection of brotherhoods were the so-called guilds of Rhetoric, which existed, in greater or less number, in all the principal cities.  These were associations of mechanics, for the purpose of amusing their leisure with poetical effusions, dramatic and musical exhibitions, theatrical processions, and other harmless and not inelegant recreations.  Such chambers of rhetoric came originally in the fifteenth century from France.  The fact that in their very title they confounded rhetoric with poetry and the drama indicates the meagre attainments of these early “Rederykers.”  In the outset of their