“And,” replied Wilibald Pirckheimer, “we would rather show kindness a second and a third time to any one on whom we have be stowed a favour than to render it once to a person from whom we have received one.  This is my own experience.  But the wise man must guard against nothing more carefully than to exceed moderation in his charity.  How easily, when Caius sees Cnejus lavish gold where silver or copper would serve, he thinks of Martial’s apt words:  ’Who gives great gifts, expects great gifts again.’—­[Martial, Epigram 5, 59, 3.]—­Do not misunderstand me.  What could yonder poor thing bestow that would please even a groom?  But the eyes of suspicion scan even the past.  I have often seen you open your purse, friend Lienhard, and this is right.  Whoever hath ought to give, and my dead mother used to say that:  ’No one ever became a beggar by giving at the proper time.’”

“And life is gladdened by what one gives to another,” remarked Conrad Peutinger, the learned Augsburg city clerk, who valued his Padua title of doctor more than that of an imperial councillor.  “It applies to all departments.  Don’t allow yourself to regret your generosity, friend Lienhard.  ‘Nothing becomes man better than the pleasure of giving,’ says Terentius.—­[Terenz.  Ad. 360]—­Who is more liberal than the destiny which adorns the apple tree that is to bear a hundred fruits, with ten thousand blossoms to please our eyes ere it satisfies our appetite?”

“To you, if to any one, it gives daily proof of liberality in both learning and the affairs of life,” Herr Wilibald assented.

“If you will substitute ‘God, our Lord,’ for ‘destiny,’ I agree with you,” observed the Abbot of St. AEgidius in Nuremberg.

The portly old prelate nodded cordially to Dr. Peutinger as he spoke.  The warm, human love with which he devoted himself to the care of souls in his great parish consumed the lion’s share of his time and strength.  He spent only his leisure hours in the study of the ancient writers, in whom he found pleasure, and rejoiced in the work of the humanists without sharing their opinions.

“Yes, my dear Doctor,” he continued in his deep voice, in a tone of the most earnest conviction, “if envy were ever pardonable, he who presumed to feel it toward you might most speedily hope to find forgiveness.  There is no physical or mental gift with which the Lord has not blessed you, and to fill the measure to overflowing, he permitted you to win a beautiful and virtuous wife of noble lineage.”

“And allowed glorious daughters to grow up in your famous home,” cried little Dr. Eberbach, waving his wineglass enthusiastically.  “Who has not heard of Juliane Peutinger, the youngest of humanists, but no longer one of the least eminent, who, when a child only four years old, addressed the Emperor Maximilian in excellent Latin.  But when, as in the child Juliane, the wings of the intellect move so powerfully and so prematurely, who would not think of the words of the superb Ovid:  ’The human mind gains victories more surely than lances and arrows.’”