were so miserable that the teachers, to support themselves and their families, had to practise some other profession or trade. Professor Paulsen states that in Saxony, towards the close of the sixteenth century, the one schoolmaster of a small town was regularly organist, town-clerk and sexton.[1] The village schoolmasters were mostly sextons, field-guards, or tailors. As late as 1738, an order was issued in Prussia to the effect that in the country there should be no other tailors besides the sextons and schoolmasters, and later on Frederick the Great declared: "tailors are bad schoolmasters," and so he preferred to make teachers out of old soldiers, invalid corporals, and sergeants. The position of teachers in the higher schools was not much more enticing. They had to obtain some addition to their scanty salaries by a sort of genteel beggary: by dedicating books or orations to influential persons, by writing poems for weddings or similar occasions. Teachers were always far worse off than lawyers or physicians. It was always a true saying, but especially in those times:
Sed genus et species cogitur ire pedes,
which may be freely rendered:
Justinian lifts the esquire on high,
But he that treads in grammar-mills,
Will tread it on until he die.
The famous rector of the school of Ilfeld, Neander,
- ↑ L. c., p. 296.
1901. Summary in Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, 1902, vol. X, pp. 295-296. – See also Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts (2nd ed.), vol. I, pp. 326-333; 362.
