Transcriber's Note: 1. John's--I do not lengthen this Summary, seeing that but for my Respect for the Truth, I would willingly pass over many Episodes in Silence. Charles the Fifth frontispiece. Martin Luther. Stettin, Wittenberg, Spires. The Diet of Augsburg. An Execution at the time of the Reformation.
Ferdinand the First. View of Stralsund. If we wish to understand the pedestrian side of German life in the sixteenth century, I know of no better document than the autobiography of Bartholomew Sastrow. This hard-headed, plain-spoken Pomeranian notary cannot indeed be classed among the great and companionable writers of memoirs.
Here are no genial portraits, no sweet-tempered and mellow confidings of the heart such as comfortable men and women are wont to distil in a comfortable age. The times were fierce, and passion ran high and deep. One might as well expect to extract amiability from the rough granite of an Icelandic saga. There is no delicacy, no charm, no elevation of tone in these memoirs.
Everything is seen through plain glass, but seen distinctly in hard and fine outlines, and reported with an objectivity which would be consistently scientific, were it not for some quick touches of caustic humour, and the stored hatreds of an active, unpopular and struggling life. Nobody very readily sympathizes with bitter or with prosperous men, and when this old gentleman took up his pen to write, he had become both prosperous and bitter.
He had always been a hard hitter, and at the age of seventy-five set himself down to compose a fighting apologia. If the ethics are those of Mr. Tulliver, senior, we must not be surprised.
