Origin of the Four Gospels

IT was a pleasant, sunny morning in May of last year, when I called at the modest house in Leipzig where the world-renowned Professor Tischendorf makes his home. It lies in a quiet, pleasant part of the city, away from its narrow streets, with their tall, grim, gaunt, gray buildings, some of them centuries old, away from the quaint churches, the castellated and fantastic Rath Haus, or City Hall, as we should call it, away from the places which Bach, and Mendelssohn, and Goethe, and Dr. Faustus used to frequent, and in the new and cheerful streets of the New Town. For Leipzig grows like an American city; its ancient limits no longer hold it in, but it is shooting away into the country on all sides, and turning the battle-field where Napoleon received his first great shock, into densely-built streets and squares. One would almost think that a paleographist like Tischendorf, a man whose life-work is the exhuming of lost and buried manuscripts and the making out of their contents, would choose for his home one of those old, weather-beaten, gaunt houses in the heart of the city; but when I saw the man, I could detect at a glance that it was not his nature to choose anything less free, pleasant, and cheery than those suburban streets, and their modern, sunny houses.