of Gawain and Orgeluse, anything like the complete drama which we find (brought out by the genius of Malory, but existing before) in the French-English Arthurian legend. But any one who knows the origins of that legend from Erec et Enide to Durmart le Gallois, and from the Chevalier au Lyon to the Chevalier as Deux Espées, must recognise in him something higher and larger than can be found in any of them, as well as something more human, if even in the best sense more fairy-tale like, than the earlier and more Western legends of the Graal as we have them in Merlin and the other French books. Here again, not so much for the form as for the spirit, we find ourselves driven to the word "great"—a great word, and one not to be misused as it so often is. Yet it may be applied in a different sense, though without hesitation, to our fourth selected name, Walther von der Vogelweide,1 a name in itself so agreeable that one really has to take care lest it raise an undue prejudice in his favour. Perhaps a part of his greatness belongs to him as the chief representative of a class, not, as in Wolfram's case, because of individual merit,-a part also to his excellence of form, which is a claim always regarded with doubt and dislike by some, though not all. It is nearly a quarter of a century since the present writer first possessed himself of and first read the delectable volume in which Franz Pfeiffer opened his series of German Classics of the Middle Ages with this singer; and every subsequent reading, in whole Walther von der 1 Ed. Bartsch. 4th ed. Leipzig, 1873. or in part, has only increased his attraction. There are some writers - not many- who seem to defy criticism by a sort of native charm, and of these Walther is one. If we listen to some grave persons, it is a childish thing to write a poem, as he does his second Lied, in stanzas every one of which is monorhymed on a different vowel. But as one reads "Diu werlt was gelf, röt unde blâ,” 1 one only prays for more such childishness. Is there a better song of May and maidens than “So diu bluomen uz dem grase dringent”? where the very phrase is romance and nature itself, and could never be indulged in by a "classical" poet, who would say (very justly), "flowers grow in beds, not grass; and if in the latter, they ought to be promptly mown and rolled down." How intoxicating, after deserts of iambs, is the dactylic swell of "Wol mich der stunde, daz ich sie erkande"! how endearing the drooping cadence of "Bin ich dir unmære Des enweiz ich niht; ich minne dich"! 1 " Diu werlt was gelf, röt unde blâ, nû schriet aber den nebelkrâ. pfligt s'iht ander varwe? jâ, Similar stanzas in e, i, o, u follow in order. R how small the change which makes a jewel out of a commonplace in "Si hat ein kussen daz ist rot"! But to go through the nearly two hundred pieces of Walther's lyric would be here impossible. His Leich, his only example of that elaborate kind, the most complicated of the early German lyrical forms, is not perhaps his happiest effort; and his Sprüche, a name given to short lyrical pieces in which the Minnesingers particularly delighted, and which correspond pretty nearly, though not exactly, to the older sense of "epigram," seldom, though sometimes, possess the charm of the Lieder themselves. But these Lieder are, for probable freedom from indebtedness and intrinsic exquisiteness of phrase and rhythm, unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled. To compare Walther to Petrarch, and to talk of the one being superior or inferior to the other, is to betray hopeless insensibility to the very rudiments of criticism. They are absolutely different, -the one the embodiment of stately form and laboured intellectual effort-of the Classical spirit; the other the mouthpiece of the half-inarticulate, all-suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the very inseparable garment of Romance. Some may like one better, others the other; the more fortunate may enjoy both. But the greatest of all gulfs is the gulf fixed between the Classical and the Romantic; and few there are, it seems, who can cross it. Perhaps something may be expected as to the personality of these poets, a matter which has had too the poets. great a place assigned to it in literary history. Personality of Luckily, unless he delights in unbridled guessing, the historian of mediaval literature is better entitled to abstain from it than any other. But something may perhaps be said of the men whose work has just been discussed, for there are not uninteresting shades of difference between them. In Germany, as in France, the trouvère-jongleur class existed; the greater part of the poetry of the twelfth century, including the so-called small epics, König Rother and the rest, is attributed to them, and they were the objects of a good deal of patronage from the innumerable nobles, small and great, of the Empire. On the other hand, though some men of consequence were poets, the proportion of these is, on the whole, considerably less than in France proper or in Provence. The German noble was not so much literary as a patron of literature, like that Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, whose court saw the fabulous or semifabulous "War of the Wartburg," with Wolfram von Eschenbach and Heinrich von Ofterdingen as chief champions. Indeed this court was the main resort of German poets and minstrels till Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in the next generation proved herself a rather "sair sanct" for literature, which has since returned her good for evil. To return to our four selected poets. Gottfried is supposed to have been neither noble, nor even directly attached to a noble household, nor a professional minstrel, but a burgher of the town which gives him his name-indeed a caution is necessary to the effect that the von of these early designations, like the de of their French originals, is by no means, as a rule, a sign of nobility. Hartmann von Aue, though rather attached to than a member of the noble family of the same name from which he has taken the hero of Der Arme Heinrich, seems to have been admitted to knightly society, was a crusader, and appears to have been of somewhat higher rank than Gottfried, whom, however, he resembled in this point, that both were evidently men of considerable education. We rise again in status, though probably not in wealth, and certainly not in education, when we come to Wolfram von Eschenbach. He was of a family of Northern Bavaria or Middle Franconia; he bore (for there are diversities on this heraldic point) two axe-blades argent on a field gules, or a bunch of five flowers argent springing from a water-bouget gules; and he is said by witnesses in 1608 to have been described on his tombstone as a knight. But he was certainly poor, had not received much education, and he was attached in the usual guest-dependant fashion of the time to the Margrave of Vohburg (whose wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria, received his poetical declarations) and to Hermann of Thuringia. He was a married man, and had a daughter. Lastly, Walther von der Vogelweide appears to have been actually a "working poet," as we may say—a trouvère, who sang his own poems as he wandered about, and whose surname was purely a decorative one. He lived, no doubt, by gifts; indeed, the historians are proud to record that a bishop gave him a |