In a city where all its associations of greatness are with the past, and
its memories essentially connected with those who have been long
numbered with the dead, it is natural we should find a strong tendency
to remembrances of events and personages generally forgotten in other
and more stirring cities. The Nuernbergers lovingly preserve all that
will connect them with the glorious days of Kaiser Maximilian, when
their "great Imperial City" held the treasures of the Holy Roman empire,
the crown and royal insignia of Charlemagne, as well as the still more
precious "relics" which he had brought from the Holy Land.[245-*]

Among all their literary magnates none is better remembered than

"Hans Sachs, the cobbler-bard,"

and statuettes of this great poet of small things are to be seen in most
Nuernberg book and print shops. Since the days of Lope de Vega no writer
scribbled so fluently and so well on the thousand-and-one incidents of
his own day, or fancies of his own brain. Sachs was born at Nuernberg in
1494 and was the son of a poor tailor, who insured his education in the
free-school of the town, and at fifteen he was apprenticed to a
shoemaker; when the period of servitude had expired, in accordance with
the German practice, he set out on his travels to see the world. It was
a stirring time, and men's eyes were rapidly opened to the corruptions
of church and state; the great principles of the Reformation were
making way. Hans possessed much of that stirling common sense, and
shrewd practical observation which belong to many of the lower class,
and make them outspoken rude despisers of courtiership. On his return he
applied for admission as a fellow rhymester among the master-singers'
fraternity of Nuernberg, a corporation of self-styled poets, who
surrounded the "divine art" with all kinds of routine ordinances, and
regulated the length of lines and number of syllables which each "poem"
(?) should contain, so magisterially that they reduced it to a
mathematical precision, and might class it among the "exact sciences."
Before this august tribunal the muse of Sachs appeared, his poem was
read, its lines were measured, its syllables counted, and he was
admitted to the honour of being an acknowledged master of song. From
that hour till his death, he cobbled and sang to the wonderful amusement
of the good citizens; and when seventy-seven years had passed gaily over
his head, "he took an inventory of his poetical st