was
that of mere admittance to the guild; the next carried with
it the title of scholar; the third the friend of the school;
after that came the singer, the poet; and last of all the
mastersinger, to attain which distinction the aspirant must
have invented a new style of melody or rhyme. The details of
the contest we all know from Wagner's comedy; in a number of
cases Wagner even made use of the sentences and words found
in the rules of the mastersingers. Although the mastersingers
retained their guild privileges in different parts of Germany
almost up to the middle of the present century, the movement
was strongest in Bavaria, with Nuremberg as its centre.

Thus we see that the mastersingers and the minnesingers were
two very different classes of men. The mastersingers are
mainly valuable for having given Wagner a pretext for his
wonderful music. Hans Sachs was perhaps the only one of the
mastersingers whose melodies show anything but the flattest
mediocrity. The minnesingers and their immediate predecessors
and successors, on the other hand, furnished thought for a great
part of our modern art. To put it in a broad manner, it may be
said that much of our modern poetry owes more than is generally
conceded to the German mediaeval romance as represented in the
works of Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried of Strasburg, and
the unknown compilers of the "Nibelungenlied" and "Gutrune."
Music owes more to the troubadours, for, from what we know
of the melodies of the minnesingers, they cannot compare in
expressiveness with those of their French _confreres_.

In closing this consideration of the minnesingers, I will quote
some of their verses and melodies, giving short accounts of
the authors.

The best known of the minnesingers were Walther von der
Vogelweide, Heinrich Frauenlob, Tannhaeuser, Nithart, Toggenburg,
etc. We first hear of Walther von der Vogelweide in 1200,
as a poet attached to the court of Philip of Hohenstaufen,
the German Kaiser, and shortly after to that of his successors
Otto and Friedrich. He accompanied Kaiser Friedrich to the
Crusade of 1228, and saw him crowned in Jerusalem. He died
in Wuerzburg, Bavaria. In accordance with his dying request,
food and drink for the birds were placed on his tomb every day;
the four holes carved for that purpose being still visible. The
pictures in Hagen's work on the mastersingers were collected in
the fifteenth century by Manasses of Zorich, and have served
as the