gn of literary
tastes,--himself a poet and a philosopher. Harassed by the Pope, he
retaliated most fiercely, and was at last accused of a design to extirpate
the Christian religion. The ban was published against him, and his own son
rose in rebellion. Germany remained faithful to her Emperor, and the
Emperor was successful against his son. But he soon died in disappointment
and despair. With him the star of the Swabian dynasty had set, and the
sweet sounds of the Swabian lyre died away with the last breath of
Corradino, the last of the Hohenstaufen, on the scaffold at Naples, in
1268. Germany was breaking down under heavy burdens. It was visited by the
papal interdict, by famine, by pestilence. Sometimes there was no Emperor,
sometimes there were two or three. Rebellion could not be kept under, nor
could crime be punished. The only law was the "Law of the Fist." The
Church was deeply demoralized. Who was to listen to romantic poetry? There
was no lack of poets or of poetry. Rudolf von Ems, a poet called Der
Stricker, and Konrad von Wuerzburg, all of them living in the middle of the
thirteenth century, were more fertile than Hartmann von Aue and Gottfried
von Strassburg. They complain, however, that no one took notice of them,
and they are evidently conscious themselves of their inferiority. Lyric
poetry continued to flourish for a time, but it degenerated into an
unworthy idolatry of ladies, and affected sentimentality. There is but one
branch of poetry in which we find a certain originality, the didactic and
satiric. The first beginnings of this new kind of poetry carry us back to
the age of Walther von der Vogelweide. Many of his verses are satirical,
political, and didactic; and it is supposed, on very good authority, that
Walther was the author of an anonymous didactic poem, "Freidank's
Bescheidenheit." By Thomasin von Zerclar, or Tommasino di Circlaria, we
have a metrical composition on manners, the "Italian Guest," which
likewise belongs to the beginning of the thirteenth century.(7) Somewhat
later we meet, in the works of the Stricker, with the broader satire of
the middle classes; and toward the close of the century, Hugo von
Trimberg, in his "Renner," addresses himself to the lower ranks of German
society, and no longer to princes, knights, and ladies.

How is this to be accounted for? Poetry was evidently changing hands
again. The Crusades had made the princes and knights the representatives
and leaders of the