Rodolph of Hapsburgh succeeded to the Imperial crown in 1273; and, though the flame which the fostering care of the Suabian princes had nourished continued, to a certain extent, to burn on till the close of the century, it is plain that it was gradually expiring. About the period of Rodolph's accession, we find Conrad of Wurtzburg, one of the most highly gifted of the Minnesingers, lamenting over the declining popularity of his art in the following plaintive lines, which are introductory to his history of the Trojan war: Man wil ungerne hören Wol sprechen unde singen ;.... Dur das mir selben clunge Min rede und miner stimme schal. Ich täte alsam die nachtegal, Dü mit ir sanges töne, Ir selben dicke schöne, Die langen stunden kürzet : Swen über sie gestürzet Wird ein gezelt von loube, So wirt von ir das toube Unwilling stays the throng Though small the praise it bring; Even if on desert waste Deep in her leafy bow'r, Her music to prolong, And makes the hills and groves The commencement of the 14th century witnessed a total revolution in the literature of Germany. John Hadloub may be considered as the last distinguished ornament of that school which Henry of Veldig commenced. The church regained its power over the mind, and the pedantic rules of the "meisters " (masters, or professors of poetry), and of their "songschools" which now arose, effectually shackled the flights of fancy. Princes left off singing; courts no longer gathered together the minstrel tribes; Germany was cut off from its intercourse with Italy and Sicily; its freebooting age of second barbarism commenced; the whole face of society changed; and poetry speedily sunk, with very few exceptions, into the lowest depths of poverty and trifling. It was not at the Imperial court only, however, that the taste for poetry was in its day of prosperity cultivated. "Germany about the time of Frederic II. began," as M. Schlegel in his Lectures observes, "to abound more than ever in petty princes; in sovereigns, whose dominions were too insignificant to occupy the whole of their attention, and who, therefore, were at full leisure to think of procuring for their courts the ornaments of music, poetry, and the arts. These were the real patrons of German literature. It was thus that vast assemblages of minstrels and poets were collected around the courts of the Landgrave of Thuringia, and still more of the Austrian Babenbergs." Suabia and German Switzerland seem to have been the principal sources whence the poetry of the Minnesingers flowed; and most of the authors from whom our specimens will be taken will be seen to spring from families belonging to those districts. St. Gall especially deserves commemoration, one of its abbots having even acquired fame for his skill in "Watchsongs," the nature of which class of compositions will be explained hereafter. But the same taste was more or less diffused all around, and there is every reason to believe that various other dialects were used by the Minnesingers, although nearly all that has come to us is Suabian. Henry of Veldig, for instance, was certainly a Low German. Rudiger von Manesse * (a senator of Zurich in the beginning of the 14th century) and his sons are the persons to whose taste and industry we are said to be indebted for the splendid MS. collection of lyric poets, now in the King's Library at Paris, which was printed at Zurich by Bodmer in 1758. Of course they were likely to use the dialect of their own province: it seems very probable, however, that the same pieces circulated in various dialects, and that they owe their * Rudiger appears to have been an extraordinary man, who not only maintained correspondence with the most eminent men of his country, but held at his house a sort of academy or conversazione, where all the pieces of poetry which could be collected were examined, and those which were thought worthy were enrolled in his "lieder-buoch." The singular history of the invaluable treasure so formed is given in Bodmer's preface to the volume of selections from it, which he first published at Zurich, in 1748, under the title of "Proben der alten Schwabischen Poesie des 13ten Jahrhunderts." The mode in which this sort of family album was compiled is related in a song by Hadloub, one of the last of the Minnesingers, who was himself patronized by the family of Manesse. The MS. (or at least one which answers to the description, and the identity of which Bodmer and succeeding German antiquaries assume with great probability) is repeatedly noticed during the 16th century, as seen at different places by various inquirers into the antiquities of German song, and was at last discovered to have found its way to the King's Library at Paris. The songs of each poet are introduced by an illumination, in which singular attention is paid to heraldic decoration. Each design seems to represent an event of the poet's life, or to be in some way illustrative of his character. A few will be engraved in a reduced size as ornamental accompaniments to this volume. permanent character to the whim of the collector, as many of the authors (particularly the one who stands in the highest rank-Wolfram of Eschenbach) were unable even to write. To this cause it is perhaps to be attributed, too, that all the pieces in the Manesse MS. bear the same apparent age and perfection of language, although the work of poets at least a century and half distant in point of time, and natives of provinces where various dialects were spoken. Some of the same songs are, it is said, to be found in the Thuringian dialect in a MS. collection at Jena. Kinderling, in his history of the Plattdeutsch, NetherSaxon, or Low-German tongue (p. 262), mentions, among his specimens of the 13th century, three songs (published from a fragment of an ancient MS. collection of similar pieces), which are in Low-German dialects, and resemble closely the style and subjects of the Suabian minstrels. We may quote a couple of verses from the first, which is in the pure NetherSaxon, and is probably the work of some Westphalian Minnesinger. Twivel nicht du Leveste myn! Lat allen Twivel ane syn! Hert, Sinne unde Mot is allend dyn, Des schaltu wol geloven my. Ick wil min sulues nemen war, |