men and artificers, they obtained a monopoly of versecraft, and extended their tuneful fraternities over the greater part of the Empire. Wherever the hoch deutsch' was spoken, there the Mastersingers founded a colony; and they were even found in Bohemia, where the German was more familiar to the mixed population of the towns, than the Sclavonian language.

"The vulgar, all over the world, delight to indulge themselves with glitter, and parade, and external distinction; and it is amusing to observe how easily the lower orders can contrive to gratify the cravings which they feel in common with greater folks. The law will have it, that the king is the sole fountain of honour; but those who are too diminutive and feeble to toil up to the pinnacle of the rock, and lave themselves in the streams of royal favour, find means to slake their thirst quite as effectually from humbler sources. A lodge of odd fellows will marshall a funeral with as many staves and banners as could be furnished by the Lord Lion King at Arms, and all his heralds and pursuivants to boot, from Albany to Dingwall. The petty huckster of the country town has no order dangling from his button-hole, and can never hope to figure in the installation: but his veins swell with quite as much dignity when he stalks in the procession with his pinchbeck badge and embroidered apron, the grand officer of the lodge of freemasons, gazed on and admired by all the slip

shod wenches and ragged urchins of the parish. The workings of this insatiate propensity may be distinctly traced in the pride and solemnity of the schools of verse of the Mastersingers. The candidate was introduced with great form into the assembly. The four 'merkers,' or examiners, sat behind a silken curtain, to pass judgment on his qualifications. One of these had Martin Luther's translation of the Bible before him, it being considered as the standard of the language. His province was to decide whether the diction of the novice was pure, and his grammar accurate. The others attended to the rime and metre of the composition, and the melody to which it was sung. And if they united in declaring that the candidate had complied with the statutes and regulations, he was decorated with a silver chain and badge,-the latter representing good King David playing on the harp; and he was honourably admitted into the society.

"The metrical system of the Mastersingers was peculiar to themselves. Their technical terms cannot be well translated; we shall therefore add the few which we shall notice in the original. Our mineralogical friends are so well content to crackle, and whizz, and thump, through many an Anglo-Wernerian page of quartz, gneiss, trapp, schorl, blue whack, and grey whack, that we humbly hope and trust that, for once, the nomenclature of this marketable poesy may also be allowed to pass muster. The poems of the

Mastersingers were always lyrical, and actually sung to music. The entire poem was called a 'bar;' and it was divided generally into three, but sometimes into five or more stanzas, or 'gesetze:' and each 'satz' also fell into three portions; the first of which was a 'stole,' the second an 'abgesang,' and the third a 'stole,' like the first. The rimes were classed into 'stumpfe-reime' and 'klingende-reime;' and 'stumpfe-schlage-reime' and 'klingende-schlagereime' and other denominations were employed, which we shall spare ourselves the trouble of transcribing. The poets, singers and merkers counted the syllables on their fingers; and if there was a proper number of syllables in the line, it was of no consequence whether they were long or short. The length of the verse, the number of lines, and the order of the rimes in each 'stole' and 'abgesang,' was variable, and consequently their poems were susceptible of a great variety of forms, which were called tunes or weise.' The invention of a new 'weise' was considered as the test of a Mastersinger's abilities. There were some hundreds of these 'weise,' all named after their inventors; as, Hans Tindeisen's rosemary weise; Joseph Schmierer's floweryparadise weise; Hans Fogel's fresh weise; and Henry Frauenlob's yellow weise, and his blue weise, and his frog weise, and his looking-glass weise. The code of criticism to which the Master

singers were subjected, was contained in the rules of 'Tabulatur' of the societies; and it certainly was unreasonably severe. They were actually prohibited from employing 'sentences which nobody could understand,' or 'words wherein no meaning could be discovered;' which unfeeling interdictions are found in the 4th and 5th articles of the Nuremberg Tabulatur.

"The Mastersingers amused themselves by ascribing an extravagant antiquity to their institutions, although their statutes and regulations do not appear to have been completely established till the fif teenth or sixteenth centuries. Master Cyril Sprangenburg, indeed, deduced their history from 'the Celtic bards in the time of Abraham;' and this elaborate disquisition gave such satisfaction to the society, that it was transcribed in vellum, and 'bound with gold bosses, clasps and corners,' and preserved amongst their archives with as much veneration as the Florentine copy of the Pandects. The charter of incorporation of the Twelve Wise Masters,' was said to have been granted by the Emperor Otto and Pope Leo the Fourth. To show the absurdity of the fable, it will be sufficient to observe, that Conrad of Würtzburg, and Frauenlob, and others of yet later date, are said to have been cited by that emperor, in the year 962, to appear before him at Pavia, where, as Adam Puschman gravely records, they sung before the

professors of the University, and were declared to be the masters and founders of the art.

"The city of Nuremberg was the Athens of these incorporated poets. To the credit of Hans Foltz, the barber and Mastersinger, who shaved there in the middle of the 15th century, it must be told, that he took great interest in promoting the then newly discovered art of printing; and even set up a private press at his own house. But none of the Mastersingers can vie with the industrious Hans Sachs the shoemaker. Hans was born at Nuremberg in the year 1494; and his father, an honest tailor, placed him, at an early age, in the free-school of the town, where, as he mentions in one of his poems, 'he was indifferently taught, according to the bad system which was followed in those days.' However, he 'picked up a few scraps of Greek and Latin.' In his fifteenth year he learnt shoemaking; and about the same time, one Nunnenbeck, a weaver and Mastersinger, instructed him in the rudiments of the 'meister gesang.' According to an old German custom, it was usual for young workmen to travel round the country for some years before they settled in their trade. Hans confesses, that his conduct during his rambles was not altogether exemplary, but he lost no opportunity of improving himself in the 'praiseworthy art;' and in his twentieth year he composed his first 'bar,' a godly song, to the tune of 'Long Marner;'