originated in Provence, had followed in Germany a peculiar development.

In Provence it had always remained a sentiment rather pagan than Christian, and had served more as an excuse for a lax morality than as an instrument for the purification of social intercourse. Transferred to Germany, it had been touched by the more serious spirit of the North; had, through devotion to the blessed Virgin, become influenced by religious sentiment, and perhaps also had been affected by that old Teutonic reverence for women which to the Roman Tacitus had seemed worthy of remark. Not that it always maintained a uniform exaltation of tone in the hands of poets varying greatly in character and genius. Walter is often led to denounce, even in his earlier poems, and before the later decadence of manners had set in, a tendency of certain singers to degrade their art to the service of licentiousness; and even such masters as Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walter himself, though insisting on the vital difference between true and false love, yet did not in every case exclude illicit relations from the former category. Yet, on the whole, the picture of the ideal woman, painted by the best and most influential of the Minnesingers, is that of a refined lady, modest, reserved, and courteous. Better than all the glories that May brings in its train, sings Walter von der Vogelweide, is it

When a noble maiden, fair and pure,

With raiment rich, and tresses deftly braided,
Mingles, for pleasure's sake, in company

High-bred, with eyes that, laughingly demure,

Glance round at times, and make all else seem faded,
As, when the sun shines, all the stars must die.

Again, he says—

We men maintain that Constancy

Is a good woman's highest pride;

If she have wit and modesty,

'Tis rose and lily side by side.

And if charm, courtesy, and virtue were looked for in woman, a corresponding excellence of character was expected of those who sought to win her love; since, as Walter says

Whoso the love of a good woman heeds

Will be ashamed of evil deeds.

That in this cult of womanhood, and in the poetry that gave it expression, there was much that was artificial and conventional is true enough. Walter, too, is not free from this imputation, which was indeed brought against him by contemporary critics, and which he is at pains to refute :

Many there are who say it is not truly from the heart I sing.

Not a little, both in form and matter, he borrowed from older masters, more particularly from Reinmar and Heinrich von Veldegge; and if we seek for genuine depth of feeling we must not look for it in his earlier lyrics, charming as they are in conception and perfect in form, but in those poems of his later years in which he raises his voice for what he believes to be the cause of righteousness, or laments the decadence of the times. A certain artificiality is, indeed, the fault that is most obvious in the work of all the Minnesingers. Till the influence of the French tradition made itself felt, German poetry had erred in the other direction, contenting itself in earlier times with a rude rhythm helped out by alliteration, and, later on, by rough attempts at rhyme. Heinrich von Veldegge had been the first to introduce stricter rules; and, the fashion once set, the artistic canons, which should have been the instruments, soon became the fetters of expression, strictness of form becoming, as it were, a new plaything, which absorbed the attention of the poets of the time, to the exclusion of qualities perhaps more essential. It is one of the most striking features of Walter von der Vogelweide's genius that, under the weight of these formal fetters, he moves in general so easily; and that, with so much that is purely conventional, we have also so much that reveals the striking individuality of the man, and throws such a clear light on the manners and habits of thought of the age in which he lived.

It is probable that, but for the tremendous social and religious cataclysm that convulsed the world at the close of the twelfth century, Walter von der Vogelweide would, like most of his compeers, never have left the traditional paths of chivalrous poetry. But the year 1198, which saw the death of the first and most munificent of his patrons, marked a memorable epoch also in the affairs of Germany and of the world, and, for a time, drew the young poet from lighter themes into the field of political and religious strife.

In September, A.D. 1197, the Emperor Henry the Sixth, after raising the empire to an unprecedented height of glory, and establishing his authority up to the very gates of Rome, had been suddenly cut off, in the mid-career of his success, and at the early age of thirty-two. A few months later, in January 1198, his antagonist, Pope Celestine the Third, also died, and the vacancy of the Holy See was speedily filled up by the election of the Cardinal Lothair, who took the memorable name of Innocent the Third.

Never had the essential weakness of the Germanic empire and the inherent strength of the papacy been contrasted in more vivid relief. The death of the emperor and the uncertainty of the succession undid in a moment the work of years; and, while the empire, deprived of its head, lay distracted and helpless, the new Pope could take up at once the thread of policy where his predecessor had dropped it, and, under the most favourable circumstances, apply his iron will and

consummate statesmanship to building up once more the fallen fortunes of the See of Peter.

The death of the emperor was the signal for the emancipation of all those anarchic and disruptive forces which his genius had kept under control; and the succession, which, had he lived a few years longer, would have devolved, in all likelihood, easily and naturally upon his son, afterwards the Emperor Frederick the Second, became the occasion of a long and ruinous civil war. Frederick was at this time a child of but three years of age; and though his father had caused him to be formally recognised as his successor, and though his uncle, Philip of Suabia, at first proclaimed himself the protector of his nephew's interests, the prospect of a long minority was, under the circumstances of the empire, not to be regarded without serious misgivings; and Philip was soon forced, in the interests of the empire, as well as of the House of Hohenstauffen, to put forward his own claims to the crown. For meanwhile Otho of Brunswick, the chief of the House of Guelph, and the hereditary foe of the Hohenstauffen Cæsars, thinking the crisis a favourable opportunity for ousting the enemies of his race, had won a great following among the turbulent nobles of Germany, had, by a concession of all the points at issue with the Church, purchased the support of the Holy See, and finally (in that age a matter of no small importance), having gained possession of the regalia, had been solemnly anointed at Aix-la-Chapelle as King of the Romans. Into the weary struggle that followed it is unnecessary to enter. For years Germany was devastated by all the horrors of civil war, and for years neither party achieved a decisive advantage; and when at last Otho's power had been completely broken, and he had been forced to acknowledge Philip as emperor, the sword of an assassin did for him, in the pursuit of private revenge, what years of open warfare had been unable to accomplish, and with the death of Philip he found himself undisputed master of the empire (A.D. 1208).

In this struggle the genius and the young and ardent patriotism of Walter von der Vogelweide were from the first enlisted on the side of Philip of Suabia; for the triumph of the Hohenstauffen meant the curbing of those disruptive forces which were destined in time to split up the empire into numberless petty princedoms, and the establishment of a united and powerful German State.

To this earlier period of the civil war, when the rival factions were as yet evenly matched, belong the oldest of Walter's political rhymes.

In the first he pictures the wretched condition to which the country had been reduced by the civil dissensions; in a second, after illustrating from the analogy of nature the necessity for a strong government, he calls upon the Germans to set the crown on Philip's head and curb the ruinous ambitions of the petty princes :

I heard a fountain brimming,

And saw the fishes swimming,

And marked what in the world did pass :

Forest and field, rush, leaf, and grass;

All things that fly and creep,
And beasts that run and leap;

And saw that of all forms of life

Not one there is lives free from strife:
Wild beasts and creeping things
Have all their quarrellings;
The birds, too, fight right angrily,
Yet in one thing they all agree:
That none would live content
Had they no government.

They choose them kings to make awards,
And some are vassals, some are lords.
Then, wretched Germany!

How ill it fares with thee!

Since ev'ry insect has its king,

While all thine honour's perishing.

Turn e'er it be too late!

The princes grow too great;

These threadbare kinglets press thee sore:

Crown Philip with the Kaiser's crown, and bid them vex thy

peace no more!

In a third poem, composed in the same form, but probably written somewhat later, in A.D. 1201, when Innocent had pronounced sentence of excommunication on Philip of Suabia, Walter attacks the clergy and the See of Rome with bitter violence, ascribing to their unchristian ambition the evils by which, in Germany, Church and State, 'soul and body,' had been desolated.

For the very arguments which would have commended the cause of the Hohenstauffen to a far-sighted German patriotism had led Innocent, almost instinctively, to espouse the side of Otho; and the casting of the whole weight of the papal influence into the scale on behalf of the weaker and less desirable candidate was but the continuation of the traditional policy of the Lateran, which had been accustomed to look for the strength of the papacy in the weakness of the empire, and to fear, from a strongly established rule beyond the Alps, a renewal of those imperial claims and ambitions in Italy which, under Henry the Sixth, had confined the temporal sway of the popes within the walls of the city.

With the death of Philip and the election and coronation of Otho the policy of Innocent would seem to have been crowned with success. But the jealous suspicion of the papacy was directed, not against a family or an individual, but against an idea; and the very triumph of the Guelph revived once more the old causes of quarrel in the irreconcilable claims of the spiritual and temporal powers, and in

due course brought down upon Otho the same thunderbolt that had once been launched against his rival.

The success of the apparently hopeless attempt of the young Frederick the Second to recover from Otho, with the help of the Holy See, the throne of his ancestors, though doubtless accelerated by the emperor's unpopular rule, his incapacity, and his unbridled temper, and consummated by Otho's overthrow, at the hands of Philip Augustus, on the field of Bouvines (A.D. 1212), was none the less a singular proof of the enormous influence which the papal censures then exercised over men's consciences, and makes all the more remarkable the independence of mind of those who, like Walter von der Vogelweide, without losing their reverence for religion or the Catholic faith, ventured, in no mild terms, to criticise the action of the head of Christendom.

For all through the great contest, which was not to end till long after he had passed away, Walter had been consistently on the side of the empire. He had supported Philip until his untimely fate had left Otho the only possible candidate for the crown; he then gave his adherence to Otho, and opposed Frederick the Second, the Priests' King (Pfaffen-König), as he was called, until the violence and incapacity of the former made his rejection not only inevitable, but desirable in the interests of the empire; and lastly, when Frederick in his turn had fallen under the displeasure of the Holy See, it was on his behalf that some of the bitterest and most scathing of his attacks on the Pope were composed. Of these anti-papal rhymes the following is one of the most characteristic examples:

Aha! how christianly the Pope of us makes mock

When what he here hath wrought he tells his foreign flock.
What he proclaims should never even have been thought.
He says: "
Beneath one crown two Germans have I brought,
That they the realm may burn, and wreck, and waste;

Their wealth the while into my chests I cast.

I've cudgelled them with my good stick; their wealth will all be mine!
Their German silver flows into my Roman shrine.

Now feast, ye priests, on fowls, and drink your wine;

And let the witless German laymen-fast.'

Yet, in spite of all this vigorous denunciation of papal ambition, and the means by which it was furthered, Walter remains to the last a pious Christian and a devout Catholic; and though the number of his religious songs which have survived is small, those that remain breathe a spirit of deep and sincere piety; nor is there in any of them a trace of a premature Protestantism, or of the influence of any of those heresies which had, at that period, gained so wide a hold on the south of Europe.