As a picture of the social life of a quaint German city three and a half centuries ago, its vividness and truthfulness are beyond all praise; it is worthy to stand beside the best dramas of the world, and has no equal in operatic literature. The food for its satire, too, is most admirably chosen, for no feature of the social life of that place and period is more amiably absurd than the efforts of the handicraftsmen and tradespeople, with their prosaic surroundings, to keep alive by dint of pedantic formularies the spirit of minstrelsy, which had a natural stimulus in the chivalric life of the troubadours and minnesingers of whom the mastersingers thought themselves the direct and legitimate successors. In its delineation of the pompous doings of the mastersingers, Wagner is true to the letter. He has vitalized the dry record to be found in old Wagenseil's book on Nuremberg, {1} and intensified the vivid description of a mastersingers' meeting which the curious may read in August Hagen's novel "Norica." His studies have been marvellously exact and careful, and he has put Wagenseil's book under literal and liberal contribution, as will appear after a while. Now it seems best to tell the story of the comedy before discussing it further. Veit Pogner, a rich silversmith, desiring to honor the craft of the mastersingers, to whose guild he belongs, offers his daughter Eva in marriage to the successful competitor at the annual meeting of the mastersingers on the feast of St. John. Eva is in love (she declares it in the impetuous manner peculiar to Wagner's heroines) with Walther von Stolzing, a young Franconian knight; and the knight with her. After a flirtation in church during divine service, Walther meets her before she leaves the building, and asks if she be betrothed. She answers in the affirmative, but it is to the unknown victor at the contest of singing on the morrow. He resolves to enter the guild so as to be qualified for the competition. A trial of candidates takes place in the church of St. Catherine in the afternoon, and Walther, knowing nothing of the rules of the mastersingers, some of which have hurriedly been outlined to him by David, a youngster who is an apprentice at shoemaking and also songmaking, fails, though Hans Sachs, a master in both crafts, recognizes evidences of genius in the knight's song, and espouses his cause as against Beckmesser, the town clerk, who aims at acquiring Pogner's fortune by winning his daughter. The young people, in despair at Walther's failure, are about to elope when they are prevented by the arrival on the scene of Beckmesser. It is night, and he wishes to serenade Eva; Sachs sits cobbling at his bench, while Eva's nurse, Magdalena, disguised, sits at a window to hear the serenade in her mistress's stead. Sachs interrupts the serenader, who is an ill-natured clown, by lustily shouting a song in which he seeks also to give warning of knowledge of