Besides pastorals of the kind just referred to, the Troubadours had several other classes of songs, among them the tensons, or contentions which were “metrical dialogues of lively repartee on some disputed points of gallantry.” These may have given ground for the myth that aristocratic ladies of this period “instituted Courts of Love, in which questions of gallantry were gravely discussed and determined by their suffrages,” as, _e.g._ whether a husband could really love his wife. The question whether any such debating clubs for considering the ethics and etiquette of love existed is still debated by scholars; but the best evidence appears to be negative. (_b_) _German Minnesingers._—The German wandering minstrels also belonged mainly to the aristocracy, and imitated their French colleagues in paying their addresses chiefly to married women—a fact for which, in both cases, the rigid chaperonage of the young must be held responsible; for man _will_ make love, and if not allowed to do so properly he will do it improperly. Yet on the whole the Minnesingers, at least in their verse, were less amorous than the Troubadours. As Mr. L. C. Elson remarks in his _History of German Song_: “The Troubadour praised the eyes, the hair, the lips, the form of his chosen one; the Minnesinger praised the sweetness, the grace, the modesty, the tenderness of the entire sex. The one was concrete, the other abstract.” Abstractness, however, is not a desirable quality in poetry, the very essence of which is concrete imagery. Accordingly we find that with few exceptions the German Minnesingers are not as poets equal to their French prototypes. It was Schiller himself who passed the severest judgment on these early colleagues of his. “If the sparrows on the roof,” he once remarked to a friend, “should ever undertake to write, or to issue an almanac of love and friendship, I would wager ten to one it would be just like these songs of love. What a poverty of ideas in these songs! A garden, a tree, a hedge, a forest, and a sweetheart—these are about all the objects that are to be found in a sparrow’s head. Then we have flowers which are fragrant, fruits which grow mellow, twigs on which a bird sits in the sunshine and sings, and spring which comes, and winter which goes, and nothing that remains except—_ennui_.” Schiller’s criticism, however, is too sweeping, for there were notable exceptions to these sparrow-poets, concerning one of whom, Hadlaub, the late Professor Scherer gives the following fascinating information in his _History of German Literature_: "He introduces human figures into his descriptions of scenery, and shows us, for instance, in the summer a group of beautiful ladies walking in an orchard, and blushing with womanly modesty when gazed at by young men. He compares the troubles of love with the troubles of hard-working men, like charcoal-burners and carters.