“Hadlaub tells us more of his personal experiences than any other Minnesinger. Even as a child, we learn, he had loved a little girl, who, however, would have nothing to say to him, but continually flouted him, to his great distress. Once she bit his hand, but her bite, he says, was so tender, womanly, and gentle, that he was _sorry the feeling of it passed away so soon_. Another time, being urged to give him a keepsake, she threw her needle-case at him, and he seized it with sweet eagerness, but it was taken from him and returned to her, and she was made to give it him in a friendly manner. In later years his pains still remained unrewarded; when his lady perceived him, she would get up and go away. Once, he tells us, he saw her fondling and kissing a child, and when she had gone he drew the child towards him and embraced it as she had embraced it, and kissed it in the place where she had kissed it.” The gradual change in woman’s position, social and amorous, is indicated by the differences between the earlier and the later Minnesongs. In the early poems Professor Scherer remarks, "The social supremacy of noble woman is not yet recognised, and the man wooes with proud self-respect.... Another refuses himself to a woman who desired his love.... A fourth boasts of his triumphs. ‘_Women_,’ says he, ‘_are as easily tamed as falcons_.’ In another song a woman tells how she tamed a falcon, but he flew away from her, and now wears other chains.... “In the later Minnesongs it is _the women who are proud, and the men who must languish_.” A still more remarkable change is noticed in the German Folk-songs which followed the periods of Minnesong proper. “The women of these popular love-songs are not mostly married women; _they are, as a rule, young maidens_” [at last, pure Romantic Love!] “who are not only praised but also turned to ridicule and blamed. The woes of love do not here arise from the capricious coyness of the fair one, but are called forth by parting, jealousy, or faithlessness. Feeling is stronger than in the Minnesong, and seeks accordingly for stronger modes of expression.” It is not a mere accident that true Romantic Love should have first appeared in these Folk-songs. For these were the products of gifted individuals in the lower classes, where chaperonage—arch enemy of Love—was less strict than among the higher classes. FEMALE CULTURE That the women were not ungrateful to the mediæval bards who first discovered in them the possibilities of higher charms and virtues, is shown by their treatment of Heinrich von Meissen, Minnesinger, who was called Frauenlob, because he constantly sang the “praise of woman.” When he died at Mainz in 1317 they carried his bier to church with their own hands, and then, in accordance with the custom of the time, poured libations of wine on his bier so freely that the whole floor of the church was covered.