It has been pointed out that for some curious reason French literary critics, not usually remarkable for lack of national vanity, have been by no means excessive in their laudations of the earlier literature of their country. The opposite is the case with those of Germany, and the rather extravagant patriotism of some of their expressions may perhaps have had a bad effect on some foreign readers. It cannot, for instance, be otherwise than disgusting to even rudimentary critical feeling to be told in the same breath that the first period of German literature was "richer in inventive genius than any that followed it," and that "nothing but fragments of a single song[106] remain to us" from this first period--fragments, it may be added, which, though interesting enough, can, in no possible judgment that can be called judgment, rank as in any way first-rate poetry. So, too, the habit of comparing the _Nibelungenlied_ to the _Iliad_ and _Kudrun_ to the _Odyssey_ (parallels not far removed from the Thucydides-and-Tennyson order) may excite resentment. But the Middle High German verse of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is in itself of such interest, such variety, such charm, that if only it be approached in itself, and not through the medium of its too officious ushers, its effect on any real taste for poetry is undoubted. [Footnote 106: _Hildebrand and Hadubrand._] The three divisions above sketched may very well be taken in the order given. The great folk-epics just mentioned, with some smaller poems, such as _Koenig Rother_, are almost invariably anonymous; the translators or adaptors from the French--Gottfried von Strasburg, Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and others--are at least known by name, if we do not know much else about them; and this is also the case with the Lyric poets, especially the best of them, the exquisite singer known as Walter of the Bird-Meadow. [Sidenote: _Folk-epics_--_The_ Nibelungenlied.] [Sidenote: _The_ Volsunga Saga.]