One thing may be said with great certainty of the division of literature to which we have come, that none shows more clearly the natural aptitude of the people who produced it for poetry. It is a familiar observation from beginners in German who have any literary taste, that German poetry reads naturally, German prose does not. In verse the German disencumbers himself of that gruesome clumsiness which almost always besets him in the art he learnt so late, and never learnt to any perfection. To "say" is a trouble to him, a trouble too often unconquerable; to sing is easy enough. And this truth, true of all centuries of German literature, is never truer than here. Translated or adapted verse is not usually the most cheerful department of poetry. The English romances, translated or adapted from the French, at times on the whole later than these, have been unduly abused; but they are certainly not the portion of the literature of his country on which an Englishman would most pride himself. Even the home-grown and, as I would fain believe, home-made legend of Arthur, had to wait till the fifteenth century before it met, and then in prose, a worthy master in English. [Sidenote: _Originality of its adaptation._] But the German adapters of French at the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are persons of very different calibre from the translators of _Alexander_ and the other English-French romances, even from those who with far more native talent Englished _Havelok_ and _Horn_. If I have spoken harshly of German admiration of _Kudrun_, I am glad to make this amends and to admit that Gottfried's _Tristan_ is by far the best of all the numerous rehandlings of the story which have come down to us. If we must rest Hartmann von Aue's chief claims on the two _Buechlein_, on the songs, and on the delightful _Armer Heinrich_, yet his _Iwein_ and his _Erec_ can hold their own even with two of the freshest and most varied of Chrestien's original poems. No one except the merest pedant of originality would hesitate to put _Parzival_ above _Percevale le Gallois_, though Wolfram von Eschenbach may be thought to have been less fortunate with _Willehalm_. And though in the lyric, the debt due to both troubadour and _trouvere_ is unmistakable, it is equally unmistakable what mighty usury the minnesingers have paid for the capital they borrowed. The skill both of Northern and Southern Frenchmen is seldom to seek in lyric: we cannot give them too high praise as fashioners of instruments for other men to use. The cheerful bird-voice of the _trouvere_, the half artificial but not wholly insincere intensity of his brethren of the _langue d'oc_, will never miss their meed. But for real "cry," for the diviner elements of lyric, we somehow wait till we hear it in