The introduction of what may be called a representative system into literary history has been here rendered necessary by the fact that the school-resemblance so common in mediaeval writers is nowhere more common than among the Minnesingers,[122] and that the latter are extraordinarily numerous, if not also extraordinarily monotonous. One famous collection contains specimens of 160 poets, and even this is not likely to include the whole of those who composed poetry of the kind before Minnesong changed (somewhere in the thirteenth century or at the beginning of the fourteenth, but at times and in manners which cannot be very precisely fixed) into Meistersong. The chief lyric poets before Walther were Heinrich von Veldeke, his contemporary and namesake Heinrich von Morungen, and Reinmar von Hagenau, whom Gottfried selects as Walther's immediate predecessor in "nightingaleship": the chief later ones, Neidhart von Regenthal, famous for dance-songs; Tannhaeuser, whose actual work, however, is of a mostly burlesque character, as different as possible from, and perhaps giving rise by very contrast to, the beautiful and terrible legend which connects his name with the Venus-berg (though Heine has managed in his version to combine the two elements); Ulrich von Lichtenstein, half an apostle, half a caricaturist of _Frauendienst_ on the Provencal model; and, finally, Frauenlob or Heinrich von Meissen, who wrote at the end of our period and the beginning of the next for nearly fifty years, and may be said to be the link between Minnesong and Meistersong. [Footnote 122: The standard edition or _corpus_ of their work is that of Von der Hagen, in three large vols. Leipzig, 1838.]