So also in the other departments of poetry, harbingers, contemporaries, and continuators, some of whom have been mentioned, most of whom it would be impossible to mention, group round the greater masters, and as in France, so here, the departments themselves branch out in an almost bewildering manner. Germany, as may be supposed, had its full share of that "poetry of information" which constitutes so large a part of mediaeval verse, though here even more than elsewhere such verse is rarely, except by courtesy, poetry. Families of later handlings, both of the folk epic and the literary romances, exist, such as the _Rosengarten_, the _Horny Siegfried_, and the story of Wolfdietrich in the one class; _Wigalois_ and _Wigamur_, and a whole menagerie of poems deriving from the _Chevalier au Lyon_, on the other. With the general growth, half epidemic, half directly borrowed from France, of abstraction and allegory (_vide_ next chapter), Satire made its way, and historians generally dwell on the "Frau Welt" of Konrad von Wurzburg in the middle of the thirteenth century, in which Wirent von Grafenburg (a well-known poet among the literary school, the author of _Wigalois_) is brought face to face with an incarnation of the World and its vanity. Volumes on volumes of moral poetry date from the thirteenth century, and culminate in the somewhat well-known _Renner_[123] of Hugo von Trimberg, dating from the very last year of our period: perhaps the most noteworthy is the _Bescheidenheit_ of Freidank, a crusader _trouvere_ who accompanied Frederick II. to the East. But in all this Germany is only following the general habit of the age, and to a great extent copying directly. Even in those greater writers who have been here noticed there is, as we have seen, not a little imitation; but the national and individual peculiarities more than excuse this. The national epics, with the _Nibelungenlied_ at their head, the Arthurian stories transformed, of which in different ways _Tristan_ and _Parzival_, but especially the latter, are the chief, and the Minnesong,--these are the great contributions of Germany during the period, and they are great indeed. [Footnote 123: On this see the last passage, except the conclusion on _Reynard the Fox_, of Carlyle's Essay on "Early German Literature" noted above. Of the great romances, as distinguished from the _Nibelungen_, Carlyle did not know much, and he was not quite in sympathy either with their writers or with the Minnesingers proper. But the life-philosopher of _Reynard_ and the _Renner_ attracted him.] CHAPTER VII. THE 'FOX,' THE 'ROSE,' AND THE MINOR CONTRIBUTIONS OF FRANCE.