* * * * * Following the Minnesänger came the Meister-Gesang and the Meistersänger. This was the age of trade guilds, when artisans met as in a club, and when each guild contained its poet or its poetaster. The shoemaker or weaver had often a fancy to be rhymester for his mates; thereupon were formed special guilds of poets of this sort, poetic artisans or artisan poets, and these were called the Schools of Meistersänger. Naturally enough the verse of men like these concerned itself, not with chivalry and troubadour lyrics, but with themes of common life, with wedding and christening songs, with songs of drink, of labour, and of domesticity. In this age begin those special German _Volkslieder_, or “people’s songs,” of which some touchingly sweet and musical specimens are still read and heard to-day. The most prolific and best known of the Meistersänger is Hans Sachs, “the cobbler bard,” who flourished about the year 1550. Of more importance to ourselves, perhaps, at this time was Sebastian Brandt. He is scarcely one of the Meistersänger, since he was no artisan, but a lawyer. Though of the same time and style he stands quite apart. Us he concerns because his work, the _Narrenschiff_, or “Ship of Fools,” was imitated in the sixteenth century by our English Barclay, and was the parent of a considerable satirical progeny during that century. It suggested, for instance, both the conception and the title of such productions as the _Ship of Drunkards_. The “Ship” was chosen by Brandt to convey the fools he satirizes—fops, misers, drunkards, and the like—because no other conveyance was large enough. The captain was a book-fool, and his name was Sebastian Brandt. About 1550 there was also translated by Copland, under the name of the _Owl-glass_, the famous _Eulenspiegel_, a series of amusing trickeries which are reflected in the English Robin Goodfellow. The age of the Meistersänger is followed by the age of Luther, the Reformation, and the Thirty Years’ War. It is an era of the founding of universities, of the spread of learning, of religious dispute carried on in pedantic language, an era when the popular speech was disregarded in favour of Latin or French. To speak broadly, there is no literature worth the name from the time of Luther, who died in 1546, down to Lessing, who wrote in 1760. Nor is Luther himself a figure of literature proper. As a translator of the Bible into the Upper-Saxon dialect, and as having thus fixed the modern German language, he is of the greatest importance to Germany itself. To us his value is that of a thinker or moral force.