The biographer of Hans Sachs described the marriage of Dr. Christoph Scheuerl, a famous jurist of Nürnberg, "the oracle of the Republic." The description of this marriage is interesting as a picture of the life of the high patrician families and their ceremonies and festivities. All the families (Geschlechter) of the city were present. The festivities lasted a whole week, and the ceremonies were elaborate and splendid. Marriage feasts of the city aristocracy took place either in the house of the parents of the bridal couple, or in the city hall, or even in the cloister. This last practice was, however, forbidden in Nürnberg in 1485, "because the carousals and dances had become unbefitting the holy place." The patrician bridegroom gave the bride a ring with precious stones, the latter presented the bridegroom with an embroidered silken kerchief. There was a great display of precious garments and silk damask. The servants wore the colors of the family to which they belonged. The headgear of the patrician lady was a high diadem, while the bridegroom wore a silver wreath adorned with artificial flowers. The bride's maids and the table maidens wore the same kind of wreath and their hair was arranged in loose waves. The first marriage day was followed by an "early morning dance at the city-hall, a night-dance, and a wedding-assembly only for the ladies." The artisan marriages are recorded to have been similar in character, only the jests of the official "speaker" (_Sprucksprecher_) were probably somewhat rude, and the display was not so elaborate as that used in patrician weddings. Hans Sachs's married life was very happy. His manifold jests regarding quarrelsome women and their qualities, and regarding the hardships of married life were merely products of his humor. "My wife is my Paradise dear, and also my daily hellfire sheer;" and the climax: "She is my virtue, and my vice; She is my wound, and yet my balm. She is my heart's constant abode, Yet makes me gray and makes me old." While happily married himself, he knew enough of bad wives. Albrecht Durer's unhappy married life could furnish him sufficient material for his _Ninefold Skin of a Scold_, and _The Twelve Properties of a Bad Woman_, against which all the arts employed in the "_taming of the shrew_" came to naught. In 1560 his beloved wife died, and one year later he married Barbara Harscher, a charming girl of seventeen years, whose beauty he sang in his _Artistic Woman's Praise_, and with whom he lived happily till 1576. He was buried in Saint John's Cemetery at Nürnberg. The grateful city erected in 1874 a beautiful monument in his honor. But the highest monument, "more abiding than steel," the prince of poets, Goethe, erected to him in his _Hans Sachs's Poetic Mission:_ "An oak wreath hovers yonder in the clouds, With ever green fair foliage adorned; With this the grateful nation crowns his brow."