; but they are very valuable to us, because
they introduce us to the smallest details of those festivals. The
office, too, of _pritschmeister_ is worthy of observation.

It is only in accordance with German nature to make the fool the
police-officer of the festival. The blow of his baton strikes the
lord as well as the peasant boy, and his irony lashes the arrogant
prince's son, and brings the colour into the cheeks of the most
impudent. The sensitive pride of the _Junker_,--every offence to
which, from a yeoman of the guard, would have been resented as a deadly
affront,--unresistingly suffered the _pritschmeister_, in the exercise
of his office, to seize and drag him to the place of punishment. But
even the jests of the _pritschmeister_ are deserving of observation,
for they are lasting; an endless variety of tricks and pleasantries,
a definite hereditary art of being merry, typical forms of foolery
many hundred years old; and they were earned on with a certain
earnestness,--nay, even pedantry. Undoubtedly these stale tricks had
their irresistible effect only when men were disposed to be in a merry
humour, but their antiquity makes them to us like woodcuts, in the
angular lines of which there lies a certain charm. When, for example,
at the end of the shooting, the unfortunate shooter, who had won the
last prize, received this prize,--a sow with six young ones,--from the
_pritschmeister_, who wished him happiness, and calculated at length
the increase of the porcine family in his house from year to year, and
that he would after three years become master of 2401 head, the hearers
of the joke were not the less amused because they had heard the same
reckoning made ever since their childhood on similar occasions; for it
acts like a melody, that exercises its greatest magic on the hearer
when it has become familiar to him.

The _pritschmeister_ knew well that it was his duty to be a fool. It is
true, there were some proud fellows among them who were ashamed of
their cap; but they were derided by their own companions. Thus in 1573,
the _pritschmeister_ of Zwickau was serious and haughty; but he
suffered for it under the contemptuous shrugging of the shoulders of
his colleague, Benedict Edelbeck, who had wandered from Bohemia to the
prize shooting, and knew better what became a _pritschmeister_. They
bore also certain tokens of the fool,--the cap, and a striking
variegated dress, in the colours of the city, which they kept as