heir songs, spurning the intolerable demands of their
exacting mistresses, and their too expensive charms we need only recall
that unmerciful lady who dropped her glove from the gallery between the
lion and the tiger, and lovingly invited her knight to pick it up for
her. The knight having accomplished the feat, threw the glove in the
pretty face that welcomed his return, with the words: "Thanks, lady, I
do not desire." But the majority became Don Quixotes and allowed
themselves to be played with and mocked by their whimsical taskmasters.

From the sunny south, the Provence, the home of minstrels and songs, we
learn how the troubadour Pierre Vidal of Toulouse fell desperately in
love with Loba of Carcasses. As her name was Loba (she-wolf), he called
himself Lop, encased himself in a wolf's skin and roamed, wolflike,
through the mountains. Shepherds and dogs misunderstood the joke and
tore him almost to pieces.

In Germany we meet with an extraordinary type of a knight-errant in the
person of the noble Ulrich von Lichtenstein (died January 6, 1275 or
1276), who spent a long life in the self-imposed service of a capricious
princess. During his long career of minne service, which, however, never
brought him fulfilment of his desires, he committed one folly after the
other, and, worst of all, he was never cured of his passion, though he
often pathetically sings his misfortunes and the cruelty of his lady. He
was no mean singer, and his poetry is a most interesting human document.

At the time of the purple bloom of Middle High German civilization, or
when it first began to fade, Ulrich von Lichtenstein was a boy. Under
his parental roof he heard and absorbed the epics of the romantic school
of his time, and learned to appreciate the worth of a nobleman by his
chivalrous aspiration for the grace of a high born lady. As a page of
twelve years he was overwhelmed at the sight of a brilliant princess,
very likely Agnes of Meran, the future consort of Frederick the Warlike.
His youthful love was inflamed to such ardor by the alluring beauty of
the queen of his heart that "he carried secretly away the water
wherewith she had washed her white hands and drank it out of sheer
love." But while he vowed chivalrous service and songs to the sun of his
life, he married a gentlewoman who became the mother of his children. At
the court of the marquis Henry of Istria he was still more confirmed in
his adulation of woman. But his poetry in t