diculed, and
snubbed by the "smart set" of the time.

Yet, on the whole, it may be said that the boys and girls of the
peasants and bourgeois led natural lives, courting and dancing and
wooing, as long as they were kept from the influence of the chivalric
craze. Instead of knight-errantry there were among these young people
simple though not always platonic relations. The lords still exercised
their harmful influence upon the freedom of the peasantry, but it
gradually diminished. At springtide there was love and marriage, not
always voluntarily, but in deference to the right of lords and princes
to command their dependants to marry. In some localities a system of
pairing prevailed, and maids were assigned as companions by lot, and
mated couples danced together during an entire summer. Such play, very
naturally, and not infrequently, became earnest.

The nobles were mostly landed proprietors, but when the cities began to
grow, urban patricians, proud and self-satisfied, arose. The common
people, however, because of their number and increasing wealth, gained a
share in the government. They formed themselves, for strength and
self-defence, into "corporations and guilds." They won city rights. In
the course of time, instead of the rule of the "families," or
patricians, there came the rule of the guilds. The democracy gained
control, though not until after hard and frequently very bloody fights
of the factions at the polls for municipal supremacy. With the victory
of democracy begins the industrial, commercial, and political vigor of
the common people. This is manifested in the great and important city
leagues: especially the _Hansa_, but also the League of Rhenish and of
Suabian Cities unions that were at times more powerful than kings and
emperors.

Socially, nevertheless, the picture is reversed: the castes remain
separated even in the church, as they were separated in dancing halls
and other places of pleasure and drinking. Yet the free artisans, their
wives and daughters, led a joyful life at their weddings, dances, and
carnivals, though they dwelt in narrow lanes and alleys, in houses of
wood, straw-covered and with a few windows, and these frequently with
panes of paper or none at all. Goethe in Faust describes these abodes:

"Out of the hollow, gloomy gate,
The motley throngs came forth elate:
Each will the joy of the sunshine hoard,
To honor the day of the Risen Lord!
Th