rain of blossoms bedews the sleeping beauty.

Emperor Maximilian (1493-1519), "the last knight," the best-beloved son
of the house of Habsburg, reigns now in Germany. It is a time of
transition, of universal change. The world has doubled its size by the
discovery of America, and the horizon has been enlarged accordingly. The
printing press has revolutionized the arts. Yet poetry is dry,
allegorical, wooden. Maximilian, aided by his secretaries, relates in a
rimed allegorical romance, Teuerdank, his wooing of Mary of Burgundy,
or, as he calls her in his poem, the beautiful and illustrious virgin
Ehrenreich, only daughter of the powerful king "Glorious" (_Ruhmreich_).
He recounts the mighty deeds which he must accomplish before he can
possess her.

The barrenness of the time, in spite of a great and varied literary
activity which, however, bears the stamp of mediocrity, appears also in
the translations made by several highborn ladies: Elizabeth of Lorraine,
and Eleanor of Scotland, consort of Duke Sigmund of Austria. Princess
Mathilda, of the illustrious Wittelsbach-Palatine house, the "Lady of
Austria," as she is called in the folk song, fostered the first advent
of humanism into Suabia and Bavaria, and entertained sympathetic
relations with all those who worked in the direction of humanism and
literary reform. Niclas von Wyle, an early Humanist, had already in
1474, in opposition to the popular farces which contained offensive,
coarse, and frequently obscene treatment of woman, composed an encomium
or eulogy in her honor, in which he enumerated the manifold blessings
which woman had brought to the world. Yet the ribald farces still
abound, and are even stimulated by the incipient religious reform.
_Joseph in Egypt_ is the typical subject for poems expressing the
criminal and passionate love of woman; the monologue of Potiphar's wife
expressing her sinful feelings for Joseph is nothing less than edifying.
The play of _Fair Susanna_ presented wicked passion in aged men, and
innocence persecuted, but finally saved; _Judith and Holofernes_
characterized the clash between conflicting religions.

In South Germany, Nuernberg, Luther's "eye and ear of Germany," is the
centre of the culture of the transition period, and is the mirror in
which the life of the time is reflected. The aesthetic culture and the
lack of it, the status of woman in society, appear nowhere more plainly
than in the plays of Hans Sachs, the greatest expo