legend which connects his name with the Venus-berg (though Heine has
managed in his version to combine the two elements); Ulrich von
Lichtenstein, half an apostle, half a caricaturist of _Frauendienst_
on the Provencal model; and, finally, Frauenlob or Heinrich von
Meissen, who wrote at the end of our period and the beginning of the
next for nearly fifty years, and may be said to be the link between
Minnesong and Meistersong.

[Footnote 122: The standard edition or _corpus_ of their work is that
of Von der Hagen, in three large vols. Leipzig, 1838.]

So also in the other departments of poetry, harbingers,
contemporaries, and continuators, some of whom have been mentioned,
most of whom it would be impossible to mention, group round the
greater masters, and as in France, so here, the departments themselves
branch out in an almost bewildering manner. Germany, as may be
supposed, had its full share of that "poetry of information" which
constitutes so large a part of mediaeval verse, though here even more
than elsewhere such verse is rarely, except by courtesy, poetry.
Families of later handlings, both of the folk epic and the literary
romances, exist, such as the _Rosengarten_, the _Horny Siegfried_, and
the story of Wolfdietrich in the one class; _Wigalois_ and _Wigamur_,
and a whole menagerie of poems deriving from the _Chevalier au Lyon_,
on the other. With the general growth, half epidemic, half directly
borrowed from France, of abstraction and allegory (_vide_ next
chapter), Satire made its way, and historians generally dwell on the
"Frau Welt" of Konrad von Wurzburg in the middle of the thirteenth
century, in which Wirent von Grafenburg (a well-known poet among the
literary school, the author of _Wigalois_) is brought face to face
with an incarnation of the World and its vanity. Volumes on volumes of
moral poetry date from the thirteenth century, and culminate in the
somewhat well-known _Renner_[123] of Hugo von Trimberg, dating from
the very last year of our period: perhaps the most noteworthy is the
_Bescheidenheit_ of Freidank, a crusader _trouvere_ who accompanied
Frederick II. to the East. But in all this Germany is only following
the general habit of the age, and to a great extent copying directly.
Even in those greater writers who have been here noticed there is, as
we have seen, not a little imitation; but the national and individual
peculiarities more than excuse this. The national epics, with the
_Nibelun