eers. Now we have leisure to examine the rare man.--

Ruediger Manesse, a town councillor of Zuerich in the fourteenth century,
raised a beautiful monument to bardic art in a manuscript work, executed
at his order, containing the songs of one hundred and forty poets,
living between the twelfth and the fourteenth century. Among the authors
are kings, princes, noblemen of high rank and low, burgher-poets, and
the Jew Suesskind von Trimberg. Each poet's productions are accompanied
by illustrations, not authentic portraits, but a series of vivid
representations of scenes of knight-errantry. There are scenes of war
and peace, of combats, the chase, and tourneys with games, songs, and
dance. We see the storming of a castle of Love (_Minneburg_)--lovers
fleeing, lovers separated, love triumphant. Heinrich von Veldeke
reclines upon a bank of roses; Friedrich von Hausen is on board a boat;
Walther von der Vogelweide sits musing on a wayside stone; Wolfram von
Eschenbach stands armed, with visor closed, next to his caparisoned
horse, as though about to mount. Among the portraits of the knights and
bards is Suesskind von Trimberg's. How does Ruediger Manesse represent
him? As a long-bearded Jew, on his head a yellow, funnel-shaped hat, the
badge of distinction decreed by Pope Innocent III. to be worn by Jews.
That is all! and save what we may infer from his six poems preserved by
the history of literature, pretty much all, too, known of Suesskind von
Trimberg.

Was it the heedlessness of the compiler that associated the Jew with
this merry company, in which he was as much out of place as a Gothic
spire on a synagogue? Suesskind came by the privilege fairly. Throughout
the middle ages the Jews of Germany were permeated with the culture of
their native land, and were keenly concerned in the development of its
poetry. A still more important circumstance is the spirit of tolerance
and humanity that pervades Middle High German poetry. Wolfram von
Eschenbach based his _Parzival_, the herald of "Nathan the Wise," on the
idea of the brotherhood of man; Walther von der Vogelweide ranged
Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans together as children of the one God;
and Freidank, reflecting that God lets His sun shine on the confessors
of all creeds, went so far as to repudiate the doctrine of the eternal
damnation of Jews. This trend of thought, characterizing both Jews and
Christians, suffices to explain how, in Germany, and at the very time in
w