hot-house in St. Stephen's chapel. My own sagacity makes me very vain, though there is very little merit in it. I had seen so much of all parties, that I had little esteem left for any; it is most indifferent to me who is in or who is out, or which is set in the pillory, Mr. Wilkes or my Lord Mansfield. I see the country going to ruin, and no man with brains enough to save it. That is mortifying; but what signifies who has the undoing it? I seldom suffer myself to think on this subject: my patriotism could do no good, and my philosophy can make me be at peace.

I am sorry you are likely to lose your poor cousin Lady Hinchinbrook; I heard a very bad account of her when I was last in town. Your letter to Madame Roland shall be taken care of; but as you are so scrupulous of making me pay postage, I must remember not to overcharge you, as I can frank my idle letters no longer; therefore, good night!

P. S.-I was in town last week and found Mr. Chute still confined. He had a return in his shoulder, but I think it more rheumatism than gout.

I

THE QUIPU SYSTEM; PROPHECIES OF NATIONAL RUIN

From Letter to the Countess of Ossory'

RETURN the Quipos, madam, because if I retained them till I understand them, I fear you would never have them again. I should as soon be able to hold a dialogue with a rainbow, by the help of its grammar, a prism; for I have not yet discovered which is the first or last verse of four lines that hang like ropes of onions. Yet it is not for want of study, or want of respect for the Peruvian manner of writing. I perceive it is a very soft language; and though at first I tangled the poem and spoiled the rhymes, yet I can conceive that a harlequin's jacket, artfully arranged by a princess of the blood of Mango Capac, may contain a deep tragedy, and that a tawdry trimming may be a version of Solomon's Song. Nay, I can already say my alphabet of six colors, and know that each stands indiscriminately but for four letters,-which gives the Peruvian a great advantage over the Hebrew tongue, in which the total want of vowels left every word at the mercy of the reader; and though our salvation depended upon it, we did not know precisely what any word signified, till the invention of points, that were not

used till the language had been obsolete for some thousands of years. A little uncertainty, as where one has but one letter instead of four, may give rise to many beauties. Puns must be greatly assisted by that ambiguity, and the delicacies of the language may depend on an almost imperceptible variation in the shades. I have heard of a French perfumer who wrote an essay on the harmony of essences. Why should not that idea be extended? The Peruvian Quipos adapted a language to the eyes, rather than to the ears. Why should not there be one for the nose? The more the senses can be used indifferently for each other, the more our understandings would be enlarged. A rose, a jessamine, a pink, a jonquil, and a honeysuckle, might signify the vowels; the consonants to be represented by other flowers. The Cape jessamine, which has two smells, was born a diphthong. How charming it would be to smell an ode from a nosegay, and to scent one's handkerchief with a favorite song. Indeed, many improvements might be made on the Quipos themselves, especially as they might be worn as well as perused. A trimming set on a new lute-string would be equivalent to a second edition with corrections.

In good truth, I was glad of anything that would occupy me, and turn my attention from all the horrors one hears or apprehends. I am sorry I have read the devastation of Barbadoes and Jamaica, etc., etc.: when one can do no good, can neither prevent nor redress, nor has any personal share, by one's self or one's friends, is it not excusable to steep one's attention in anything? . . . The expedition sent against the Spanish settlements is cut off by the climate, and not a single being is left alive. The Duchess of Bedford told me last night that the poor soldiers were so averse, that they were driven to the march by the point of the bayonet; and that, besides the men, twenty-five officers have perished. Lord Cornwallis and his tiny army are scarce in a more prosperous way. On this dismal canvas a fourth war is embroidered; and what, I think, threatens still more, the French administration is changed, and likely to be composed of more active men, and much more hostile to England. Our ruin seems to me inevitable. Nay, I know those who smile in the drawing-room, that groan by their fireside: they own we have no more men to send to America, and think our credit almost as nearly exhausted. Can you wonder, then, madam, if I am glad to play with Quipos - Oh, no! nor can I be sorry to be on the verge― does one wish to live to weep over the ruins of Carthage?

WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE AND HIS

W

TIMES

(EARLY THIRTEENTH CENTURY)

BY CHARLES HARVEY GENUNG

WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE is the greatest lyric poet of Germany before Goethe, and the first supremely great lyric poet that the nations of modern Europe produced. There is a musical cadence in the very name that is like a chord struck by the minstrel on his lyre as the prelude to a lay of love. But Walther was not a Minnesinger only: he could tune his instrument to sterner

WALTHER

themes, swaying the popular passions and moving the hearts of princes; great political movements were checked or speeded by his powerful rhymes. He was thus not only the chief literary figure of his time, but he became also an important political force. In him too, as in his great contemporaries Wolfram von Eschenbach and Hartmann von Aue, the deep religious spirit of the age found expression. Gottfried von Strassburg pictured the courtly graces, the manly accomplishments, and the extravagant ideals, of chivalry at its height.

These men, with the legion of lesser Minnesingers, shed radiance upon the reign of the greatest of medieval emperors, Frederick II.;. than whom no more enlightened prince had sat upon a European throne since the days of Alfred the Great and Charlemagne. Over all that wonderful age lies the fairy charm of poetry and romance. The court of Frederick recalls the fabled glories of the emperors of Trebizond; it shines through the mists of nearly seven centuries like an imperial city gleaming in a golden atmosphere. With the brave, bold, broad-minded characteristics of the Hohenstaufen house, Frederick united the rarest natural gifts,-learning, wisdom, foresight, and a passionate love of art and science. According to the picture that Raumer draws of him in the History of the Hohenstaufen,' he was a warrior and statesman, a poet and a naturalist, and a protector of learning and the fine arts. He mastered the languages of the six dominions that were united under his imperial sway: Greek, Latin,

Italian, German, French, and Arabic. He promulgated the Sicilian Constitutions, -a book of laws far in advance of his times. He collected a vast library in many languages, and on the greatest variety of subjects. He made Greek works more accessible by having them translated into the vernacular. Copies were sent to the University of Bologna, although that institution stood in political opposition to him. In 1224 he founded the University of Naples, and many 'students were assisted from his own private purse.

After his coronation in 1215 he attached to himself Nicolà da Pisano, who was the first to shake off the conventionality of Byzantine art. Through neglect or destruction the imperial art collections have been lost; but the beautiful coins of Frederick's reign, and the splendid remains of palaces and castles, testify to the inspiring interest that the Emperor took in the arts. The bridge at Capua with its tower he designed himself. Mural paintings adorned at least one of his castles, that of Foggia,- and the mosaics of Palermo we owe in a sense to him. It was he that gave an impulse to the study of natural history by founding a zoölogical garden, which, through his relations with Oriental princes, he was able to stock with exotic animals; and he caused a translation to be made of Aristotle's work on zoölogy. He himself wrote a book on falconry, which has intrinsic value aside from the interest which attaches to its age and origin. And since he was a poet and wrote love lyrics, singers and poets were gathered at his romantic court. His sympathies were, it is true, far more Italian than German: his efforts in behalf of the Italian tongue were soon to be crowned by the immortal work of Dante; but he was liberal-minded enough to treat the German language in the same way. Germany, to be sure, already had a literature, but the indifference of such a man as Frederick could have done much to check its development. The first State document in German, however, was issued by him when the Peace of Mayence was proclaimed in 1235. In this care for the popular languages of his dominions he resembled his great predecessors, Charlemagne and Alfred. He made himself the centre of intellectual activity throughout his broad realm.

It was this age also that saw the rise of the great Dominican and Franciscan orders, and of the Order of Mendicant Friars; it witnessed. the career of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. At the north the court of the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia became a rallying-point for minstrelsy and song; the historic contest of the singers on the Wartburg is a poetic memorial of those romantic days. Much that is best in our traditional romance had its rise then. From the time of the migrations down, rugged men of action had been making history which the poetic mind of the people transmitted into legend, until in this more cultivated age that vast fund of history and legend received its artistic form from the shaping genius of the great poets.

It was in the twelfth century that the Nibelungenlied was put into the strophes in which we read it. The crusade of Frederick Barbarossa in 1189 gave a powerful impulse to the intellectual activity of Germany. Contact with the Orient had introduced greater luxury and a higher refinement into the arts of living. The barbarian hordes which had overthrown the Roman empire had now taken their place among the leaders of European civilization. This was the long misunderstood and misrepresented thirteenth century, whose glories were soon transfigured in legend, obscured by the rise of democracy, and at last forgotten utterly in the wars of the seventeenth century. Honest ignorance, and the zeal of bigotry, finally succeeded in fastening upon it the name of the Dark Ages! The darkness lay elsewhere; for although we look back upon those dazzling days through the beautifying medium of many centuries, which shows them stripped of their sordidness and sorrow, it is certain that the early thirteenth century was the most brilliant period in German literary history until Goethe took up the Minnesingers' lyre, and evoked new harmonies at the old Thuringian court.

It was of an age such as this that Walther von der Vogelweide was the chief literary figure and a great political force. The rapid development of chivalry during the crusades had brought with it the Minnedienst,—the service and homage paid to women. Love and war were the essence of life, and both were the inspiration of song. The conception of love was deepened, idealized, refined. Love became an ennobling and purifying influence. It is the chivalrous homage of a vassal for a queen to whom he devotes his service and his life,— a conception unknown in the ruder days when Siegfried conquered Brünnhilde, and men won women sword in hand. In the expression of this homage there was often much euphuistic exaggeration, which weakened the directness of its appeal; but in Walther von der Vogelweide the note is always genuine, true, convincing. One of the earliest examples of supersensual love in European literature is in Walther's lines: :

"Would you know what may be the eyne

Wherewith I can see her whate'er befalls?
They are the thoughts of this heart of mine;

Therewith I can see her through castle walls."

Walther's poems not only reveal the character of the man, but they tell the story of his life. They do not, however, give us the date or place of his birth. He was probably born in the Tyrol in 1170. At Bozen, on the borderlands between the German and Italian dominions of the Hohenstaufen emperors, Walther's heroic statue stands. His earliest song of which the date is known belongs to the year 1198, and already shows the mature artist. For forty years, he says,