126 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
brings to every moral man Ms first battle with life. He shows 
himself as a man with plain middle-class sentiments, and praises 
conjugal love above the adventurous Mnd, as every rightminded 
man of his time considers it his duty to do. At an early period 
(1517), in his Venus’s Retinue, he manifests how little he would 
be skilled to interpret love and its nature in any other fashion. 
Early and late, in his youthful poem on Chastity Exiled (in which 
the stringent commands that he imposes on himself do honor to 
his fine character), as well as in the theme of Tristan, which he 
treats late in life, he gives the admonition to reserve love for matri¬ 
mony; and the sanctity of this union is also in his serious and 
comic works the constant pivot about which his moralizing poetry 
almost prefers to circle. In musing meditatively with himself, or 
when his private genius listens at the window-shutters, in looking 
into the heart of family life, or in escorting Ulysses to the abodes 
of Calypso and Circe, he makes it an occasion to praise wedded life, 
to scourge the common infidelity, to ridicule and curse the evil 
domestic life in cities and villages. 
(Page 417). As early as 1523 he wrote his Wittenberg Night¬ 
ingale, and saluted the new doctrine with so much determination 
that nothing but a glance at this poem is needed to recognize his 
attitude toward the Reformation and at the same time to see how 
Luther’s teaching struck and roused long dormant thoughts of the 
honorable middle classes of Germany, how the upright intellect of 
this class, with the guiding testament in hand, now secured for it¬ 
self light in all directions, how the honest citizens hailed the day 
with the singing nightingale, how they let themselves be called 
back by it from devious wanderings, from desert and darkness 
whither the crafty lion had lured them, how they withstood all the 
yelping of his aiding fiends. 
(Page 418). The attentive study of religious conditions in Ger¬ 
many led Hans Sachs of itself to the German Empire and its state, 
especially at the time of the Smalkaldic War. Hence in the fifth 
decade of his life the master’s poetry is particularly occupied with 
it. He scourges what Hutten and with him every unselfish man of 
the period scourged, but he does it in his own peculiar manner. 
He remains true to the conviction, which Hutten abandoned, that 
public spirit and concord alone would be Germany’s salvation. 
. . . (421) Most of those allegorical and other poems that with 
a satiric whip persecute the aberrations of the time as vices, while 
