Boedder—“Die Meistersinger von Niimberg.” 
127 
later, more mild and forbearing, lie but laughs at them, arise in 
this sturdy period, during which he was also more active in public 
life (fourth and fifth decades). The felicitous and unfaltering 
observation of the world and ol men, which was natural to our 
master’s genius, found plentiful food in the tendency of the sages 
of antiquity to consider man’s inner nature; and their judicious 
moderation fortified him in the placid calmness with which he views 
unconfused the antlike medley of human beings, and confronts the 
people with the mirror of his truthful paintings; their contempla¬ 
tive wisdom fostered his plastic sense. . . . (422) From ancient 
history he emphasized for his contemporaries that which in school 
we present in the same way to the minds of children, and in the 
most direct manner he conducted the purest water of the spring he 
had found even into the lowest classes of people. What two or 
three centuries had already done would have been wholly lost if 
at this time of the first printed books, when the common people 
were really eager to learn and read, a man who had mastered the 
tone of the common folk had not taken the whole mass of what 
Thomasin, the Renner, and all the didactic poems and collections 
of moral examples had long been spreading broadcast, and modern¬ 
ized it in a new language and suitable diction. Let us never fail 
to give Hans Sachs credit for this service. He became a humanist 
teacher of the common people, as the scholars became teachers of 
the young. He was the first to popularize the ancients from their 
purely moral side in our country, just as in recent times Wieland 
introduced his Cicero, Lucian, and Horace from the side of the 
philosopher of life and man of the world. 
From his sixth decade on another taste begins to predominate in 
Hans Sachs’s poetry. He centers his attention more on rhymed 
tales and carnival farces, he loves to attach the didactic to exam¬ 
ples, the ethical character of his poems becomes more plastic, his 
German style of painting becomes more Dutch, his allegory is ex¬ 
changed for the fable, direct references to the present become 
rarer, and he takes us from public into private life. He then sees 
the classes and ranks of men less in their relation to their civic and 
social obligations than to human nature and the rational world in 
general; he pictures the droll doings of men more humorously, and 
laughs at them instead of scourging them as heretofore. His im¬ 
pressively severe teaching rather disappears beside his goodhu- 
mored description, his censure becomes ironic delineation; his po¬ 
etry, which formerly was more bent on enjoining virtue, is now 
