their cells with supernal beauty only made them the more eager to share their heaven of privilege with the sorely burdened world without. Surely Virgil and Horace and the other masters of classic form were never more honoured than when these noble-minded lovers of learning and of their kind made their sounding lines familiar in peasant homes. Among the great folios of the fifteenth century, the very titles of which the modern scholar no longer burdens his memory with, there is one little volume which the world has known by heart these four hundred years. and more. Its bulk is so small that one may carry it in his pocket, but its depth of feeling is so great that one never gets quite to the bottom of it, and its outlook is so sublime that one never sees quite to the end of it. The great folios are monuments of patience and imperfect information; this little volume is instinct with human life; a soul speaks to souls in it. It was by no caprice of nature that the "De Imitatione Christi" was written by a member of the Brotherhood of the Common Life.

And when the great hour of

deliverance from priestcraft for Germany and Northern Europe came, it was no accident that made another member of the same order the fellow-worker with Luther for liberty of thought. Erasmus was no reformer, but he was a true scholar, and in the splendour of his great attainments and the importance of his great service the obscure virtues of the Brotherhood of the Common Life receive a final and perpetual illumination.

In Kaulbach's striking cartoon of the Reformation there is one figure which no one overlooks, although Shakespeare and Michael Angelo stand in full view. Among the masters of art and literature the cobbler, with his leather apron, finds at place by right of possession which no one of his compeers would dispute. The six thousand compositions of Hans Sachs are for the most part forgotten, with the innumerable poems of the Minnesingers and Meistersingers, but there remain a few verses which the world will not care to forget. In spite of the roughness of his verse, its unmelodious movement, its lack of musical cadence and accent, the cobbler

of Nürnberg lived in the life of his time;
he had eyes that looked upon the skies and
fields, and a heart that was one with the
hearts of his people. It was this vital per-
ception that saved him from slavery to the
mechanism of verse and made him a poet
in spite of his time and himself.
A genu-
ine scholar, and yet a man of the people,
Hans Sachs lifts himself out of the mechan-
ical pedantry of his age by the freshness of
his contact with life. He might truly
have said of himself, as he has said of
another:

"But he - I say with sorrow
Is a wretched singer thorough,
Who all his songs must borrow
From what was sung before.'

No man can live in a "Palace of Art " without danger of missing, not only his own highest development, but that heritage of truth which is always a common and never a personal possession. The poet who separates himself from his fellows. reproduces himself by a law which holds. him powerless in its grasp; the poet who lives richly and deeply with his kind