tation, really deserves the praise of Pirkheimer". Other writers are less reserved. "A more miserable kitchen Latin could scarcely be imagined". Certainly every part of Pirkheimer's own book De Bello Helvetico would pass muster as a school-exercise in elementary Latin style with far less criticism than these paragraphs which he told Melancthon were unsurpassed by any German historian. His own language Maximilian never learned to write with great clearness or any freedom.

Maximilian's book-making activity may be most easily described in short space under three heads:

I. Books for which the reader has the right to hold him personally responsible.

II. Books whose manuscripts he criticized and supervised.

III. The expression of his ideas in illustrations and sets of wood-cuts.

Maximilian seems to have written only one book without any help, the Geheimes Jagdbuch.1 The manuscript, which contains only twenty-five hundred words, is entirely in his own hand. The Emperor wrote it to teach his two grandchildren, Carl and Ferdinand, the art of hunting. The glamor of an amiable personality in a high position, which affected those who knew Maximilian, is not yet exhausted. The editor speaks of "the fresh air of the woods that breathes from its lines the reflective sense for nature that takes us captive". But as a matter of fact, it would be difficult to write twenty-five hundred words, chiefly about chamois-hunting in Tyrol, drier and less captivating. Nearly a quarter of the Jagdbuch is occupied by a list of hunting preserves and houses. Four-fifths of the rest is filled with minute directions about dress, food and conduct while hunting. Of these miscellaneous directions some are useless, some the boys would have learned by common sense, most of the remainder any of the huntsmen would have shown them in one trip. They are told nothing of value about the habits of the game. There is an absence of any sense of the beauty of nature. This is the more remarkable, for, in an age when mountainclimbing was not fashionable, Maximilian tells us that he had been on the top of the highest mountain in Europe, he meant either the Gross Glockner or the Gross Venediger. Maximilian may have been like those modern Alpinists who think of their record and never of the view. More probably he lacked, not the feeling for natural beauty shown in the French hunting treatises of his contemporaries, but the power to express it.

'Beautifully printed by Thomas von Karajan, 1859, second edition, together with a modern German translation.

The disappointed reader rouses when the writer announces that he will close his book with some wonderful true hunting stories. But they are not very interesting. "The Great Huntsman killed a hundred ducks with a hundred and four shots". He saw a "chamois taken in a fish net; a stag in a house; a wild boar in a mill-wheel ". He mixes with such sentences riddles of this sort: "The Great Huntsman arrived on the top of the greatest mountain of Europe without touching the globe or the mountain". The answer probably is, he walked over the snow. All the recorded specimens of Maximilian's wit are of this exceedingly simple and almost childish type.

Three things in this dull performance are interesting. First, his naïve self-glorification. He speaks of himself as the Great Huntsman. And once when he had written Kaiser Maximilian he struck it out and wrote the Great Huntsman. His dreams for the greatness of his house show in the phrase by which he calls the future head of the Hapsburgs, "Thou King of Austria". The title was then "Duke of Austria ". One single paragraph shows a touch of that sympathetic tact in personal intercourse which was Maximilian's rarest quality. It suggests the best reason why a gentleman should cherish the survival of primitive instinct in the love of hunting and fishing-to keep him in touch with simple men and the fundamental needs of life. "Thou King of Austria shalt always rejoice in the great pleasures of woodcraft for thy health and refreshing and the comfort of thy subjects. . . because they have access to you, and while hunting you can help the petitions of the poor, for the common man will come closer to you . . . in the hunting field than in houses".

Before the year 1888 the list of extant books of the first class was supposed to begin and end with the title of this little treatise. The two great autobiographical works, Teuerdank and Weiss Kunig, were thought to be the work of the imperial secretaries, carrying out general suggestions of Maximilian. A more careful study of the manuscript has dispelled this false impression. As a result of his examination of the four different codices containing drafts of Teuerdank, Mr. Simon Laschitzer concludes, "The Emperor himself was the chief redactor of the poem. He himself gave the contents of each separate chapter; and not only those in which his different adventures are told, but also those which simply adorn the poem with mystic or didactic passages. . . . It is certain that without his consent no verse of the poem and no illustration was sent to the printer. And finally he settled the order of the separate chapters".

Teuerdank was printed in 1517, and was the only one of Maximilian's works to reach the public during his life. It was begun more than twelve years before, and at least three men helped to put Maximilian's ideas into halting verses, which he criticized, changed and combined. In 1517 the Germans had not yet achieved a national language. Even men of position used dialects in their letters. Teuerdank is written in the court language in which Martin Luther found the starting-point for the national language he formed for his translation of the Bible. Hence, one of the editors of Teuerdank has written that there is "no work of the age before Luther so easy for a modern German to read ". It is doubtful whether anybody finds it easy to read this labored allegorical poem describing the mythical adventures of Teuerdank (Maximilian) on his journey to marry his first wife, Mary of Burgundy. Three treacherous characters, Badluck, Rashness and Envy, plot to destroy him. In succession they meet Maximilian and tempt him into a variety of dangerous positions from which by courage, wisdom and skill he escapes. From a moral point of view this is admirable enough, but the allegory halts. Its standing difficulty is the incredible obtuseness of the hero. It took Teuerdank fifty unfortunate adventures to find out that Badluck was a treacherous counsellor. Surely for a cool and clever hero that was a little slow. At the end Teuerdank reaches his bride and the three scoundrels are put to death.

The carrying out of this plan is monotonous. Envy plunges Teuerdank into two kinds of dangers: of war and of the tilt-yard. There are thirty of these. Badluck and Rashness lead him into dangers of travel, of hunting, and the handling of weapons, varied by two illnesses. There are sixty-three of these, and we are told with unvarying monotony the most various adventures: how the hero did not break through the ice-how powder did not explode when he was duck-shooting in a boat full of it-how water saved his life on a number of occasions because he did not get drowned in it-how he went into a cage of lions-how stones did not fall on him-how the doctors did not kill him because he prescribed for himself how an avalanche missed him-how he killed a number of animals and how a number of men failed to kill him. The probability is that most of these things really happened or failed to happen. In talking of some of them he must have been interesting. But the poem uses just as many and just as dull sentences in telling how Teuerdank did not step on a rotten beam in an old tower, as in describing his single-handed killing of a boar at bay in a tangled swamp. All the adventures sound very much alike. The most successful literary effort of the poem is the search for laudatory

epithets to link with the name of the hero; the net result is fifteen. But in its day the book was popular. It was twice printed during the life of the author, each time in two editions. Eighteen years later it was again issued and before the sixteenth century closed it was modernized, appearing in four editions. A hundred years later, in 1679, it was again modernized and printed in two editions. This popularity was doubtless due partly to the affectionate interest which gathered around the legendary figure of Maximilian as a typical Kaiser of the German folk, and partly to the splendid wood-cuts his care provided for the book.

Mr. Alwin

The second of Maximilian's greater literary works is the Weiss Kunig, first printed more than a hundred and fifty years after his death. It was long regarded as to a great extent the production of a certain Marx Treizsaurwein, one of his secretaries. Schultz, the editor of the final edition of it, says: "What we have of the Weiss Kunig is, with the possible exception of the first and second part, unquestionably the personal work of Maximilian himself. Nevertheless, Maximilian permitted his private secretary to dedicate the manuscript to the King of Spain and to his two grandchildren and so to appear, in a way, as the author; just as Melchior Pfinzing had done with Teuerdank."

Weiss Kunig is an unfinished autobiography in three parts. The last and longest part relates to the achievements of the hero in diplomacy and war. Treizsaurwein tells in a final note that he ordered the dictations of the Emperor, and the internal evidence. supports the assertion. The names of the chief personages are concealed. For example, the Fish King means the Doge of Venice; the Blue King, the King of France; the King with Three Crowns, the Pope; the Old White King, Maximilian's father; the Young White King, Maximilian himself. But beyond this disguise the book purports to be history and not allegory. It is really historical romance. The object of the writer was, as Treizsaurwein explains in the dedication, to present to his grandsons, that they might follow in his footsteps, the example of a king ruling in the fear of God. The last editor, writing under the shadow of the throne of Maximilian's descendant, diplomatically remarks: "How far in his relations the imperial poet presents the facts in a light favorable to himself, historians will perhaps measure". It does not need a very careful measure. The Weiss Kunig is as bad history as it is literature. In a style clumsy and monotonous, it shows us Maximilian not as he was but as he wanted to appear to posterity. That this treatment of history to his own advantage was more naïve selfconsciousness than intentional distortion, is quite possible. His

attitude in the case of his Genealogy suggests this explanation of the suppressions and distortions of the Weiss Kunig.

The Genealogy was only a part of a cyclus of works he ordered written to display the history of his family. A number of men were engaged in making studies for it, and the Emperor gave a roving commission to search all the convent libraries for material. The researches finally took shape in a great work in five books by Dr. Jacob Mennel, entitled Die fürstliche Chronik Kaiser Maximilian's genannt Geburtspiegel.

It opened with a chronicle showing how the Franks were descended through the Romans from Hector of Troy, which prepared the way for showing Maximilian's descent from Priam. It contained also the legends of one hundred and seventy canonized saints, all of whom are in some way connected with the genealogical tables of Maximilian's family, which, with descriptions of their coats-ofarms, complete the volume. But the Emperor, either from his own. studies or the suggestions of rival scholars, demanded proofs of the correctness of this genealogical tree. Especially he asked proof of the descent of his ancestor Clovis from Hector of Troy. Mennel referred the Emperor to information he had received from a certain abbot, Trithemius of Sponheim. Trithemius informed the Emperor that a certain Hunibald had written in the time of Clovis an account of the origin of the Franks and their migration from Troy to Germany. He had made extracts from that work, but the manuscript itself he had left in Sponheim eight years ago. His successor as abbot had sold a lot of works to the abbot of Hirschau. The libraries of the two monasteries were carefully searched, but no chronicle of Hunibald could be found. Then Trithemius printed a work on the origin of the Franks from his own pen, with a number of extracts from the lost Hunibald, and Dr. Mennel based on it a new line of descent for Maximilian. A certain learned Dr. Stabius was then asked by the Emperor to decide which was the better genealogy. His report concluded that neither was reliable. It pointed out that the first filled an interval of two hundred and nine years between two historical persons by one name, Amprintas, and suggested that Amprintas must have been rather old when he died. It showed that the second rested on the word of Trithemius about a vanished manuscript. Trithemius had made too many mistakes where his statements could be corrected by authority to entitle him to credit where they could not. Stabius finished by making very pointed remarks about Trithemius's character. He even took the pains to provide his manuscript with a caricature of the abbot as a three-headed monster in a monk's gown. He followed this attack