In the third act Walther, who had been taken into his house by Sachs and spent the night there, sings a recital of a dream; and Sachs, struck by its beauty, transcribes it, punctuating it with bits of comments and advice.  Beckmesser, entering Sachs’s shop when the cobbler-poet is out for a moment, finds the song, concludes that it is Sachs’s own composition, and appropriates it.  Sachs, discovering the theft, gives the song to Beckmesser, who secures a promise from Sachs not to betray him, and resolves to sing it at the competition.  The festival is celebrated in a meadow on the banks of the Pegnitz River, between Furth and Nuremberg.  It begins with a gathering of all the guilds of Nuremberg, each division in the procession entering to characteristic music—­a real masterpiece, whether viewed as spectacle, poetry, or music.  The competition begins, and Beckmesser makes a monstrously stupid parody of Walther’s song.  He is hooted at and ridiculed, and, becoming enraged, charges the authorship of the song on Sachs, who coolly retorts that it is a good song when correctly sung.  To prove his words he calls on Walther to sing it.  The knight complies, the mastersingers are delighted, and Pogner rewards the singer with Eva’s hand.  Sachs, at the request of the presiding officer of the guild, also offers him the medal as the insignia of membership in the guild of mastersingers.  Walther’s experience with the pedantry which had condemned him the day before, when he had sung as impulse, love, and youthful ardor had prompted, leads him to decline the distinction; but the old poet discourses on the respect due to the masters and their, work as the guaranty of the permanence of German art, and persuades him to enter the guild of mastersingers.

“Die Meistersinger” is photographic in many of its scenes, personages, and incidents; but so far as the stage pictures which we are accustomed to see in the opera-houses of New York and the European capitals are concerned, this statement must be taken with a great deal of allowance, owing to the fact that opera directors, stage managers, scene painters, and costumers are blithely indifferent to the verities of history.  I have never seen a mimic reproduction of the church of St. Catherine on any stage; yet the church stands to-day with its walls intact as they were at the time in which the comedy is supposed to play.  This time is fixed by the fact that its principal character, Hans Sachs, is represented as a widower who might himself be a suitor for Eva’s hand.  Now the veritable Sachs was a widower in the summer of the year 1560.  I visited Nuremberg in 1886 in search of relics of the mastersingers and had no little difficulty in finding the church.  It had not been put to its original purposes for more than a hundred years, and there seemed to be but few people in Nuremberg who knew of its existence.  It has been many things since it became secularized:  a painter’s academy, drawing-school, military