hospital, warehouse, concert-hall, and, no doubt, a score of other things.  When I found it with the aid of the police it was the paint-shop and scenic storeroom of the municipal theatre.  It is a small building, utterly unpretentious of exterior and interior, innocent of architectural beauty, hidden away in the middle of a block of lowly buildings used as dwellings, carpenter shops, and the like.  That Wagner never visited it is plain from the fact that though he makes it the scene of one act of his comedy (as he had to do to be historically accurate), his stage directions could not possibly be accommodated to its architecture.  In 1891 Mr. Louis Loeb, the American artist, whose early death in the summer of 1909 is widely mourned, visited the spot and made drawings for me of the exterior and interior of the church as it looked then.  The church was built in the last half decade of the thirteenth century, and on its water-stained walls, when I visited it, there were still to be seen faint traces of the frescoes which once adorned it and were painted in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries; but they were ruined beyond hope of restoration.  In the Germanic Museum I found a wooden tablet dating back to 1581, painted by one Franz Hein.  It preserves portraits of four distinguished members of the mastersingers’ guild.  There is a middle panel occupied by two pictures, the upper showing King David, the patron saint of the guild, so forgetful of chronology as to be praying before a crucifix, the lower a meeting of the mastersingers.  Over the heads of the assemblage is a representative of the medallion with which the victor in a contest used to be decorated, as we see in the last scene of Wagner’s comedy.  One of these decorations was given to the guild by Sachs and was in use for a whole century.  At the end of that time it had become so worn that Wagenseil replaced it with another.

Church and tablet are the only relics of the mastersingers left in Nuremberg which may be called personal.  I had expected to find autobiographic manuscripts of Sachs, but in this was disappointed.  There is a volume of mastersongs in the poet-cobbler’s handwriting in the Royal Library of Berlin, and one of these is the composition of the veritable Sixtus Beckmesser; but most of the Sachs manuscripts are in Zwickau.  In the Bibliotheca Norica Williana, incorporated with the Municipal Library of Nuremberg, there are several volumes of mastersingers’ songs purchased from an old mastersinger some 135 years ago, and from these the students may learn the structure and spirit of the mastersongs of the period of the opera as well as earlier and later periods, though he will find all the instruction he needs in any dozen or twenty of the 4275 mastersongs written by Hans Sachs.  The manuscript books known serve to prove one thing which needed not to have called up a doubt.  In them are poems from all of the mastersingers who make up the meeting which condemns