Excerpt from Merry Tales and Three Shrovetide Plays Though the most famous of the Meister-singers, the great popularity that Hans Sachs enjoyed was due, not so much to the elaborate production of meister songs under the two hundred and thirty formulated rules that governed such compositions, as to the more familiar versification in which he appealed directly to the hearts of his neighbours and countrymen. Therefore his simple tales have been selected for translation in this volume, though doubtless their author considered them the lighter and less artistic of his work. He was a most prolific writer; the number of his pieces of verse being more than six thousand with over half a million of lines. He was born on November 5, 1494, and died on January 20, 1576; thus completing a life of a little more than eighty-one years. His father, Jorg Sachs, was a tailor, a burgher of Nuremberg, in moderate circumstances, but of sufficiently liberal mind to give his son, until he was sixteen years old, the advantage of one of the four Latin schools of Nuremberg, which were then at their highest standard of excellence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.