Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands.

It is a strange circumstance that in a large number of these representations the devil is exhibited triumphant, and in others the victory is at least doubtful.In a splendid psalter preserved in the British Museum there is a large picture (an engraving of which is given on the preceding page) of a soul climbing an extremely steep and high mountain, on the summit of which a winged archangel stands with outstretched arms to receive him.The soul has nearly reached the top; another step will bring him within the archangel's reach; but behind him is the devil with a long three-pronged clawing instrument, which he is about to thrust into the hair of the ascending saint; and no man can tell which is to finally have that soul, the angel or the devil.M.Champfleury describes a capital in a French church which represents one of the minions of the devil carrying a lizard, symbol of evil, which he is about to add to the scale containing the sins; and the spectator is left to infer that fraud of this kind is likely to be successful, for underneath is written, "Ecce Diabolus!" It is as if the artist had said, "Such is the devil, and this is one of his modes of entrapping his natural prey of human souls!"From a large number of similar pictures the inference is fair that, let a man lead a spotless life from the cradle to the grave, the devil, by a mere trick, may get his soul at last.Some of the artists might be suspected of sympathizing with the devil in his triumphs over the weakness of man.Observe, for example, the comic exuberance of the above picture, in which devils are seen tumbling their immortal booty into the jaws of perdition.

It is difficult to look at this picture without feeling that the artist must have been alive to the humors of the situation. It is, however, the opinion of students of these quaint relics that the authors of such designs honestly intended to excite horror, not hilarity. Queen Mary probably saw in this picture, as she turned the page of her sumptuous psalter, an argument to inflame her bloody zeal for the ancient faith. In the writings of some of the early fathers we observe the same appearance of joyous exultation at the sufferings of the lost, if not a sense of the comic absurdity of their doom. Readers may remember the passage from Tertullian (A.D. 200) quoted so effectively by Gibbon:

"You are fond of all spectacles," exclaims this truly ferocious Christian; "expect the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe.How shall I rejoice, how laugh, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs and fancied gods groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates who persecuted the name of the Lord liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers—"

This is assuredly not the utterance of compassion, but rather of the fierce delight of an unregenerate Roman, when at the amphitheatre he doomed a rival's defeated gladiator to death by pointing downward with his thumb.In a similar spirit such pictures were conceived as the one given above.

The sculptor, it is apparent, is "with" the adversary of mankind in the present case.Kings and bishops carried things with a high hand during their mortal career, but the devils have them at last with a rope round their necks, crown and mitre notwithstanding!

The devil was not always victor. There was One whom neither his low cunning nor his bland address nor his blunt audacity could beguile—the Son of God, his predestined conqueror. The passages in the Gospels which relate the attempts made by Satan to tempt the Lord furnished congenial subjects to the illuminators of the Middle Ages, and they treated those subjects with their usual enormous crudity. In one very ancient Saxon psalter, in manuscript, preserved at the British Museum, there is a colossal Christ, with one foot upon a devil, the other foot about to fall upon a second devil, and with his hands delivering from the open mouth of a third devil human souls, who hold up to him their hands clasped as in prayer. In this picture the sympathies of the artist are evidently not on the side of the evil spirits. Their malevolence is apparent, and their attitude is ignominious. The rescued souls are, indeed, a pigmy crew, of woe-begone aspect; but their resistless Deliverer towers aloft in such imposing altitude that the tallest of the saints hardly reaches above his knees. In another picture of very early date, the Lord upon a high place is rescuing a soul from three scoffing devils, who are endeavoring to pull him down to perdition by cords twisted round his legs. This soul we are permitted to consider safe; but below, in a corner of the spacious drawing, a winged archangel is spearing a lost soul into the flames of hell, using the spear in the manner of a farmer handling a pitchfork.

These ancient attempts to exhibit the endless conflict between good and evil are too rude even to be interesting.The specimen annexed, of later date, about 1475, occurs in a Poor People's Bible (Biblia Pauperum), block-printed, in which it forms part of an extensive frontispiece.The book was once the property of George III., at the sale of whose personal effects it was bought for the British Museum, where it now is.It has the additional interest of being one of the oldest specimens of wood-engraving yet discovered.

The mountain in the background, adorned by a single tree, is the height to which the Lord was taken by the tempter, and from which the devil urged him to cast himself down.

A very frequent object of caricature during the ages when terror ruled the minds of men was human life itself—its brevity, its uncertainty, and the absurd, ill-timed suddenness with which inexorable death sometimes cuts it short. Herodotus records that at the banquets of the Egyptians it was customary for a person to carry about the table the figure of a corpse lying upon a coffin, and to cry out, "Behold this image of what yourselves shall be; therefore eat, drink, and be merry." There are traces of a similar custom in the records of other ancient nations, among whom it was regarded as a self-evident truth that the shortness of life was a reason for making the most of it while it lasted. And their notion of making the most of it was to get from it the greatest amount of pleasure. This vulgar scheme of existence vanished at the promulgation of the doctrine that the condition of every soul was fixed unalterably at the moment of its severance from the body, or, at best, after a short period of purgation, and that the only way to avoid unending anguish was to do what the Church commanded and to avoid what the Church forbade. Terror from that time ruled Christendom. Terror covered the earth with ecclesiastical structures, gave the Church a tenth of all revenues and two-fifths of all property. By every possible device death was clothed with new and vivid terrors, and in every possible way the truth was brought home to the mind that the coming of death could be as unexpected as it was inevitable and unwelcome. The tolling of the church-bell spread the gloom of the death-chamber over the whole town; and the death-crier, with bell and lantern, wearing a garment made terrible by a skull and cross-bones, went his rounds, by day or night, crying to all good people to pray for the soul just departed.[6]

These criers did not cease to perambulate the streets of Paris until about the year 1690, and M.Langlois informs us that in remote provinces of France their doleful cry was heard as recently as 1850.

Blessed gift of humor!Against the most complicated and effective apparatus of terror ever contrived, worked by the most powerful organization that ever existed, the sense of the ludicrous asserted itself, and saved the human mind from being crushed down into abject and hopeless idiocy.The readers of "Don Quixote" can not have forgotten the colloquy in the highway between the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and the head of the company of strollers.

"'Sir,' replied the Devil, politely, stopping his cart, 'we are the actors of the company of the Evil Spirit. This morning, which is the octave of Corpus Christi, we have represented the play of the Empire of Death. This young man played Death, and this one an Angel. This woman, who is the wife of the author of the comedy, is the Queen. Over there is one who played the part of an Emperor, and the other man that of a Soldier. As to myself, I am the Devil, at your service, and one of the principal actors.' "

For centuries the comedy of Death was a standard play at high festivals, the main interest being the rude, sudden interruption of human lives and joys and schemes by the grim messenger.Art adopted the theme, and the Dance of Death began to figure among the decorations of ecclesiastical structures and on the vellum of illuminated prayer-books.No sculptor but executed his Dance of Death; no painter but tried his skill upon it; and by whomsoever the subject was treated, the element of humor was seldom wanting.

So numerous are the pictures and series of pictures usually styled Dances of Death, that a descriptive catalogue of them would fill the space assigned to this chapter; and the literature to which they have given rise forms an important class of the works relating to the Middle Ages.Two phases of the subject were especially attractive to artists.One was the impartiality of Death, noted by Horace in the familiar passage; and the other the incongruity between the summons to depart and the condition of the person summoned.When these two aspects of the subject had become hackneyed, artists pleased themselves sometimes with a treatment precisely the opposite, and represented Death dancing gayly away with the most battered, ancient, and forlorn of human kind, who had least reason to love life, but did not the less shrink from the skeleton's icy touch.Every one feels the comic absurdity of gay and sprightly Death hurrying off to the tomb a cripple as dilapidated as the one in the picture above.In another engraving we see Death, with exaggerated courtesy, handing to an open tomb an extremely old man just able to totter.

Another subject in the same series is Death dragging at the garment of a peddler, who is so heavily laden as he trudges along the highway that one would imagine even the rest of the grave welcome. But the peddler, too, makes a very wry face when he recognizes who it is that has interrupted his weary tramp. The triumphant gayety of Death in this picture is in humorous contrast with the lugubrious expression on the countenance of his victim.

In other series we have Death dressed as a beau seizing a young maiden, Death taking from a house-maid her broom, Death laying hold of a washer-woman, Death taking apples from an apple-stand, Death beckoning away a bar-maid, Death summoning a female mourner at a funeral, and Death plundering a tinker's basket. Death, standing in a grave, pulls the grave-digger in by the leg; seated on a plow, he seizes the farmer; with an ale-pot at his back, he throttles an inn-keeper who is adulterating his liquors; he strikes with a bone the irksome chain of matrimony, and thus sets free a couple bound by it; he mows down a philosopher holding a clock; upon a miser who has thrust his body deep down into a massive chest he shuts the heavy lid; he shows himself in the mirror in which a young beauty is looking; to a philosopher seated in his study he enters and presents an hour-glass. A pope on his throne is crowning an emperor kneeling at his feet, with princes, cardinals, and bishops in attendance, when a Death appears at his side, and another in his retinue dressed as a cardinal. Death lays his hand upon an emperor's crown at the moment when he is doing justice to a poor man against a rich; but in another picture of the same series, Death seizes a duke while he is disdainfully turning from a poor woman with her child who has asked alms of him. The dignitaries of the Church were not spared. Fat abbots, gorgeous cardinals, and vehement preachers all figure in these series in circumstances of honor and of dishonor. In most of them the person summoned yields to King Death without a struggle; but in one a knight makes a furious resistance, laying about him with a broadsword most energetically. It is of no avail. Death runs him through the body with his own lance, though in the other picture the weapon in Death's hand was only a long thigh-bone.

Mr. Longfellow, in his "Golden Legend," has availed himself of the Dance of Death painted on the walls of the covered bridge at Lucerne to give naturalness and charm to the conversation of Elsie and Prince Henry while they are crossing the river.The strange pictures excite the curiosity of Elsie, and the Prince explains them to her as they walk:

And so the lovers converse on the bridge, all covered from end to end with these caricatures of human existence, until the girl hurries with affright from what she calls "this great picture-gallery of death."

Tournaments were among the usual subjects of caricature during the century or two preceding the Reformation.Some specimens have already been given from the illuminated prayer-books (pp.44, 46).The device, however, seldom rises above the ancient one of investing animals with the gifts and qualities of men.Monkeys mounted upon the backs of dogs tilt at one another with long lances, or monsters utterly nondescript charge upon other monsters more ridiculous than themselves.

All the ordinary foibles of human nature received attention. These never change. There are always gluttons, misers, and spendthrifts. There are always weak men and vain women. There are always husbands whose wives deceive and worry them, as there are always wives whom husbands worry and deceive; and the artists of the Middle Ages, in their own direct rude fashion, turned both into caricature. The mere list of subjects treated in Brandt's "Ship of Fools," written when Luther was a school-boy, shows us that men were men and women were women in 1490. That quaint reformer of manners dealt mild rebuke to men who gathered great store of books and put them to no good use; to women who were ever changing the fashion of their dress; to men who began to build without counting the cost; to "great borrowers and slack payers;" to fools "who will serve two lords both together;" to them who correct others while themselves are "culpable in the same fault;" to "fools who can not keep secret their own counsel;" to people who believe in "predestinacyon;" to men who attend closely to other people's business, leaving their own undone; to "old folks that give example of vice to youth;" and so on through the long catalogue of human follies. His homely and wise ditties are illustrated by pictures of curious simplicity. Observe the one subjoined, in which "a foule" is weighing the transitory things of this world against things everlasting, one being represented by a scale full of castles and towers, and the other by a scale full of stars—the earthly castles outweighing the heavenly bodies in the balance of this "foule."

One of the quaint poems of the gentle priest descants upon the bad behavior of people at church.This poem has an historical interest, for it throws light upon the manners of the time, over which poetry, tradition, and romance have thrown a very delusive charm.We learn from it that while the Christian people of Europe were on their knees praying in church they were liable to be disturbed by the "mad noise and shout" of a loitering crowd; by knights coming in from the field, falcon upon wrist, with their dogs yelping at their heels; by men chaffering and bargaining as they walked up and down; by the wanton laughter of girls ogled by young men; by lawyers conferring with clients; and by all the usual noises of a crowd at a fair.The author wonders

"That the false paynyms within theyr Temples be
To theyr ydols moche more devout than we."

The worthy Brandt was not the only satirist of Church manners.The "Usurer's Paternoster," given by M.Champfleury, is more incisive than Brandt's amiable remonstrance.The usurer, hurrying away to church, tells his wife that if any one comes to borrow money while he is gone, some one must be sent in all haste for him.On his way he says his paternoster thus:

"Our Father. Blessed Lord God [Beau Sire Dieu], be favorable to me, and give me grace to prosper exceedingly. Let me become the richest money-lender in the world. Who art in heaven. I am sorry I wasn't at home the day that woman came to borrow. Really I am a fool to go to church, where I can gain nothing. Hallowed be thy name. It's too bad I have a servant so expert in pilfering my money. Thy kingdom come. I have a mind to go home to see what my wife is about. I'll bet she sells a chicken while I am away, and keeps the money. Thy will be done. It pops into my mind that the chevalier who owed me fifty francs paid me only half. In heaven. Those damned Jews do a rushing business in lending to every one. I should like very much to do as they do. As on earth. The king plagues me to death in raising taxes so often."

Arrived at church, the money-lender goes through part of the service as best he may; but as soon as sermon time comes, off he goes, saying to himself, "I must get away home: the priest is going to preach a sermon to draw money out of our purses." Doubtless the priest in those times of ignorance had to deal with many most profane and unspiritual people, who could only be restrained by fear, and to whose "puerility" much had to be conceded. In touching upon the Church manners of the Middle Ages, M. Champfleury makes a remark that startles a Protestant mind accustomed only to the most exact decorum in churches. "Old men of to-day" (1850), he says, speaking of France, "will recall to mind the gayety of the midnight masses, when buffoons from the country waited impatiently to send down showers of small torpedoes upon the pavement of the nave, to barricade the alcoves with mountains of chairs, to fill with ink the holy-water basins, and to steal kisses in out-of-the-way corners from girls who would not give them." These proceedings, which M. Champfleury styles "the pleasantries of our fathers," were among the concessions made by a worldly-wise old Church to the "puerility" of the people, or rather to the absolute necessity of occasional hilarious fun to healthy existence.

Amusing and even valuable caricatures six and seven centuries old have been discovered upon parchment documents in the English record offices, executed apparently by idle clerks for their amusement when they had nothing else to do.One of these, copied by Mr. Wright, gives us the popular English conception of an Irish warrior of the thirteenth century.

The broad-axes of the Irish were held in great terror by the English. An historian of Edward I.' s time, while discoursing on that supreme perplexity of British kings and ministers, how Ireland should be governed after being quite reduced to subjection, expresses the opinion that the Irish ought not to be allowed in time of peace to use "that detestable instrument of destruction which by an ancient but accursed custom they constantly carry in their hands instead of a staff." The modern Irish shillalah, then, is only the residuum of the ancient Irish broad-axe—the broad-axe with its head taken off. The humanized Irishman of to-day is content with the handle of "the detestable instrument." Other pen-and-ink sketches of England's dreaded foes, the Irish and the Welsh, have been found upon ancient vellum rolls, but none better than the specimen given has yet been copied.

The last object of caricature which can be mentioned in the present chapter is the Jew—the odious Jew—accursed by the clergy as a Jew, despised by good citizens as a usurer, and dreaded by many a profligate Christian as the holder of mortgages upon his estate. When the ruling class of a country loses its hold upon virtue, becomes profuse in expenditure, ceases to comply with natural law, comes to regard licentious living as something to be expected of young blood, and makes a jest of a decorous and moral conversation, then there is usually in that country a less refined, stronger class, who do comply with natural law, who do live in that virtuous, frugal, and orderly manner by which alone families can be perpetuated and states established. In several communities during the centuries preceding the Reformation, when the nobles and great merchants wasted their substance in riotous living or in insensate pilgrimages and crusades, the Jew was the virtuous, sensible, and solvent man. He did not escape the evil influence wrought into the texture of the character by living in an atmosphere of hatred and contempt, nor the narrowness of mind caused by his being excluded from all the more generous and high avocations. But he remained through all those dismal ages temperate, chaste, industrious, and saving, as well as heroically faithful to the best light on high things that he had. Hence he always had money to lend, and he could only lend it to men who were too glad to think he had no rights which they were bound to respect.

The caricature on the next page was also discovered upon a vellum roll in the Public Record Office in London, the work of some idle clerk 642 years ago, and recently transferred to an English work[7] of much interest, in which it serves as a frontispiece.

The ridicule is aimed at the famous Jew, Isaac of Norwich, a rich money-lender and merchant, to whom abbots, bishops, and wealthy vicars were heavily indebted. At Norwich he had a wharf at which his vessels could receive and discharge their freights, and whole districts were mortgaged to him at once. He lent money to the king's exchequer. He was the Rothschild of his day. In the picture, which represents the outside of a castle—his own castle, wrested from some lavish Christian by a money-lender's wiles—the Jew Isaac stands above all the other figures, and is blessed with four faces and a crown, which imply, as Mr. Pike conjectures, that, let him look whichever way he will, he beholds possessions over which he holds kingly sway. Lower down, and nearer the centre, are Mosse Mokke, another Jewish money-lender of Norwich, and Madame Avegay, one of many Jewesses who lent money, between whom is a horned devil pointing to their noses. The Jewish nose was a peculiarly offensive feature to Christians, and was usually exaggerated by caricaturists. The figure holding up scales heaped with coin is, so far as we can guess, merely a taunt; and the seating of Dagon, the god of the Philistines, upon the turret seems to be an intimation that the Jews, in their dispersion, had abandoned the God of their fathers, and taken up with the deity of his inveterate foes.

So far as the records of those ages disclose, there was no one enlightened enough to judge the long-suffering Jews with just allowance.Luther's aversion to them was morbid and violent.He confesses, in his Table-talk, that if it had fallen to his lot to have much to do with Jews, his patience would have given way; and when, one day, Dr. Menius asked him how a Jew ought to be baptized, he replied, "You must fill a large tub with water, and, having divested a Jew of his clothes, cover him with a white garment.He must then sit down in the tub, and you must baptize him quite under the water."He said further to Dr. Menius that if a Jew, not converted at heart, were to ask baptism at his hands, he would take him to the bridge, tie a stone round his neck, and hurl him into the river, such an obstinate and scoffing race were they.If Luther felt thus toward them, we can not wonder that the luxurious dignitaries of the Church, two centuries before his time, should have had qualms of conscience with regard to paying Isaac of Norwich interest upon money borrowed.

CHAPTER VII.
CARICATURES PRECEDING THE REFORMATION.

We have in this strange, rude picture[8] a device of contemporary caricature to cast ridicule upon the movement of which Martin Luther was the conspicuous figure. It is reduced from a large wood-cut which appeared in Germany at the crisis of the lion-hearted reformer's career, the year of his appearance at the Diet of Worms, when he said to dissuading friends, "If I knew there were as many devils at Worms as there are tiles upon the houses, I would go." The intention of the artist is obvious; but, in addition to the leading purpose, he desired, as Mr. Chatto conjectures, to remind his public of the nasal drawl of the preaching friars of the time, for which they were as proverbial as the Puritans of London in Cromwell's day. Such is the poverty of human invention that the idea of this caricature has been employed several times since Luther's time—even as recently as 1873, when a London draughtsman made it serve his turn in the contentions of party politics.

The best humorous talent of Christendom, whether it wrought with pencil or with pen, whether it avowed or veiled its sympathy with reform, was on Luther's side.It prepared the way for his coming, co-operated with him during his life-time, carried on his work after he was gone, and continues it to the present hour.

Recent investigators tell us, indeed, that the Reformation began in laughter, which the Church itself nourished and sanctioned. M. Viollet-le-Duc, author of the "Dictionnaire d'Architecture," discourses upon the gradual change which church decorators of the Middle Ages effected in the figure of the devil. Upon edifices erected before the year 1000 there are few traces of the devil, and upon those of much earlier date none at all; but from the eleventh century he "begins to play an important rôle," artists striving which should give him the most hideous form.No one was then audacious enough to take liberties with a being so potent, so awful, so real, the competitor and antagonist of the Almighty Lord of Heaven and Earth.But mortals must laugh, and familiarity produces its well-known effect.In the eyes of men of the world the devil became gradually less terrible and more grotesque, became occasionally ridiculous, often contemptible, sometimes silly.His tricks are met by tricks more cunning than his own; he is duped, and retires discomfited.Before Luther appeared on the scene, the painters and sculptors, not to mention the authors and poets, had made progress in reducing the devil from the grade of an antagonist of deity and arch-enemy of men to that of a cunning and amusing deceiver of simpletons."The great devil," as the author just mentioned remarks, "sculptured over the door of the Autun Cathedral in the twelfth century is a frightful being, well designed to strike terror to unformed souls; but the young devils carved in bas-reliefs of the fifteenth century are more comic than terrible, and it is evident that the artists who executed them cared very little for the wicked tricks of the Evil Spirit."We may be sure that the artist who could sketch the devil fiddling upon a pair of bellows with a kitchen dipper had outgrown the horror which that personage had once excited in all minds.Such a sketch is here reproduced from a Flemish MS. in the library of Cambrai.

But this could not be said of the great mass of Christian people for centuries after.Luther, as the reader is aware, speaks of the devil with as absolute an assurance of his existence, activity, and nearness as if he were a member of his own household.God, he once said, mocks and scorns the devil by putting under his nose such a weak creature as man; and at other times he dwelt upon the hardness of the conflict which the devil has to maintain."It were not good for us to know how earnestly the holy angels strive for us against the devil, or how hard a combat it is.If we could see for how many angels one devil makes work, we should be in despair."Many devils, he remarks with curious certainty, are in forests, in waters, in wildernesses, in dark pooly places, ready to hurt and prejudice people; and there are some in the thick black clouds, which cause hail, lightnings, and thunderings, and poison the air, the pastures, and grounds.He derides the philosophers and physicians who say that these things have merely natural causes; and as to the witches who torment honest people, and spoil their eggs, milk, and butter, "I should have no compassion upon them—I would burn them all."The Table-talk of the great reformer is full of such robust credulity.

Luther represented, as much as he reformed, his age and country. In these utterances of his we discern the spirit against which the humor and gayety of art had to contend, and over which it has gained a tardy victory, not yet complete. Let us keep in mind also that in those twilight ages, as in all ages, there were the two contending influences which we now call "the world" and "the church." In other words, there were people who took the devil lightly, as they did all invisible and spiritual things, and there were people who dreaded the devil in every "dark pooly place," and to whom nothing could be a jest which appertained to him. Humorous art has in it healing and admonition for both these classes.

It was in those centuries, also, that men of the world learned to laugh at the clergy, and, again, not without clerical encouragement.In the brilliantly illuminated religious manuscripts of the two centuries preceding Luther, along with other ludicrous and absurd images, of which specimens have been given, we find many pictures in which the vices of the religious orders are exhibited.The oldest drawing in the British Museum, one of the only two that bear the date 1320, shows us two devils tossing a monk headlong from a bridge into a rough and rapid river, an act which they perform in a manner not calculated to excite serious thought in modern minds.

In the old Strasburg Cathedral there was a brass door, made in 1545, upon which was engraved a convent with a procession of monks issuing from it bearing the cross and banners. The foremost figure of this procession was a monk carrying a girl upon his shoulders. This was not the coarse fling of an enemy. It was not the scoff of an Erasmus, who said once, "These paunchy monks are called fathers, and they take good care to deserve the name."It was engraved on the eternal brass of a religious edifice for the warning and edification of the faithful.

Nothing more surprises the modern reader than the frequency and severity with which the clergy of those centuries were denounced and satirized, as well by themselves as by others. A Church which showed itself sensitive to the least taint of what it deemed heresy appears to have beheld with indifference the exhibition of its moral delinquencies—nay, taken the lead in exposing them. It was a clergyman who said, in the Council of Siena, fifty years before Luther was born: "We see to-day priests who are usurers, wine-shop keepers, merchants, governors of castles, notaries, stewards, and debauch brokers. The only trade which they have not yet commenced is that of executioner. The bishops surpass Epicurus himself in sensuality, and it is between the courses of a banquet that they discuss the authority of the Pope and that of the Council." The same speaker related that St. Bridget, being in St. Peter's at Rome, looked up in a religious ecstasy, and saw the nave filled with mitred hogs. She asked the Lord to explain this fantastic vision. "These," replied the Lord, "are the bishops and abbés of to-day." M. Champfleury, the first living authority on subjects of this nature, declares that the manuscript Bibles of the century preceding Luther are so filled with pictures exhibiting monks and nuns in equivocal circumstances that he was only puzzled to decide which specimens were most suitable to give his readers an adequate idea of them.

From mere gayety of heart, from the exuberant jollity of a well-beneficed scholar, whose future was secure and whose time was all his own, some of the higher clergy appear to have jested upon themselves and their office.Two finely engraved seals have been found in France, one dating as far back as 1300, which represent monkeys arrayed in the vestments of a Church dignitary.Upon one of them the monkey wears the hood and holds the staff of an abbot, and upon the other the animal appears in the character of a bishop.

One of these seals is known to have been executed at the express order of an abbot.The other, a copy of which is given here, was found in the ruins of an ancient château of Picardy, and bears the inscription, "LE: SCEL: DE: LEUECQUE: DE: LA: CYTE: DE: PINON"—"The seal of the bishop of the city of Pinon." This interesting relic was at first thought to be the work of some scoffing Huguenot, but there can now be no doubt of its having been the merry conceit of the personage whose title it bears. The discovery of the record relating to the monkey seal of the abbot, showing it to have been ordered and paid for by the actual head of a great monastery, throws light upon all the grotesque ornamentation of those centuries. It suggests to us also the idea that the clergy joined in the general ridicule of their order as much from a sense of the ludicrous as from conviction of its justice. In the British Museum there is a religious manuscript of the thirteenth century, splendidly illuminated, one of the initial letters of which represents a young friar drawing wine from a cask in a cellar, that contains several humorous points. With his left hand he holds the great wine-jug, into which the liquid is running from the barrel; with his right he lifts to his lips a bowlful of the wine, and from the same hand dangle the large keys of the cellar. If this was intended as a hint to the younger brethren how they ought not to behave when sent to the cellar for wine, the artist evidently felt also the comic absurdity of the situation.

The vast cellars still to be seen under ancient monasteries and priories, as well as the kitchens, not less spacious, and supported by archways of the most massive masonry, tell a tale of the habits of the religious orders which is abundantly confirmed in the records and literature of the time."Capuchins," says the old French doggerel, "drink poorly, Benedictines deeply, Dominicans pint after pint, but Franciscans drink the cellar dry."The great number of old taverns in Europe named the Mitre, the Church, the Chapel-bell, St.Dominic, and other ecclesiastical names, point to the conclusion that the class that professed to dispense good cheer for the soul was not averse to good cheer for the body.[9]

If the clergy led the merriment caused by their own excesses, we can not wonder they should have had many followers.In the popular tales of the time, which have been gathered and made accessible in recent years, we find the priest, the monk, the nun, the abbot, often figuring in absurd situations, rarely in creditable ones.The priest seems to have been regarded as the satirist's fair game, the common butt of the jester.In one of these stories a butcher, returning home from a fair, asks a night's lodging at the house of a priest, who churlishly refuses it.The butcher, returning, offers in recompense to kill one of his fine fat sheep for supper, and to leave behind him all the meat not eaten.On this condition he is received, and the family enjoy an excellent supper in his society.After supper he wins the favor first of the priest's concubine and afterward of the maid-servant by secretly promising to each of them the skin of the sheep.In the morning, after he has gone, a prodigious uproar arises, the priest and the two women each vehemently claiming the skin, in the midst of which it is discovered that the butcher had stolen the sheep from the priest's own flock.

From a merry tale of these ages a jest was taken which to-day forms one of the stock dialogues of our negro-minstrel bands. The story was apparently designed to show the sorry stuff of which priests were sometimes made. A farmer sends a lout of a son to college, intending to make a priest of him, and the lad was examined as to the extent of his knowledge. "Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob," said the examiner: "who was Jacob's father?" The candidate, being unable to answer this question, is sent home to his tutor with a letter relating his discomfiture. "Thou foole and ass-head!" exclaims the tutor. "Dost thou not know Tom Miller of Oseney?" "Yes," answered the hopeful scholar. "Then thou knowest he had two sons, Tom and Jacke: who is Jacke's father?" "Tom Miller." Back goes the youth to college with a letter to the examiner, who, for the tutor's sake, gives him another chance, and asks once more who was Jacob's father. "Marry!" cries the candidate, "I can tell you now: that was Tom Miller of Oseney."

We must be cautious in drawing inferences from the popular literature of a period, since there is in the unformed mind a propensity to circulate amusing scandal, and the satirist is apt to aim his shaft at characters and actions which are exceptional, not representative.In some of the less frequented nooks of Europe, where the tone of mind among the people has not materially changed since the fifteenth century, we still find priests the constant theme of scandal.The Tyrolese, for example, as some readers may have observed, are profuse in their votive offerings, and indefatigable in their pilgrimages, processions, and observances—the most superstitious people in Europe; but a recent writer tells us that they "have a large collection of anecdotes, humorous and scandalous, about their priests, and they take infinite delight in telling them."They are not pious, as the writer remarks, "but magpious."The Tyrolese may judge their priests correctly, but a person who believes in magpious humbug may be expected to lend greedy ears to comic scandal, and what the Tyrolese do to-day, their ancestors may have done when Luther was a school-boy.

But of late years the exact, methodical records of the past, the laws, law-books, and trials, which are now recognized to be among the most trustworthy guides to a correct interpretation of antiquity, have been diligently scrutinized, and we learn from them that it was among the commonest of criminal events for clergymen, in the time of Edward III. of England, to take part in acts of brigandage. A band of fifty men, for example, broke into the park and warren of a lady, the Countess of Lincoln, killed her game, cut down two thousand pounds' worth of timber, and carried it off. In the list of the accused are the names of two abbots and a prior. Several chaplains were in a band of knights and squires who entered an inclosure belonging to the Archbishop of Canterbury, drove off his cattle, cut down his trees, harvested his wheat, and marched away with their booty. In a band of seventy who committed a similar outrage at Carlton there were five parsons. Two parsons were accused of assisting to break into the Earl of Northampton's park and driving off his cattle. The prior of Bollington was charged with a robbery of horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs. Five clergymen were in the band that damaged the Bishop of Durham's park to the extent of a thousand pounds. These examples and others were drawn from a single roll of parchment of the year 1348; and that roll, itself one of three, is only one of many sources of information. The author of the "History of Crime" explains that the rolls of that year consist of more than one hundred and twenty skins of parchment, among which there are few that do not contain a reference to some lawless act committed by knights or priests, or by a band consisting of both.[10]

This is record, not gossip, not literature; and it may serve to indicate the basis of truth there was for the countless allusions to the dissoluteness of the clergy in the popular writings and pictures of the century that formed Luther and the Lutherans.

It is scarcely possible in the compass of a chapter to convey an idea of the burst of laughter that broke the long spell of superstitious terror, and opened the minds of men to receive the better light.Such works as the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, which to modern readers is only interesting as showing what indecency could be read and uttered by fine ladies and gentlemen on a picnic in 1350, had one character that harmonized with the new influence.Their tone was utterly at variance with the voice of the priest.The clergy, self-indulgent, preached self-denial; practicing vice, they exaggerated human guilt.But the ladies and gentlemen of the "Decameron," while practicing virtue, made light of vice, and brought off the graceful profligate victorious.Later was circulated in every land and tongue the merry tale of "Reynard the Fox," which children still cherish among the choicest of their literary treasures.Reynard, who appears in the sculptures of so many convents and in the illuminations of so many pious manuscripts, whom monks loved better than their missal, exhibits the same moral: witty wickedness triumphant over brute strength.The fox cheats the wolf, deludes the bear, lies to King Lion, turns monk, gallops headlong up and down the commandments, only to be at last taken into the highest favor by the king and made Prime Minister.It is not necessary to discover allegory in this tale.What made it potent against the spell of priestly influence was the innocent and boisterous merriment which it excited, amidst which the gloom evoked by priestly arts began to break away.Innocent mirth, next to immortal truth, is the thing most hostile to whatever is mingled with religion which is hostile to the interests of human nature.

And "Reynard," we must remember, was only the best and gayest of a large class of similar fables that circulated during the childhood of Columbus and of Luther. In one of the Latin stories given by Mr. Wright in his "Selection," we have an account of the death and burial of the wolf, the hero of the tale, which makes a most profane use of sacred objects and rites, though it was written by a priest. The holy water was carried by the hare, hedgehogs bore the candles, goats rang the bell, moles dug the grave, foxes carried the bier, the bear celebrated mass, the ox read the gospel, and the ass the epistle. When the burial was complete, the animals sat down to a splendid banquet, and wished for another grand funeral. Mark the moral drawn by the priestly author: "So it frequently happens that when some rich man, an extortionist or a usurer, dies, the abbot or prior of a convent of beasts [i.e., of men living like beasts] causes them to assemble.For it commonly happens that in a great convent of black or white monks [Benedictines or Augustinians] there are none but beasts—lions by their pride, foxes by their craftiness, bears by their voracity, stinking goats by their incontinence, asses by their sluggishness, hedgehogs by their asperity, hares by their timidity (because they were cowardly when there was no fear), and oxen by their laborious cultivation of their land."Unquestionably this author belonged to another order than those named in his tirade.

A book with original life in it becomes usually the progenitor of a line of books.Brandt's "Ship of Fools," which was published when Luther was eleven years old, gave rise to a literature.As soon as it appeared it kindled the zeal of a noted preacher of Strasburg, Jacob Geiler by name, who turned Brandt's gentle satire into fierce invective, which he directed chiefly against the monks.The black friars, he said, were the devil, the white friars his dame, and the others were their chickens.The qualities of a good monk, he declared, were an almighty belly, an ass's back, and a raven's mouth.From the pulpit, on another occasion, he foretold a coming reformation in the Church, adding that he did not expect to live to see it, though some that heard him might.The monks taunted him with looking into the "Ship of Fools" for his texts instead of the Scripture; but the people heard him eagerly, and one of his pupils gave the public a series of his homely, biting sermons, illustrated by wood-cuts, which ran through edition after edition.Badius, a noted scholar of the time, was another who imitated the "Ship of Fools," in a series of satirical pieces entitled "The Boats of Foolish Women," in which the follies of the ladies of the period were ridiculed.

Among the great number of works which the "Ship of Fools" suggested, there was one which directly and powerfully prepared the way for Luther. Erasmus, while residing in England, from 1497 to 1506, Luther being still a student, read Brandt's work, and was stirred by it to write his "Praise of Folly," which, under the most transparent disguise, is chiefly a satire upon the ecclesiastics of the day. We may at least say that it is only in the passages aimed at them that the author is at his best. Before Luther had begun to think of the abuses of the Church, Erasmus, in his little work, derided the credulous Christians who thought to escape mishaps all day by paying devotion to St. Christopher in the morning, and laughed at the soldiers who expected to come out of battle with a whole skin if they had but taken the precaution to "mumble over a set prayer before the picture of St. Barbara." He jested upon the English who had constructed a gigantic figure of their patron saint as large as the images of Hercules; only the saint was mounted upon a horse "very gloriously accoutred," which the people scarcely refrained from worshiping. But observe this passage in the very spirit of Luther, though written fifteen years before the reformer publicly denounced indulgences:

"What shall I say of such as cry up and maintain the cheat of pardons and indulgences?who by these compute the time of each soul's residence in purgatory, and assign them a longer or shorter continuance, according as they purchase more or fewer of these paltry pardons and salable exemptions?...By this easy way of purchasing pardon, any notorious highwayman, any plundering soldier, or any bribe-taking judge shall disburse some part of their unjust gains, and so think all their grossest impieties sufficiently atoned for....And what can be more ridiculous than for some others to be confident of going to heaven by repeating daily those seven verses out of the Psalms?"

These "fooleries," which Erasmus calls most gross and absurd, he says are practiced not merely by the vulgar, but by "such proficients in religion as one might well expect should have more wit." He ridicules the notion of each country and place being under the special protection of a patron saint, as well as the kindred absurdity of calling upon one saint to cure a toothache, upon another to restore lost goods, upon another to protect seamen, and upon another to guard cows and sheep. Nor does he refrain from reflecting upon the homage paid to the Virgin Mary, "whose blind devotees think it manners now to place the mother before the Son." He utterly scouts and reviles the folly of hanging up offerings at the shrines of saints for their imaginary aid in getting the donors out of trouble or danger. The responsibility of all this folly and delusion he boldly assigns to the priests, who gain money by them. "They blacken the darkness and promote the delusion, wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked) would part with less if they knew more." If any serious and wise man, he adds, should tell the people that a pious life is the only way of securing a peaceful death, that repentance and amendment alone can procure pardon, and that the best devotion to a saint is to imitate his example, there would be a very different estimate put upon masses, fastings, and other austerities. Erasmus saw this prophecy fulfilled before many years had rolled over his head.

It is, however, in his chapters upon the amazingly ridiculous subtleties of the monastic theology of his time that Erasmus gives us his most exquisite fooling. Here he becomes, indeed, the merry Erasmus who was so welcome at English Cambridge, at Paris, at Rome, in Germany, in Holland, wherever there were good scholars and good fellows. He pretends to approach this part of his subject with fear; for divines, he says, are generally very hot and passionate, and when provoked they set upon a man in full cry, and hurl at him the thunders of excommunication, that being their spiritual weapon to wound such as lift up a hand against them. But he plucks up courage, and proceeds to discourse upon the puerilities which absorbed their minds. Among the theological questions which they delighted to discuss were such as these: the precise manner in which original sin was derived from our first parents; whether time was an element in the supernatural generation of our Lord; whether it would be a thing possible for the first person in the Trinity to hate the second; whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a man, could as well have become a woman, a beast, an herb, or a stone; and if he could, how could he have then preached the gospel, or been nailed to the cross? whether if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the time when our Saviour was upon the cross, the consecrated bread would have been transubstantiated into the same body that remained on the tree; whether, in Christ's corporal presence in the sacramental wafer, his humanity was not abstracted from his Godhead; whether, after the resurrection, we shall carnally eat and drink as we do in this life; how it is possible, in the transubstantiation, for one body to be in several places at the same time; which is the greater sin, to kill a hundred men, or for a cobbler to set one stitch in a shoe on Sunday? Such subtleties as these alternated with curious and minute delineations of purgatory, heaven, and hell, their divisions, subdivisions, degrees, and qualities.

He heaps ridicule also upon the public preaching of those profound theologians. It was mere stage-playing; and their delivery was the very acme of the droll and the absurd. "Good Lord! how mimical are their gestures! What heights and falls in their voice! What toning, what bawling, what singing, what squeaking, what grimaces, what making of mouths, what apes' faces and distorting of their countenances!" And their matter was even more ridiculous than their manner. One of these absurd divines, discoursing upon the name of Jesus, subtly pretended to discover a revelation of the Trinity in the very letters of which the name was composed. It was declined only in three cases. That was one mysterious coincidence. Then the nominative ended in S, the accusative in M, and the ablative in U, which obviously indicated Summus, the beginning; Medius, the middle; and Ultimus, the end of all things. Other examples he gives of the same profound nature. Nor did the different orders of monks escape his lash. He dwelt upon the preposterous importance they attached to trifling details of dress and ceremonial. "They must be very critical in the precise number of their knots, in the tying-on of their sandals, of what precise colors their respective habits should be made, and of what stuff; how broad and long their girdles, how big and in what fashion their hoods, whether their bald crowns be of the right cut to a hair's-breadth, how many hours they must sleep, and at what minute rise to prayers."

In this manner he proceeds for many a sprightly page, rising from monks to bishops and cardinals, and from them to popes, "who pretend themselves Christ's vicars," while resembling the Lord in nothing. Luther never went farther, never was bolder or more biting, than Erasmus in this essay. But all went for nothing with the great leader of reform, because Erasmus refused to abandon the Church, and cast in his lot openly with the reformers. Luther calls him "a mere Momus," who laughed at Catholic and Protestant alike, and looked upon the Christian religion itself very much as Lucian did upon the Greek. "Whenever I pray," said Luther once, "I pray for a curse upon Erasmus." It was certainly a significant fact that in the heat of that contest Erasmus should have given the world a translation of Lucian. But he was a great, wise, genial soul, whose fame will brighten as that age becomes more justly and familiarly known to us.

The first place in the annals of such a warfare belongs of right to the soldiers who took their lives in their hands and went forth to meet the foe in the open field, braving torture, infamy, and death for the cause.Such were Luther and his followers.But there is a place in human memory for the philosopher and the humorist who first made the contest possible, and then rendered it shorter and easier.

CHAPTER VIII.
COMIC ART AND THE REFORMATION.

When Luther began the immortal part of his public career in 1517 by nailing to the church door his ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences, wood-engraving was an art which had been practiced nearly a century.He found also, as we have seen, a public accustomed to satirical writings illustrated by wood-cuts.The great Holbein illustrated Erasmus's "Praise of Folly."Brandt's "Ship of Fools," as well as the litter of works which it called forth, was even profusely illustrated.Caricatures as distinct works, though usually accompanied with abundant verbal commentary, were familiar objects.Among the curiosities which Luther himself brought from Rome in 1510, some years before he began his special work, was a caricature suggested by the "Ship of Fools," showing how the Pope had "fooled the whole world with his superstitions and idolatries."He showed it to the Prince Elector of Saxony at the time.The picture exhibited a little ship filled with monks, friars, and priests casting lines to people swimming in the sea, while in the stern sat comfortably the Pope with his cardinals and bishops, overshadowed and covered by the Holy Ghost, who was looking up to heaven, and through whose help alone the drowning wretches were saved.

In talking about the picture many years after, Luther said, "These and the like fooleries we then believed as articles of faith." He had not reached the point when he could talk at his own table of the cardinals as "peevish milksops, effeminate, unlearned blockheads, whom the Pope places in all kingdoms, where they lie lolling in kings' courts among the ladies and women."

Finding this weapon of caricature ready-made to his hands, he used it freely, as did also his friends and his foes.He was himself a caricaturist.When Pope Clement VII.seemed disposed to meet the reformers half-way, and proposed a council to that end, Luther wrote a pamphlet ridiculing the scheme, and, to give more force to his satire, he "caused a picture to be drawn" and placed in the title-page.It was not a work describable to the fastidious ears of our century, unless we leave part of the description in Latin.The Pope was seated on a lofty throne surrounded by cardinals having foxes' tails, and seeming "sursum et deorsum repurgare." In the "Table-talk" we read also of a picture being brought to Luther in which the Pope and Judas were represented hanging to the purse and keys. "'Twill vex the Pope horribly," said Luther, "that he whom emperors and kings have worshiped should now be figured hanging upon his own picklocks." The picture annexed, in which the Pope is exhibited with an ass's head performing on the bagpipes, was entirely in the taste of Luther. "The Pope's decretals," he once said, "are naught; he that drew them up was an ass." No word was too contemptuous for the papacy. "Pope, cardinals, and bishops," said he, "are a pack of guzzling, stuffing wretches; rich, wallowing in wealth and laziness, resting secure in their power, and never thinking of accomplishing God's will."

The famous pamphlet of caricatures published in 1521 by Luther's friend and follower, Lucas Cranach, contains pictures that we could easily believe Luther himself suggested. The object was to exhibit to the eyes of the people of Germany the contrast between the religion inculcated by the lowly Jesus and the pompous worldliness of the papacy. There was a picture on each page which nearly filled it, and at the bottom there were a few lines in German of explanation; the engraving on the page to the left representing an incident in the life of Christ, and the page to the right a feature of the papal system at variance with it. Thus, on the first page was shown Jesus, in humble attitude and simple raiment, refusing honors and dignities, and on the page opposite the Pope, cardinals, and bishops, with warriors, cannon, and forts, assuming lordship over kings. On another page Christ was seen crowned with thorns by the scoffing soldiers, and on the opposite page the Pope wearing his triple crown, and seated on his throne, an object of adoration to his court. On another was shown Christ washing the feet of his disciples, in contrast to the Pope presenting his toe to an emperor to be kissed. At length we have Christ ascending to heaven with a glorious escort of angels, and on the other page the Pope hurled headlong to hell, accompanied by devils, with some of his own monks already in the flames waiting to receive him. This concluding picture may serve as a specimen of a series that must have told powerfully on the side of reform.[11]

These pictorial pamphlets were an important part of the stock in trade of the colporteurs who pervaded the villages and by-ways of Germany during Luther's life-time, selling the sermons of the reformers, homely satiric verses, and broadside caricatures. The simplicity and directness of the caricatures of that age reflected perfectly both the character and the methods of Luther. One picture of Hans Sachs's has been preserved, which was designed as an illustration of the words of Christ: "I am the door. He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber." The honest Sachs shows us a lofty, well-built barn, with a very steep roof, on the very top of which sits the Pope crowned with his tiara. To him cardinals and bishops are directing people, and urging them to climb up the steep and slippery height. Two monks have done so, and are getting in at a high window. At the open door of the edifice stands the Lord, with a halo round his head, inviting a humble inquirer to enter freely. Nothing was farther from the popular caricaturists of that age than to allegorize a doctrine or a moral lesson; on the contrary, it was their habit to interpret allegory in the most absurdly literal manner. Observe, for example, the treatment of the subject contained in the words, "How wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye, and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?"

The marriage of Luther in 1525 was followed by a burst of caricature. The idea of a priest marrying excited then, as it does now in a Catholic mind, a sense of ludicrous incongruity. It is as though the words "married priest" were a contradiction in terms, and the relation implied by them was a sort of manifest incompatibility, half comic, half disgusting. The spectacle occasionally presented in a Protestant church of a clergyman ordained and married in the same hour is so opposed to the Catholic conception of the priesthood that some Catholics can only express their sense of it by laughter. Equally amazing and equally ludicrous to them is the more frequent case of missionaries coming home to be married, or young missionaries married in the evening and setting out for their station the next morning. We observe that some of Luther's nearest friends—nay, Luther himself—saw something both ridiculous and contemptible in his marriage, particularly in the haste with which it was concluded, and the disparity in the ages of the pair, Luther being forty-two and his wife twenty-six. "My marriage," wrote Luther, "has made me so despicable that I hope my humiliation will rejoice the angels and vex the devils." And Melanchthon, while doing his best to restore his leader's self-respect, expressed the hope that the "accident" might be of use in humbling Luther a little in the midst of a success perilous to his good sense.Luther was not long abased.We find him soon justifying the act, which was among the boldest and wisest of his life, as a tribute of obedience to his aged father, who "required it in hopes of issue," and as a practical confirmation of what he had himself taught.He speaks gayly of "my rib, Kate," and declared once that he would not exchange his wife for the kingdom of France or the wealth of Venice.

But the caricaturists were not soon weary of the theme. Readers at all familiar with the manners of that age do not need to be told that few of the efforts of their free pencils will bear reproduction now. Besides exhibiting the pair carousing, dancing, romping, caressing, and in various situations supposed to be ridiculous, the satirists harped a good deal upon the old prophecy that Antichrist would be the offspring of a monk and a nun. "If that is the case," said Erasmus, "how many thousands of Antichrists there are in the world already!" Luther was evidently of the same opinion, for he gave full credit to the story of six thousand infants' skulls having been found at the bottom of a pond near a convent, as well as to that of "twelve great pots, in each of which was the carcass of an infant," discovered under the cellars of another convent. But, then, Luther was among the most credulous of men.

The marriage of the monk and the nun gave only a brief advantage to the enemies of reform.The great German artists of that generation were friends of Luther.No name is more distinguished in the early annals of German art than Albert Dürer, painter, engraver, sculptor, and author.He did not employ his pencil in furtherance of Luther's cause, nor did he forsake the communion of the ancient Church, but he expressed the warmest sympathy with the objects of the reformer.A report of Luther's death in 1521 struck horror to his soul."Whether Luther be yet living," he wrote, "or whether his enemies have put him to death, I know not; yet certainly what he has suffered has been for the sake of truth, and because he has reprehended the abuses of unchristian papacy, which strives to fetter Christian liberty with the incumbrance of human ordinances, that we may be robbed of the price of our blood and sweat, and shamefully plundered by idlers, while the sick and needy perish through hunger."These words go to the heart of the controversy.

Holbein, nearly thirty years younger than Dürer, only just coming of age when Luther nailed his theses to the castle church, did more, as the reader has already seen, than express in words his sympathy with reform.The fineness and graphic force of the two specimens of his youthful talent given on pages 72, 73,[12] every reader must have remarked. Only three copies of these pictures are known to exist. They appeared at the time when Luther had kindled a general opposition to the sale of indulgences, as well as some ill feeling toward the classic authors so highly esteemed by Erasmus. They are in a peculiar sense Lutheran pictures, and they give expression to the reformer's prejudices and convictions. A third wood-cut of Holbein's is mentioned by Woltmann, dated 1524, in which the Pope is shown riding in a litter surrounded by an armed escort, and on the other side Christ is seen on an ass, accompanied by his disciples. These three works were Holbein's contribution to the earlier stage of the movement.

This artist was soon drawn away to the splendid court of Henry VIII. of England, where, among other works, he executed his renowned paintings, "The Triumph of Riches" and "The Triumph of Poverty," in both of which there is satire enough to bring them within our subject. Of these stupendous works, each containing seventeen or more life-size figures, every trace has perished except the artist's original sketch of "The Triumph of Riches." But they made a vivid impression upon the two generations which saw them, and we have so many engravings, copies, and descriptions of them that it is almost as if we still possessed the originals. Holbein's sketch is now in the Louvre at Paris. It will convey to the reader some idea of the harmonious grandeur of the painting, and some notion of the ingenious and friendly nature of its satire upon human life.

In accordance with the custom of the age, the painting bore an explanatory motto in Latin: "Gold is the father of lust and the son of sorrow. He who lacks it laments; he who has it fears." Plutus, the god of wealth, is an old, old man, long past enjoyment; but his foot rests upon sacks of superfluous coin, and an open vessel before him, heaped with money, affords the only pleasures left to him—the sight and conscious possession of the wealth he can never use. Below him Fortuna, a young and lovely woman, scatters money among the people who throng about her, among whom are the portly Sichæus, Dido's husband, the richest of his people; Themistocles, who stooped to accept wealth from the Persian king; and many others noted in classic story for the part gold played in their lives. Crœsus, Midas, and Tantalus follow on horseback, and, last of all, the unveiled Cleopatra. The careful driver of Plutus's chariot is Ratio—reason. "Faster!" cries one of the crowd, but the charioteer still holds a tight rein. The unruly horses next the chariot, named Interest and Contract, are led by the noble maidens Equity and Justice; and the wild pair in front, Avarice and Deceit, are held in by Generosity and Good Faith. In the rear, hovering over the triumphal band, Nemesis threatens.

The companion picture, "The Triumph of Poverty," had also a Latin motto, to the effect that, while the rich man is ever anxious, "the poor man fears nothing, joyous hope is his portion, and he learns to serve God by the practice of virtue."In the picture a lean and hungry-looking old woman, Poverty, was seen riding in the lowliest of vehicles, a cart, drawn by two donkeys, Stupidity and Clumsiness, and by two oxen, Negligence and Indolence.Beside her in the cart sits Misfortune.A meagre and forlorn crowd surround and follow them.But the slow-moving team is guided by the four blooming girls, Moderation, Diligence, Alertness, and Toil, of whom the last is the one most abounding in vigor and health.The reins are held by Hope, her eyes toward heaven.Industry, Memory, and Experience sit behind, giving out to the hungry crowd the means of honorable plenty in the form of flails, axes, squares, and hammers.

These human and cheerful works stand in the waste of that age of wrathful controversy and irrational devotion like green islands in the desert, a rest to the eye and a solace to the mind.

When Luther was face to face with the hierarchy at the Diet of Worms, Calvin, a French boy of twelve, was already a sharer in the worldly advantage which the hierarchy could bestow upon its favorites. He held a benefice in the Cathedral of Noyon, his native town, and at seventeen he drew additional revenue from a curacy in a neighboring parish. The tonsured boy owed this ridiculous preferment to the circumstance that his father, being secretary to the bishop of the diocese, was sure to be at hand when the bishop happened to have a good thing to give away. In all probability Jean Calvin would have died an archbishop or a cardinal if he had remained in the Church of his ancestors, for he possessed the two requisites for advancement—fervent zeal for the Church and access to the bestowers of its prizes. At Paris, however, whither he was sent by his father to pursue his studies, a shy, intense, devout lad, already thin and sallow with fasting and study, the light of the Reformation broke upon him. Like Luther, he long resisted it, and still longer hoped to see a reformation in the Church, not outside of its pale. The Church never had a more devoted son. Not Luther himself loved it more. "I was so obstinately given to the superstitions of popery," he said, long after, "that it seemed impossible I should ever be pulled out of the deep mire."

He struggled out at length. Observe one of the results of his conversion in this picture, in which a slander of the day is preserved for our inspection.[13]

Gross and filthy calumny was one of the familiar weapons in the theological contests of that century.Both sides employed it—Luther and Calvin not less than others—for it belonged to that age to hate, and hence to misinterpret, opponents."Search the records of the city of Noyon, in Picardie," wrote Stapleton, an eminent controversialist on the Catholic side, and professor in a Catholic college of Calvin's own day, "and read again that Jean Calvin, convicted of a crime" (infamous and unmentionable), "by the very clement sentence of the bishop and magistrate was branded with an iron lily on the shoulders."The records have been searched; nothing of the kind is to be found in them; but the picture was drawn and scattered over France.Precisely the same charge was made against Luther.That both the reformers died of infamous diseases was another of the scandals of the time.In reading these controversies, it is convenient to keep in mind the remark of the collector of the Calvin pictures: "When two theologians accuse one another, both of them lie."One of these calumnies drew from Calvin a celebrated retort."They accuse me," said he, "of having no children.In every land there are Christians who are my children."

Another caricature, shown on the following page, representing Calvin at the burning of Servetus, had only too much foundation in truth.

The reformer was not indeed present at the burning, but he caused the arrest of the victim, drew up the charges, furnished part of the testimony that convicted him, consented to and approved his execution. Servetus was a Spanish physician, of blameless life and warm convictions, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. Catholic and Protestant equally abhorred him, and Protestant Geneva seized the opportunity to show the world its attachment to the true faith by burning a man whom Rome was also longing to burn. It was a hideous scene—a virtuous and devoted Unitarian expiring in the flames after enduring the extremest anguish for thirty minutes, and crying, from the depths of his torment, "Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy on me!" But it was not Calvin who burned him. It was the century. It was imperfectly developed human nature. Man had not reached the civilization which admits, allows, welcomes, and honors disinterested conviction. It were as unjust to blame Calvin for burning Servetus as it is to hold the Roman Catholic Church of the present day responsible for the Inquisition of three centuries ago. It was Man that was guilty of all those stupid and abominable cruelties. Luther, the man of his period, honestly declared that if he were the Lord God, and saw kings, princes, bishops, and judges so little mindful of his Son, he would "knock the world to pieces."If Calvin had not burned Servetus, Servetus might have burned Calvin, and the Pope would have been happy to burn both.

One of the best caricatures—perhaps the very best—which the Reformation called forth was suggested by the dissensions that arose between the followers of Luther and Calvin when both of them were in the grave.It might have amused the very persons caricatured.We can fancy Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics all laughing together at the spectacle of the two reformers holding the Pope by the ear, and with their other hands fighting one another, Luther clawing at Calvin's beard, and Calvin hurling a Bible at Luther's head.

On the same sheet in the original drawing a second picture was given, in which a shepherd was seen on his knees, surrounded by his flock, addressing the Lord, who is visible in the sky. Underneath is written, "The Lord is my Shepherd; he will never forsake me." The work has an additional interest as showing how early the French began to excel in caricature. In the German and English caricatures of that period there are no existing specimens which equal this one in effective simplicity.

Perhaps the all-pervading influence of Rabelais in that age may have made French satire more good-humored. After all efforts to discover in the works of Rabelais hidden allusions to the great personages and events of his time, we must remain of the opinion that he was a fun-maker pure and simple, a court-fool to his century. The anecdote related of his convent life seems to give us the key both to his character and his writings. The incident has often been used in comedy since Rabelais employed it. On the festival of St. Francis, to whom his convent was dedicated, when the country people came in, laden with votive offerings, to pray before the image of the saint, young Rabelais removed the image from its dimly lighted recess and mounted himself upon the pedestal, attired in suitable costume. Group after group of awkward rustics approached and paid their homage. Rabelais at length, overcome by the ridiculous demeanor of the worshipers, was obliged to laugh, whereupon the gaping throng cried out, "A miracle! a miracle! Our good lord St. Francis moves!" But a cunning old friar, who knew when miracles might and might not be rationally expected in that convent, ran into the chapel and drew out the merry saint, and the brothers laid their knotted cords so vigorously across his naked shoulders that he had a lively sense of not being made of wood. That was Rabelais! He was a natural laugh-compeller. He laughed at every thing, and set his countrymen laughing at every thing. But there were no men who oftener provoked his derision than the monks. "How is it?" asks one of his merry men, "that people exclude monks from all good companies, calling them feast-troublers, marrers of mirth, and disturbers of all civil conversation, as bees drive away the drones from their hives?" The hero answers this question in three pages of most Rabelaisan abuse, of which only a very few lines are quotable. "Your monk," he says, "is like a monkey in a house. He does not watch like a dog, nor plow like the ox, nor give wool like the sheep, nor carry like the horse; he only spoils and defiles all things. Monks disquiet all their neighborhood with a tingle-tangle jangling of bells, and mumble out great store of psalms, legends, and paternosters without thinking upon or apprehending the meaning of what they say, which truly is a mocking of God." There is no single theme to which Rabelais, the favorite of bishops, oftener returns than this, and his boisterous satire had its effect upon the course of events in Europe, as well as upon French art and literature.

The English caricatures that have come down to us from the era of the Reformation betray far more earnestness than humor or ingenuity.There is one in the British Museum which figures in so many books, and continued to do duty for so many years, that the inroads of the worms in the wood-cut can be traced in the prints of different dates.It represents King Henry VIII.receiving a Bible from Archbishop Cranmer and Lord Cromwell.The burly monarch, seated upon his throne, takes the book from their hands, while he tramples upon Pope Clement, lying prostrate at his feet, the tiara broken and fallen off, the triple cross lying on the ground.Cardinal Pole, with the aid of another dignitary, is trying to get the Pope on his feet again.A monk is holding the Pope's horse, and other monks stand dismayed at the spectacle.This picture was executed in 1537, but, as we learn from the catalogue, the deterioration of the block and "the working of worms in the wood" prove that the impression in the Museum was taken in 1631.[14]

The martyrdom of the reformers in 1555, under Queen Mary of bloody memory, furnished subjects for the satiric pen and pencil as soon as the accession of Elizabeth made it safe to treat them. But there is no spirit of fun in the pictures. They are as serious and grim as the events that suggested them. In one we see a lamb suspended before an altar, which the Bishop of Winchester (Gardiner), with his wolf's head, is beginning to devour; and on the ground lie six slain lambs, named Houperus, Cranmerus, Bradfordus, Rydlerus, Rogerus, and LatimerusThree reformers put a rope round Gardiner's neck, saying, "We will not this feloue to raigne over us;" and on the other side of him two bishops with wolves' heads mitred, and having sheepskins on their shoulders, are drinking from chalices.Behind Gardiner are several men attached by rings through their noses to a rope round his waist.The devil appears above, holding a scroll, on which is written, "Youe are my verye chyldren in that youe have slayne the prophetes. For even I from the begynning was a murtherer." On the altar lie two books, one open and the other shut.On the open book we read, "Christ alone is not sufficient without our sacrifice."The only window in the edifice, a small round one, is closed and barred.Many of the figures in this elaborate piece utter severe animadversion upon opponents; but none of them is scurrilous and indecent, except the mitred wolf, who is so remarkably plain-spoken that the compiler of the catalogue was obliged to suppress several of his words.

The English caricaturists of that age seem to have felt it their duty to exhibit the entire case between Catholic and Protestant in each broadside, with all the litigants on both sides, terrestrial and celestial, all the points in both arguments, and sometimes the whole history of the controversy from the beginning. The great expanse of the picture was obscured with the number of remarks streaming from the mouths of the persons depicted, and there was often at the bottom of the engraving prose and verse enough to fill two or three of these pages. Such extensive works call to mind the sermons of the following century, when preachers endeavored on each occasion to declare, as they said, "the whole counsel of God;" so that if one individual present had never heard the Gospel before, and should never hear it again, he would hear enough for salvation in that one discourse.

Another of these martyrdom prints may claim brief notice.Two companies of martyrs are seen, one composed of the bishops, and the other of less distinguished persons, between whom there is a heap of burning fagots.Nearly all the figures say something, and the space under the picture is filled with verses.Cranmer, with the Bible in his left hand, holds his right in the fire, exclaiming, "Burne, unworthie right hand!" Latimer cries, "Lord, Lord, receive my spirit!" Philpot, pointing to a book which he holds, says, "I will pay my vowes in thee, O Smithfield!" The other characters utter their dying words.The verses are rough, but full of the resolute enthusiasm of the age:

In many of the English pictures of that period, the intention of the draughtsman is only made apparent by the explanatory words at the bottom. In one of these a friar is seen holding a chalice to a man who stretches out his hands to receive it. From the chalice a winged cockatrice is rising. There is also a man who stabs another while embracing him. The quaint words below explain the device: "The man which standeth lyke a Prophet signifieth godliness; the Fryer, treason; the cup with the Serpent, Poyson; the other which striketh with the sworde, Murder; and he that is wounded is Peace." In another of these pictures we see an ass dressed in a judge's robes seated on the bench. Before him is the prisoner, led away by a priest and another man. At one side a friar is seen in conversation with a layman. No one could make any thing of this if the artist had not obligingly appended these words: "The Asse signifieth Wrathfull Justice; the man that is drawn away, Truth; those that draweth Truth by the armes, Flatterers; the Frier, Lies; and the associate with the Frier, Perjury." In another drawing the artist shows us the Pope seated in a chair, with his foot on the face of a prostrate man, and in his hand a drawn sword, directing an executioner who is in the act of beheading a prisoner. In the distance are three men kneeling in prayer. The explanation is this: "The Pope is Oppression; the man which killeth is Crueltie; those which are a-killing, Constant Religion; the three kneeling, Love, Furtherance, and Truth to the Gospel." In one of these crude productions a parson is exhibited preaching in a pulpit, from which two ecclesiastics are dragging him by the beard to the stake outside. Explanation in this instance is not so necessary, but we have it, nevertheless: "He which preacheth in the pulpit signifieth godly zeale and a furtherer of the gospel; and the two which are plucking him out of his place are the enemies of God's Word, threatening by fire to consume the professors of the same; and that company which (sit) still are Nullifidians, such as are of no religion, not regarding any doctrine, so they may bee quiet to live after their owne willes and mindes."Another picture shows us a figure seated on a rainbow, the world at his feet, up the sides of which a pope and a cardinal are climbing.In the middle is the devil tumbling off headlong.The world is upheld by Death, who sits by the mouth of hell.This is the explanation: "He which sitteth on the raynebowe signifieth Christ, and the sworde in his hand signifieth his wrath against the wycked; the round compasse, the worlde; and those two climing, the one a pope, the other a cardinall, striving who shall be highest; and the Divell which falleth headlong downe is Lucifer, whiche through pride fel; he whiche holdeth the world is Death, standing in the entrance of hell to receyve all superbious livers."

In another print is represented a Roman soldier riding on a boar, and bearing a banner, on which is painted the Pope with his insignia.A man stabs himself and tears his hair, and behind him is a raving woman.This picture has a blunt signification: "The bore signifieth Wrath, and the man on his back Mischief; the Pope in the flag Destruction, and the flag Uncertaine Religion, turning and chaunging with every blaste of winde; the man killing himselfe, Desperation; the woman, Madness."

There are fourteen specimens in this quaint manner in the collection of the British Museum, all executed and published in the early part of the reign of Elizabeth.As art, they are naught.As part of the record of a great age, they have their value.

Germany, England, and France fought the battle of the Reformation—two victors and one vanquished.From Italy in that age we have one specimen of caricature, but it was executed by Titian.He drew a burlesque of the Laocoön to ridicule a school of artists in Rome, who, as he thought, extolled too highly the ancient sculptures, and, because they could not succeed in coloring, insisted that correctness of form was the chief thing in art.Since Titian's day, parodies of the Laocoön have been among the stock devices of the caricaturists of all nations.

CHAPTER IX.
IN THE PURITAN PERIOD.

The annexed picture,[15] a favorite with the Protestants of England, Holland, and Germany for more than a century, is composed of twenty-two articles and objects, most of which are employed in the Roman Catholic worship. A church-bell forms the hat, which is decorated by crossed daggers and holy-water brushes. A herring serves for a nose. The mouth is an open wine-flagon. The eye is a chalice covered by the holy wafer, and the cheek is a paten, or plate used in the communion service. The great volume that forms the shoulders is the mass-book. The front of the bell-tiara is adorned by a mitred wolf devouring a lamb, and by a goose holding a rosary in its bill; the back, by a spectacled ass reading a book, and by a boar wearing a scholar's cap. At the bottom of the engraving the pierced feet of Christ are seen resting upon two creatures called by the artist "the Queen's badges." The whole figure of Christ is supposed to be behind this mass of human inventions; for in the original these explanatory words are given, "Christ Covered."

It was by this device that Master Batman, at the beginning of the Puritan period, sought to present to the eye a summary of what the Reformation had accomplished, and what it had still to fear. Half a century before, Henry VIII. being still the Defender of the Faith, the various articles used in Master Batman's satirical picture were objects of religious veneration throughout Great Britain. They had now become the despised but dreaded rattle-traps of a suppressed idolatry. From the field of strife one of the victors gathered the scattered arms and implements, the gorgeous ensigns and trappings of the defeated, and piled them upon the plain, a trophy and a warning.

There is no revolution that does not sweep away much that is good.The reformation in religion, chiefly wrought by Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, and Calvin, was a movement of absolute necessity to the further progress of our race.The intelligence of Christendom had reached a development which was incompatible with respect for the assumptions of the papacy, and with a belief in the fictions which the papacy had invented or adopted.The vase must have broken, or the oak planted in it must have ceased to grow.Nevertheless, those fictions had their beauty and their use.There was a good and pleasing side to that system of fables and ceremonies, which amused, absorbed, and satisfied the people of Europe for a thousand years.If we could concede that the mass of men must remain forever ignorant and very poor, we could also admit that nothing was ever invented by man better calculated to make them thoughtlessly contented with a dismal lot than the Roman Catholic Church as it existed in the fifteenth century, before the faith of the people had been shaken in its pretensions.There was something in it for every faculty of human nature except the intellect.It gave play to every propensity except the propensity of one mind in a thousand to ask radical questions.It relieved every kind of distress except that which came of using the reason.All human interests were provided for in it except the supreme interest of human advancement.

One must have been in a Catholic community, or else lived close to an important Catholic church, in order to form an idea of the great part the Church once played in the lives and thoughts of its members—the endless provision it made for the entertainment of unformed minds in the way of festivals, fasts, processions, curious observances, changes of costume, and special rites. There was always something going on or coming off. There was not a day in the year nor an hour in the day which had not its ecclesiastical name and character. In our flowery observance of Easter and in our joyous celebration of Christmas we have a faint traditional residue of festivals that once made all Christendom gay and jocund. And it was all so adapted to the limited abilities of our race! In an average thousand men, there is not more than one man capable of filling creditably the post of a Protestant minister, but there are a hundred who can be drilled into competent priests.

Consider, for example, a procession, which was formerly the great event of many of the Church festivals, gratifying equally those who witnessed and those who took part in it. In other words, it gratified keenly the whole community. And yet how entirely it was within the resources of human nature! Not a child so young, not a woman so weak, not a man so old, but could assist or enjoy it. The sick could view it from their windows, the robust could carry its burdens, the skillful could contrive its devices, and all had the feeling that they were engaged in enhancing at once the glory of God, the fame of their saint, the credit of their town, and the good of their souls. It was pleasure; it was duty; it was masquerade; it was devotion. Some readers may remember the exaltation of soul with which Albert Dürer, the first of German artists in Luther's age, describes the great procession at Antwerp, in 1520, in honor of what was styled the "Assumption" of the Virgin Mary. One of the pleasing fictions adopted by the old Church was that on the 15th of August, A.D. 45, the Virgin Mary, aged seventy-five years, made a miraculous ascent into heaven. Hence the annual festival, which was celebrated throughout Europe with pomp and splendor. The passage in the diary of Dürer has a particular value, because it affords us a vivid view of the bright side of the ancient Church just before the reformers changed its gorgeous robes into the Puritan's plain black gown, and substituted the long prayer and interminable sermon for the magnificent ceremonial and the splendid procession.

Albert Dürer was in sympathy with Luther, but his heart swelled within him as he beheld, on that Sunday morning in Antwerp, the glorious pageantry that filed past for two hours in honor of the "Mother of God's" translation.All the people of the city assembled about the Church of "Our Lady," each dressed in gayest attire, but each wearing the costume of his rank, and exhibiting the badge of his guild or vocation.Silver trumpets of the old Frankish fashion, German drums and fifes, were playing in every quarter.The trades and guilds of the city—goldsmiths, painters, masons, embroiderers, statuaries, cabinet-makers, carpenters, sailors, fishermen, butchers, curriers, weavers, bakers, tailors, shoe-makers, and laborers—all marched by in order, at some distance apart, each preceded by its own magnificent cross.These were followed by the merchants, shop-keepers, and their clerks.The "shooters" came next, armed with bows, cross-bows, and firelocks, some on horseback and some on foot.The city guard followed.Then came the magistrates, nobles, and knights, all dressed in their official costume, and escorted, as our artist records, "by a gallant troop, arrayed in a noble and splendid manner."There were a number of women in the procession, belonging to a religious order, who gained their subsistence by labor.These, all clad in white from head to foot, agreeably relieved the splendors of the occasion.After them marched "a number of gallant persons and the canons of Our Lady's Church, with all the clergy and scholars, followed by a grand display of characters."Here the enthusiasm of the artist kindles, as he recalls the glories of the day:

"Twenty men carried the Virgin and Christ, most richly adorned, to the honor of God. In this part of the procession were a number of delightful things represented in a splendid manner. There were several wagons, in which were representations of ships and fortifications. Then came a troop of characters from the Prophets, in regular order, followed by others from the New Testament, such as the Annunciation, the Wise Men of the East riding great camels and other wonderful animals, and the Flight into Egypt, all very skillfully appointed. Then came a great dragon, and St. Margaret with the image of the Virgin at her girdle, exceedingly beautiful; and last, St. George and his squire. In this troop rode a number of boys and girls very handsomely arrayed in various costumes, representing so many saints. This procession, from beginning to end, was upward of two hours in passing our house, and there were so many things to be seen that I could never describe them all even in a book."

In some such hearty and picturesque manner all the great festivals of the Church were celebrated age after age, the entire people taking part in the show. There was no dissent, because there was no thought. But the reformers preached, the Bible was translated into the modern tongues, the intelligence of Christendom awoke, and all that bright childish pageantry vanished from the sight of the more advanced nations. The reformers discovered that there was no reason to believe that the aged Virgin Mary, on the 15th of August, A.D. 45, was borne miraculously to heaven; and in a single generation many important communities, by using their reason even to that trifling extent, grew past enjoying the procession annually held in honor of the old tradition. All the old festivals fell under the ban. It became, at length, a sectarian punctilio not to abstain from labor on Christmas. The Puritan Sunday was gradually evolved from the same spirit of opposition, and life became intense and serious.

For it is not in a single generation, nor in ten, that the human mind, after having been bound and confined for a thousand years, learns to enjoy and safely use its freedom.Luther the reformer was only a little less credulous than Luther the monk.He assisted to strike the fetters from the reason, but the prisoner only hobbled from one cell into another, larger and cleaner, but still a cell.No one can become familiar with the Puritan period without feeling that the bondage of the mind to the literal interpretation of some parts of the Old Testament was a bondage as real, though not as degrading nor as hopeless, as that under which it had lived to the papal decrees.You do not make your canary a free bird by merely opening the door of its cage.It has to acquire slowly, with anguish and great fear, the strength of wing, lungs, and eye, the knowledge, habits, and instincts, which its ancestors possessed before they were captured in their native islands.It is only in our own day that we are beginning really to enjoy the final result of Luther's heroic life—a tolerant and modest freedom of thought—for it is only in our own day that the consequences of peculiar thinking have anywhere ceased to be injurious.

If there are any who can not yet forgive the Puritans for their intolerance and narrowness, it must be they who do not know the agony of apprehension in which they passed their lives. It is the Puritan age that could be properly called the Reign of Terror. It lasted more than a century, instead of a few months, and it was during that long period of dread and tribulation that they acquired the passionate abhorrence of the papal system which is betrayed in the pictures and writings of the time. There was a fund of terror in their own belief, in that awful Doubt which hung over every soul, whether it was or was not one of the Elect; and, in addition to that, it seemed to them that the chief powers of earth, and all the powers of hell, were united to crush the true believers.

Examine the two large caricatures, "Rome's Monster" and "Spayne and Rome Defeated," in the light of a mere catalogue of dates. The Field of the Cloth of Gold, which we may regard as the splendid close of the old state of things, occurred in 1520, three years after Luther nailed up his theses. Henry VIII. defied the Pope in 1533; and twenty years after, Bloody Mary, married to Philip of Spain, was burning bishops at Smithfield. Elizabeth's reign began in 1558, which changed, not ended, the religious strife in England. The massacre of St. Bartholomew occurred in 1572, on that 24th of August which, as Voltaire used to say, all the humane and the tolerant of our race should observe as a day of humiliation and sorrow for evermore. In 1579 began the long struggle between the New and the Old, which is called the Thirty Years' War. The Prince of Orange was assassinated in 1584, in the midst of those great events which Mr. Motley has made familiar to the reading people of both continents. Every intelligent Protestant in Europe felt that the weapon which slew the prince was aimed at his own heart. The long dread of the Queen of Scots' machinations ended only with her death in 1587. Soon after, the shadow of the coming Spanish Armada crept over Great Britain, which was not dispelled till the men of England defeated and the storm scattered it in 1588. In 1605 Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot struck such terror to the Protestant mind, that it has not, in this year, 1877, wholly recovered from it, as all may know who will converse with uninstructed people in the remoter counties of Great Britain. Raleigh was beheaded in 1618. The civil war began in 1642. In 1665 the plague desolated England, and in the next year occurred the great fire of London, good Protestants not doubting that both events were traceable to the fell influence of the Beast. The accession of James II. , a Roman Catholic, filled the Puritans with new alarm in 1685, and during the three anxious years of his reign their brethren, the Huguenots, were fleeing into all the Protestant lands from the hellish persecution of the priests who governed Louis XIV.

Upon looking back at this period of agitation and alarm, it startles the mind to observe in the catalogue of dates this one: "Shakspeare died 1616." It shows us, what the ordinary records do not show, that there are people who retain their sanity and serenity in the maddest times. The rapid succession of the plays—an average of nearly two per annum—proves that there was a public for Shakspeare when all the world seemed absorbed in subjects least akin to art and humor. And how little trace we find of all those thrilling events in the plays! He was a London actor when the Armada came; and during the year of the Gunpowder Plot he was probably meditating the grandest of all his themes, "King Lear!"

The picture entitled "Spayne and Rome Defeated"[16] was one of the most noted and influential broadsheets published during the Puritan period. It may properly be termed a broadsheet, since the copy of the original in the British Museum measures 20-²/₃ inches by 13. The Puritans of England saw with dismay the growing cordiality between James I. and the Spanish court, and watched with just apprehension the visit of Prince Charles to Spain, and the prospect of a marriage between the heir-apparent and a Spanish princess. At this alarming crisis, 1621, the sheet was composed in England, and sent over to Holland to be engraved and printed, Holland being then, and for a hundred and fifty years after, the printing-house and type-foundry of Northern Europe. Some of the Pilgrim Fathers of Massachusetts, then residing at Leyden, and still waiting to hear the first news of the Mayflower company, who had sailed the year before, may have borne a hand in the work. Pastor Robinson, we know, gained part of his livelihood by co-operating with brethren in England in the preparation of works designed for distribution at home.

Besides being one of the most characteristic specimens of Puritan caricature which have been preserved, it presents to us a résumé of history, as Protestants interpreted it, from the time of the Spanish Armada to that of Guy Fawkes—1588 to 1605. It appears to have been designed for circulation in Holland and Germany as well as in England, as the words and verses upon it are in English, Dutch, and Latin. The English lines are these:

"In Eighty-eight, Spayne, arm'd with potent might,
Against our peacefull Land came on to fight;
But windes and waves and fire in one conspire,
To help the English, frustrate Spaynes desire.
To second that the Pope in counsell sitts,
For some rare stratagem they strayne their witts;
November's 5th, by powder they decree
Great Brytanes state ruinate should bee.
But Hee, whose never-slumb'ring Eye did view
The dire intendments of this damned crew,
Did soone prevent what they did thinke most sure.
Thy mercyes, Lord! for evermore endure."

This interesting sheet was devised by Samuel Ward, a Puritan preacher of Ipswich, of great zeal and celebrity, who dedicated it, in the fashion of the day, thus:

"To God. In memorye of his double deliveraunce from y^e invincible Navie and y^e unmatcheable powder Treason, 1605."

It was a timely reminder.As we occasionally see in our own day a public man committing the absurdity of replying in a serious strain to a caricature, so, in 1621, the Spanish embassador in London, Count Gondomar, called the attention of the British Government to this engraving, complaining that it was calculated to revive the old antipathy of the English people to the Spanish monarchy.The obsequious lords of the Privy Council summoned Samuel Ward to appear before them.After examining him, they remanded him to the custody of their messenger, whose house was a place of confinement for such prisoners; and there he remained.As there was yet no habeas corpus act known among men, he could only protest his innocence of any ill designs upon the Spanish monarchy, and humbly petition for release.He petitioned first the Privy Council; and they proving obdurate, he petitioned the king.He was set free at last, and he remained for twenty years a thorn in the side of those who dreaded "Spayne and Rome" less than they hated Puritans and Parliaments.

This persecution of Samuel Ward gave his print such celebrity that several imitations or pirated editions of the work speedily appeared, of which four are preserved in the great collection of the British Museum, each differing from the original in details. Caricatures aimed directly at the Spanish embassador followed, but they are only remarkable for the explanatory words which accompany them. In one we read that the residence of Count Gondomar in England had "hung before the eyes of many good men like a prodigious comet, threatening worse effects to Church and State than this other comet," which had recently menaced both from the vault of heaven. "No ecclipse of the sunne," continues the writer, "could more damnifie the earth, to make it barraine and the best things abortive, than did his interposition." We learn also that when the count left England for a visit to his own country, in 1618, "there was an uproare and assault a day or two before his departure from London by the Apprentices, who seemed greedy of such an occasion to vent their own spleenes in doing him or any of his a mischiefe." Another picture exhibits the odious Gondomar giving an account of his conduct in England to the "Spanishe Parliament," in the course of which he attributes the British abhorrence of Spain to such men as "Ward of Ipswich," whom he describes as "light and unstayed wits," intent on winning the airy applause of the vulgar, and to raise their desperate fortunes. Nor does he refrain from chuckling over the penalty inflicted upon that enemy of Spayne and Rome: "And I think that Ward of Ipswich escaped not safely for his lewed and profane picture of '88 and their Powder Treason, one whereof, my Lord Archbishop, I sent you in a letter, that you might see the malice of these detestable Heretiques against his Holiness and the Catholic Church." This broadsheet being entitled "Vox Populi," the writer concludes his explanation by styling the embassador "Fox Populi, Count Gondomar the Great."

Ward of Ipswich continued to be heard from occasionally during the first years of the reign of Charles I.Ipswich itself acquired a certain celebrity as a Puritan centre, and the name was given during the life-time of Samuel Ward to a town in Massachusetts, which is still thriving.One of his sermons upon drunkenness was illustrated by a picture, of which a copy is given here,[17] designed to show the degeneracy of manners that had taken place in England in his day. Mr. Chatto truly remarks that twenty years later the picture would have been more appropriate with the inscriptions transposed.

The marriage of Charles I. with the Princess Henrietta of France, in 1625, was one of the long series of impolitic acts which the king expiated on the scaffold in 1649. It aggravated every propensity of his nature that was hostile to the liberties of the people. Under James I. the élite of the Puritans had fled to Holland, and a little company had sought a more permanent refuge on the coast of New England. During the early years of the reign of Charles, the persecution of the Puritans by his savage bishops became so cruel and so vigilant as to induce men of family and fortune, like Winthrop and his friends, accompanied by a fleet of vessels laden with virtuous and thoughtful families, to cross the ocean and settle in Massachusetts. Boston was founded when Charles I. had been cutting off the ears and slitting the noses of Puritans for five years. All that enchanting shore of New England, with its gleaming beaches, and emerald isles, and jutting capes of granite and wild roses, now so dear to summer visitors—an eternal holiday-ground and resting-place for the people of North America—began to be dotted with villages, the names of which tell us what English towns were most renowned for the Puritan spirit two hundred and fifty years ago. The satirical pictures preserved in the British Museum which relate to events in earlier reigns number ninety-nine in all; but those suggested by events in the reign of Charles I. are nearly seven hundred in number. Most of them, however, were not published until after the downfall of the king.

Several of these prints are little more than portraits of the conspicuous persons of the time, with profuse accounts on the same sheet of their sufferings or misdeeds.One such records the heroic endurance of "the Reverend Peter Smart, mr of Artes, minister of God's word at Durham," who, for preaching against popery, lost above three hundred pounds per annum, and was imprisoned eleven years in the King's Bench.The composer adds these lines:

"Peter preach downe vaine rites with flagrant harte;
Thy Guerdon shall be greate, though heare thou Smart."

Another of these portrait pieces exhibits Dr. Alexander Leighton, who spoke of Queen Henrietta as "the daughter of Hell, a Canaanite, and an idolatresse," and spared not Archbishop Laud and his confederates.For these offenses he was, as the draughtsman informs us, "clapt up in Newgate for the space of 15 weekes, where he suffered great miserie and sicknes almost to death, afterward lost one of his Eares on the pillorie, had one of his nosthrills slitt clean through, was whipt with a whip of 3 Coardes knotted, had 36 lashes therewith, was fined 1000ll., and kept prisoner in the fleet 12 yeares, where he was most cruelly used a long time, being lodged day and night amongst the most desperately wiked villaines of y^e whole prison." He was also branded on the cheek with the letters S. S. —sower of sedition. Several other prints of the time record the same mark of attention paid by the "martyred" king to his Catholic wife. By-and-by, the crowned and mitred ruffians who did such deeds as these being themselves in durance, Parliament set Dr. Leighton free, and made him a grant of six thousand pounds.

A caricature of the same bloody period is entitled, "Archbishop Laud dining on the Ears of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton." We see Laud seated at dinner, having an ear on the point of his knife and three more ears in the plate before him, the three victims of his cruelty standing about, and two armed bishops at the foot of the table. The dialogue below represents Laud as rejecting with scorn all the dainties of his table, and declaring that nothing will content him but the ears of Lawyer Prynne and Dr. Bastwick. He cuts them off himself, and orders them to be dressed for his supper.

"Canterbury. This I doe to make you examples,
That others may be more careful to please my palate.
Henceforth let my servants know, that what I will, I will have done,
What ere is under heaven's Sunne."

A burst of caricature heralded the coming triumph of the Puritans in 1640, the year of the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford.Many of the pictures recorded both the sufferings and the joyful deliverance of the Puritan clergymen.Thus we have in one of them a glowing account of the return of the three gentlemen whose ears furnished a repast for the Archbishop of Canterbury.They had been imprisoned for many years in the Channel Islands, from which they were conveyed to Dartmouth, and thence to London, hailed with acclamations of delight and welcome in every village through which they passed.All the expenses of their long journey were paid for them, and presents of value were thrust upon them as they rode by.Within a few miles of London they were met by such a concourse of vehicles, horsemen, and people that it was with great difficulty they could travel a mile in an hour.But when at length, in the evening, they reached the city, masses of enthusiastic people blocked the streets, crying, "Welcome home!welcome home!"and strewing flowers and rosemary before them.Thousands of the people carried torches, which rendered the streets lighter than the day.They were three hours in making their way through the crowd from Charing Cross to their lodgings in the city, a distance of a mile.

It was during the exaltation of the years preceding the civil war that such pictures appeared as the one here given, urging a union between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland against the foe of both. This is copied from an original impression in the collection of the New York Historical Society.

The caricaturists pursued Laud and Strafford even to the scaffold.The archbishop was the author of a work entitled "Canons and Institutions Ecclesiastical," in which he gave expression to his extreme High-church opinions.In 1640 the victorious House of Commons canceled the canons adopted from this work, and fined the clergy who had sat in the Convocation.A caricature quickly appeared, called "Archbishop Laud firing a Cannon," in which the cannon is represented as bursting, and its fragments endangering the clergymen standing near.Laud's committal to the Tower was the occasion of many broadsheets, one of which exhibits him fastened to a staple in a wall, with a long string of taunting stanzas below:

In these stanzas are roughly given the leading counts of the popular indictment against Archbishop Laud.Other prints present him to us in the Tower with a halter round his neck; and, again, we see him in a bird-cage, with the queen's Catholic confessor, the two being popularly regarded as birds of a feather.In another, a stout carpenter is holding Laud's nose to a grindstone, while the carpenter's boy turns the handle, and the archbishop cries for mercy:

"Such turning will soon deform my face;
Oh! I bleed, I bleed! and am extremely sore."

But the carpenter reminds him that the various ears that he had caused to be cut off were quite as precious to their owners as his nose is to him.A Jesuit enters with a vessel of holy water with which to wash the extremely sore nose.One broadsheet represents Laud in consultation with his physician, who administers an emetic that causes him to throw off his stomach several heavy articles which had been troubling him for years.First, the "Tobacco Patent" comes up with a terrible wrench.As each article appears, the doctor and his patient converse upon it:

"Doctor. What's this? A book? Whosoever hath bin at church may exercise lawful recreations on Sunday. What's the meaning of this?

"Canterbury. 'Tis the booke for Pastimes on the Sunday, which I caused to be made. But hold! here comes something. What is it?

"Doctor. 'Tis another book. The title is, 'Sunday no Sabbath.' Did you cause this to be made also?

"Canterbury. No; Doctor Pocklington made it; but I licensed it.

"Doctor. But what's this? A paper 'tis; if I be not mistaken, a Star-Chamber order made against Mr. Prinne, Mr. Burton, and Dr. Bastwicke. Had you any hand in this?

"Canterbury. I had. I had. All England knoweth it. But, oh, here comes up something that makes my very back ake! O that it were up once! Now it is up, I thank Heaven!

"Doctor. 'Tis a great bundle of papers, of presentations and suspensions. These were the instruments, my lord, wherewith you created the tongue-tied Doctors, and gave them great Benefices in the Country to preach some twice a year at the least, and in their place to hire some journeyman Curate, who will only read a Sermon in the forenoone, and in the afternoone be drunke, with his parishioners for company."

By the same painful process the archbishop is delivered of his "Book of Canons," and finally of his mitre; upon which the doctor says, "Nay, if the miter be come, the Divell is not far off.Farewell, my good lord."

There still exist in various collections more than a hundred prints relating directly to Archbishop Laud, several of which give burlesque representations of his execution. There are some that show him asleep, and visited by the ghosts of those whom he had persecuted, each addressing him in turn, as the victims of Richard III. spoke to their destroyer on Bosworth Field. One of the print-makers, however, relented at the spectacle of an old man, seventy-two years of age, brought to the block. He exhibits the archbishop speaking to the crowd from the scaffold:

"Lend me but one poore teare, when thow do'st see
This wretched portraict of just miserie.
I was Great Innovator, Tyran, Foe
To Church and State; all Times shall call me so.
But since I'm Thunder-stricken to the Ground,
Learn how to stand: insult not ore my wound."

This one poor stanza alone among the popular utterances of the time shows that any soul in England was touched by the cruel fanatic's bloody end.

During the civil war and the government of Cromwell, 1642 to 1660, nine in ten of all the satirical prints that have been preserved are on the Puritan side. A great number of them were aimed at the Welsh, whose brogue seems to have been a standing resource with the mirth-makers of that period, as the Irish is at present. The wild roystering ways of the Cavaliers, their debauchery and license, furnished subjects. The cruelties practiced by Prince Rupert suggested the annexed illustration, in which the author endeavored to show "the cruell Impieties of Blood-thirsty Royalists and blasphemous Anti-Parliamentarians under the Command of that inhumane Prince Rupert, Digby, and the rest, wherein the barbarous Crueltie of our Civill uncivill Warres is briefly discovered." Beneath the portrait of England's wolf are various narratives of his bloody deeds. One picture exhibits the plundering habits of the mercenaries on the side of the king in Ireland. A soldier is represented armed and equipped with the utensils that appertain to good forage: on his head a three-legged pot, hanging from his side a duck, a spit with a goose on it held in his left hand as a musket, a dripping-pan on his arm as a shield, a hay-fork in his right hand for a rest, with a string of sausages for a match, a long artichoke at his side for a sword, bottles of canary suspended from his belt, slices of toast for shoe-strings, and two black pots at his garters. This picture may have been called forth by an item in a news-letter of 1641, wherein it was stated that such "great store of pilidges" was daily brought into Drogheda that a cow could be bought there for five shillings and a horse for twelve.

The abortive attempt of Charles II., after the execution of his father, to unite the Scots under his sceptre, and by their aid place himself upon the throne of England, called forth the caricature annexed, in which an old device is put to a new use.A large number of verses explain the picture, though they begin by declaring:

"This Embleme needs no learned Exposition;
The World knows well enough the sad condition
Of regal Power and Prerogative.
Dead and dethron'd in England, now alive
In Scotland, where they seeme to love the Lad,
If hee'l be more obsequious than his Dad,
And act according to Kirk Principles,
More subtile than were Delphic Oracles."

In the verses that follow there is to be found one of the few explicit justifications of the execution of Charles I.that the lighter literature of the Commonwealth affords:

"But Law and Justice at the last being done
On the hated Father, now they love the Son."

The poet also taunts the Scots with having first stirred up the English to "doe Heroick Justice" on the late king, and then adopting the heir on condition of his giving their Church the same fell supremacy which Laud had claimed for the Church of England.

The Ironsides of Cromwell soon accomplished the caricaturist's prediction:

"But this religious mock we all shall see,
Will soone the downfall of their Babel be."

We find the pencil and the pen of the satirist next employed in exhibiting the young king fleeing in various ludicrous disguises before his enemies.

An interesting caricature published during the civil wars aimed to cast back upon the Malignants the ridicule implied in the nickname of Roundhead as applied to the Puritans. It contained figures of three ecclesiastics, "Sound-head, Rattle-head, and Round-head." Sound-head, a minister sound in the Puritan faith, hands a Bible to Rattle-head, a personage meant for Laud, half bishop and half Jesuit. On the other side is the genuine Round-head, a monk with shorn pate, who presents to Rattle-head a crucifix, and points to a monastery. Rattle-head rejects the Bible, and receives the crucifix. Over the figures is written:

"See heer, Malignants Foolerie
Retorted on them properly,
The Sound-head, Round-head, Rattle-head,
Well placed, where best is merited."

Below are other verses in which, of course, Rattle-head and Round-head are belabored in the thorough-going, root-and-branch manner of the time, Atheist and Arminian being used as synonymous terms:

"See heer, the Rattle-heads most Rotten Heart,
Acting the Atheists or Arminians part."

In looking over the broadsheets of that stirring period, we are struck by the absence of the mighty Name that must have been uppermost in every mind and oftenest on every tongue—that of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.A few caricatures were executed in Holland, in which "The General" and "Oliver" and "The Protector" were weakly satirized; but as most of the plates in that age were made to serve various purposes, and were frequently altered and redated, it is not certain that any of them were circulated in England during Cromwell's life-time.English draughtsmen produced a few pictures in which the Protector was favorably depicted dissolving the Long Parliament, but their efforts were not remarkable either with pen or pencil.The Protector may have relished, and Bunyan may have written, the verses that accompanied some of them:

"Full twelve years and more these Rooks they have sat
to gull and to cozen all true-hearted People;
Our Gold and our Silver has made them so fat
that they lookt more big and mighty than Paul's Steeple."

The Puritans handled the sword more skillfully than the pen, and the royalists were not disposed to satire during the rule of the Ironside chief.The only great writer of the Puritan age on the Puritan side was Milton, and he was one of the two or three great writers who have shown little sense of humor.

CHAPTER X.
LATER PURITAN CARICATURE.