n the interlude between two worlds, the older dying
and the new struggling painfully to begin. The Church, which in the
quarrels of the sixteenth century will regain some of her strength, at
least for fighting, in the fourteenth is down in the mire. Look at the
truthful picture drawn by Clemangis. The nobles, so proudly arrayed in
their new armour, fall all the more heavily at Crecy, Poitiers,
Agincourt. All who survive end by being prisoners in England. What a
theme for ridicule! The citizens, the very peasants make merry and
shrug their shoulders. This general absence of the lords gave, I
fancy, no small encouragement to the Sabbath gatherings which had
always taken place, but at this time might first have grown into vast
popular festivals.

How mighty the power thus wielded by Satan's sweetheart, who cures,
foretels, divines, calls up the souls of the dead; who can throw a
spell upon you, turn you into a hare or wolf, enable you to find a
treasure, and, best of all, ensure your being beloved! It is an awful
power which combines all others. How could a stormy soul, a soul most
commonly gangrened, and sometimes grown utterly wayward, have helped
employing it to wreak her hate and revenge; sometimes even out of a
mere delight in malice and uncleanness?

All that once was told the confessor, is now imparted to her: not only
the sins already done, but those also which folk purpose doing. She
holds each by her shameful secret, by the avowal of her uncleanest
desires. To her they entrust both their bodily and mental ills; the
lustful heats of a blood inflamed and soured; the ceaseless prickings
of some sharp, urgent, furious desire.

To her they all come: with her there is no shame. In plain blunt words
they beseech her for life, for death, for remedies, for poisons.
Thither comes a young woman, to ask through her tears for the means of
saving her from the fruits of her sin. Thither comes the
step-mother--a common theme in the Middle Ages--to say that the child
of a former marriage eats well and lives long. Thither comes the
sorrowing wife whose children year by year are born only to die. And
now, on the other hand, comes a youth to buy at any cost the burning
draught that shall trouble the heart of some haughty dame, until,
forgetful of the distance between them, she has stooped to look upon
her little page.

* * * * *

In these days there are but two types, two forms of marriage, both