356)

(356) I cite these instances out of a vast number which I have
personally noted in visits to various cathedrals. For striking examples
of mediaeval grotesques, see Wright's History of Caricature and the
Grotesque, London, 1875; Langlois's Stalles de la Cathedrale de Rouen,
1838; Adeline's Les Sculptures Grotesques et Symboliques, Rouen,
1878; Viollet le Duc, Dictionnaire de l'Architecture; Gailhabaud, Sur
l'Architecture, etc. For a reproduction of an illuminated manuscript in
which devils fly out of the mouths of the possessed under the influence
of exorcisms, see Cahier and Martin, Nouveaux Melanges d' Archeologie
for 1874, p. 136; and for a demon emerging from a victim's mouth in a
puff of smoke at the command of St. Francis Xavier, see La Devotion de
Dix Vendredis, etc., Plate xxxii.

Satan and his imps were among the principal personages in every popular
drama, and "Hell's Mouth" was a piece of stage scenery constantly
brought into requisition. A miracle-play without a full display of the
diabolic element in it would have stood a fair chance of being pelted
from the stage.(357)

(357) See Wright, History of Caricature and the Grotesque; F. J.
Mone, Schauspiele des Mittelalters, Carlsruhe, 1846; Dr. Karl Hase,
Miracle-Plays and Sacred Dramas, Boston,1880 (translation from the
German). Examples of the miracle-plays may be found in Marriott's
Collection of English Miracle-Plays, 1838; in Hone's Ancient Mysteries;
in T. Sharpe's Dissertaion on the Pageants.. . anciently performed at
Coventry, Coventry, 1828; in the publications of the Shakespearean and
other societies. See especially The Harrowing of Hell, a miracle-play,
edited from the original now in the British Museum, by T. O. Halliwell,
London, 1840. One of the items still preserved is a sum of money paid
for keeping a fire burning in hell's mouth. Says Hase (as above, p. 42):
"In wonderful satyrlike masquerade, in which neither horns, tails,
nor hoofs were ever... wanting, the devil prosecuted on the stage his
business of fetching souls," which left the mouths of the dying "in the
form of small images."

Not only the popular art but the popular legends embodied these ideas.
The chroniclers delighted in them; the Lives of the Saints abounded in
them; sermons enforced them from every pulpit. What wonder, then, that
men and women had vivid dreams of Satanic influence, that dread of it
was like dread of the plague, and that this terror spr