popular humour found its largest and freest
expression. On missal-marge and sign-board, on stall and entablature, in
gargoyle and initial, the grotesque displayed itself in an infinite
variety of forms. The import of this inextricable tangle of imagery,
often obscene and horrible, often quaint and fantastic, is difficult, if
not impossible, to determine. We recognize the prevalence of three great
popular types or figures, each of which may be credited with a satirical
intention--of Reynard the Fox, the hero of the famous medieval romance;
of the Devil, that peculiarly medieval antithesis of God; and of Death,
the sarcastic and irreverent skeleton. The popularity of the last is
evidenced by the fact that no fewer than forty-three towns in England,
France and Germany are enumerated as possessing sets of the Dance of
Death, that grandiose all-levelling series of caprices in the
contemplation of which the middle ages found so much consolation. It was
reserved for Holbein (1498-1554), seizing the idea and resuming all that
his contemporaries thought and felt on the subject, to produce, in his
fifty-three magnificent designs of the Danse Macabre, the first and
perhaps the greatest set of satirical moralities known to the modern
world.

It is in the tumult of the Renaissance, indeed, that caricature in its
modern sense may be said to have been born. The great popular movements
required some such vehicle of comment or censure; the perfection to
which the arts of design were attaining supplied the means; the
invention of printing ensured its dissemination. The earliest genuine
piece of graphic irony that has been discovered is a caricature (1499)
relating to Louis XII. and his Italian war. But it was the Reformation
that produced the first full crop of satirical ephemerae, and the heads
of Luther and Alexander VI. are therefore the direct ancestors of the
masks that smirk and frown from the "cartoons" of _Punch_ and the
_Charivari_. Fairly started by Lucas Cranach, a friend of Luther, in his
_Passionale of Christ and Antichrist_ (1521), caricature was naturalized
in France under the League, but only to pass into the hands of the
Dutch, who supplied the rest of Europe with satirical prints during the
whole of the next century. A curious reaction is visible in the work of
Pieter Breughel (1510-1570) towards the grotesque _diablerie_ and
macaberesque morality of medieval art, the last original and striking
note of which is caught