ester. Their larger assemblies were
accompanied with long festivities, the solemn entry into a town or
village being styled _Landjuweel_ (Landjewel). The nobility mingled in
them, incited by the example of Henry IV. of Brabant or
Philippe-le-Bel. The wealth of the Netherlands was displayed on these
solemnities, and the citizens rivalled their monarchs in magnificence.
The burghers of Ghent and Bruges and Antwerp shone, on these
occasions, in the gaudy pomp of princely patricians. All were invited
to take part and dispute the prizes awarded by fair hands.

It can scarcely be expected that these guilds, composed in many cases
of mechanics, should give rise to works of the highest order of merit.
Their dramatic representations were rather gorgeous than tasteful,
their attempts at wit little better than buffoonery, their humor mere
personal vituperation. Yet even in matters of taste they are not much
inferior to the then more pretentious academies of other lands. It was
an age of long religious dramas, of tortured rhymes and impossible
metres, when strange and new versification imported from France found
favor among a people whose silks and linens and rich tapestries were
destined to reach a wider circulation than all the poetical effusions
of their guilds, the "Lily," the "Violet," and the "Jesus with the
Balsam Flower."

It was Philip the Fair who, wishing to centralize the scattered
efforts of these societies, established at Malines, in 1493, a
sovereign chamber, of which he appointed his chaplain, Pierre Aelters,
_sovereign prince_. With an admixture of religion, in accordance with
the spirit of the Middle Ages, the sacred number was fifteen. There
were fifteen members. Fifteen young girls were to form part of it, in
honor of the fifteen joys of Mary. Fifteen youths were instructed in
the art of rhetoric, and the assemblies were held fifteen times a
year. Charles V. was the last chief of this assembly, which had
previously been removed to Ghent. In 1577 it greeted the arrival of
the Prince of Orange, but this was its last sign of vitality.

The Chambers of Rhetoric reached their climax in a time of
fermentation. The impatience, the feeling of uneasiness and restraint,
is felt in the drama of these days, which was wholly under the control
of the Chambers. The stage, that "mirror of the times," is often the
first manifestation of the unquiet heaving and subsequent up-bubbling
in the fluid compost of the mass that const