o handle them.

Another and most important collection of brotherhoods were the so-called
guilds of Rhetoric, which existed, in greater or less number, in all the
principal cities. These were associations of mechanics, for the purpose
of amusing their leisure with poetical effusions, dramatic and musical
exhibitions, theatrical processions, and other harmless and not inelegant
recreations. Such chambers of rhetoric came originally in the fifteenth
century from France. The fact that in their very title they confounded
rhetoric with poetry and the drama indicates the meagre attainments of
these early "Rederykers." In the outset of their career they gave
theatrical exhibitions. "King Herod and his Deeds" was enacted in the
cathedral at Utrecht in 1418. The associations spread with great celerity
throughout the Netherlands, and, as they were all connected with each
other, and in habits of periodical intercourse, these humble links of
literature were of great value in drawing the people of the provinces
into closer union. They became, likewise, important political engines. As
early as the time of Philip the Good, their songs and lampoons became so
offensive to the arbitrary notions of the Burgundian government, as to
cause the societies to be prohibited. It was, however, out of the
sovereign's power permanently to suppress institutions, which already
partook of the character of the modern periodical press combined with
functions resembling the show and licence of the Athenian drama. Viewed
from the stand-point of literary criticism their productions were not
very commendable in taste, conception, or execution. To torture the Muses
to madness, to wire-draw poetry through inextricable coils of difficult
rhymes and impossible measures; to hammer one golden grain of wit into a
sheet of infinite platitude, with frightful ingenuity to construct
ponderous anagrams and preternatural acrostics, to dazzle the vulgar eye
with tawdry costumes, and to tickle the vulgar ear with virulent
personalities, were tendencies which perhaps smacked of the hammer, the
yard-stick and the pincers, and gave sufficient proof, had proof been
necessary, that literature is not one of the mechanical arts, and that
poetry can not be manufactured to a profit by joint stock companies. Yet,
if the style of these lucubrations was often depraved, the artisans
rarely received a better example from the literary institutions above
them. It was not for guilds of mecha