d
be found many who, like David of Delft, John of Leyden, and others, had
been members of rhetorical chambers. The genius for mummery and
theatrical exhibitions, transplanted from its sphere, and exerting itself
for purposes of fraud and licentiousness, was as baleful in its effects
as it was healthy in its original manifestations. Such exhibitions were
but the excrescences of a system which had borne good fruit. These
literary guilds befitted and denoted a people which was alive, a people
which had neither sunk to sleep in the lap of material prosperity, nor
abased itself in the sty of ignorance and political servitude. The spirit
of liberty pervaded these rude but not illiterate assemblies, and her
fair proportions were distinctly visible, even through the somewhat
grotesque garb which she thus assumed.

The great leading recreations which these chambers afforded to themselves
and the public, were the periodic jubilees which they celebrated in
various capital cities. All the guilds of rhetoric throughout the
Netherlands were then invited to partake and to compete in magnificent
processions, brilliant costumes, living pictures, charades, and other
animated, glittering groups, and in trials of dramatic and poetic skill,
all arranged under the superintendence of the particular association
which, in the preceding year, had borne away the prize. Such jubilees
were called "Land jewels."

From the amusements of a people may be gathered much that is necessary
for a proper estimation of its character. No unfavorable opinion can be
formed as to the culture of a nation, whose weavers, smiths, gardeners,
and traders, found the favorite amusement of their holidays in composing
and enacting tragedies or farces, reciting their own verses, or in
personifying moral and esthetic sentiments by ingeniously-arranged
groups, or gorgeous habiliments. The cramoisy velvets and yellow satin
doublets of the court, the gold-brocaded mantles of priests and princes
are often but vulgar drapery of little historic worth. Such costumes
thrown around the swart figures of hard-working artisans, for literary
and artistic purposes, have a real significance, and are worthy of a
closer examination. Were not these amusements of the Netherlanders as
elevated and humanizing as the contemporary bull-fights and autos-da-fe
of Spain? What place in history does the gloomy bigot merit who, for the
love of Christ, converted all these gay cities into shambles, and