Curious Myths of the Middle Ages

Transcriber's Note
There is a small amount of Greek text in this book. To see a transliteration, hover your mouse over words with a red dotted underline, e.g. βιβλος .
S. BARING-GOULD, M.A.
BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1867.
STEREOTYPED AT THE BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY, No. 4 Spring Lane.
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge.
POPE JOAN. From Joh. Wolfii Lect. Memorab. (Lavingæ, 1600.)

MEDIÆVAL MYTHS.
WHO, that has looked on Gustave Doré’s marvellous illustrations to this wild legend, can forget the impression they made upon his imagination?
I do not refer to the first illustration as striking, where the Jewish shoemaker is refusing to suffer the cross-laden Savior to rest a moment on his door-step, and is receiving with scornful lip the judgment to wander restless till the Second Coming of that same Redeemer. But I refer rather to the second, which represents the Jew, after the lapse of ages, bowed beneath the burden of the curse, worn with unrelieved toil, wearied with ceaseless travelling, trudging onward at the last lights of evening, when a rayless night of unabating rain is creeping on, along a sloppy path between dripping bushes; and suddenly he comes over against a wayside crucifix, on which the white glare of departing daylight falls, to throw it into ghastly relief against the pitch-black rain-clouds. For a moment we see the working of the miserable shoemaker’s mind. We feel that he is recalling the tragedy of the first Good Friday, and his head hangs heavier on his breast, as he recalls the part he had taken in that awful catastrophe.
Or, is that other illustration more remarkable, where the wanderer is amongst the Alps, at the brink of a hideous chasm; and seeing in the contorted pine-branches the ever-haunting scene of the Via Dolorosa, he is lured to cast himself into that black gulf in quest of rest,—when an angel flashes out of the gloom with the sword of flame turning every way, keeping him back from what would be to him a Paradise indeed, the repose of Death?