In the same volume is another wood-cut on the subject of a dance given by the Lord of Death in Clifton Halls. A motley group of various characters are dancing in a circle whilst Death plays the fiddle.
In 1832 was published at Paris “La Danse des Morts, ballade dediée à Madame la Comtesse de Tryon Montalembert. Paroles et musique de P. Merruau.” The subject is as follows: A girl named Lise is admonished by her mother not to dance on a Saturday, the day on which Satan calls the dead to the infernal Sabbat. She promises obedience, but whilst her mother is napping, escapes to the ball. She forgets the midnight hour, when a company of damned souls, led by Satan, enter the ball-room hand-in-hand, exclaiming “Make way for Death.” All the party escape, except Lise, who suddenly finds herself encircled by skeletons, who continue dancing round her. From that time, on every Saturday at midnight, there is heard under ground, in the church-yard, the lamentation of a soul forcibly detained, and exclaiming “Girls beware of dancing Satan!” At the head of this ballad is a lithographic print of the terrified Lise in Satan’s clutches, surrounded by dancing, piping, and fiddling Deaths.
About the same time there appeared a silly ballad, set to music, intitled “the Cork Leg,” accompanied by a print in which the man with the cork leg falling on the ground drops his leg. It is seized by Death, who stalks away with it in a very grotesque manner.
CHAPTER XV.
Initial or capital Letters with the Dance of Death.
t is very well known that the use of initial or capital letters, especially with figures of any kind, is not coeval with the invention of printing. It was some time before they were introduced at all, a blank being left, or else a small letter printed for the illuminators to cover or fill up, as they had been accustomed to do in manuscripts; for, although the art of printing nearly put an end to the occupation of that ingenious class of artists, they continued to be employed by the early printers to decorate their books with elegant initials, and particularly to illuminate the first pages of them with beautiful borders of foliage or animals, for the purpose of giving them the appearance of manuscripts.
It has more than once been most erroneously asserted by bibliographers and writers on typography, that Erhard Ratdolt, a printer at Venice, was the first person who made use of initial letters about the year 1477; for instances are not wanting of their introduction into some of the earliest printed books. Among the latter the most beautiful specimen of an ornamented capital letter is the B in the Psalter of 1457, of which Dr. Dibdin has given a very faithful copy in vol. I. p. 107, of the Bibliotheca Spenceriana. This truly elegant letter seems to have been regarded as the only one of its kind; but, in a fragment of an undescribed missal in folio, printed in the same type as the above-mentioned Psalter, there is an equally beautiful initial T, prefixed to the “Te igitur” canon of the mass. It is ornamented with flowers and foliage, and in both these precious volumes there are many other smaller capitals, but whether printed with the other type, or afterwards stamped, may admit of some doubt. This unique and valuable fragment is in the collection of the present writer.