“Heures à l’usage de Paris.” Jacques Kerver, 1573. 12mo. And again, 1575. 12mo.
In “The Contemplation of Sinners,” printed by Wynkyn de Worde. 4to.
All the above articles are in the collections of the author of this dissertation.
In an elegant MS. “Horæ,” in the Harl. Coll. No. 2917, 12mo. three Deaths appear to a pope, an emperor, and a king coming out of a church. All the parties are crowned.
At the end of Desrey’s “Macabri speculum choreæ mortuorum,” a hermit sees a vision of a king, a legislator, and a vain female. They are all lectured by skeletons in their own likenesses.
In a manuscript collection of unpublished and chiefly pious poems of John Awdeley, a blind poet and canon of the monastery of Haghmon, in Shropshire, anno 1426, there is one on the “trois vifs et trois morts,” in alliterative verses, and composed in a very grand and terrific style.
NEGRO FIGURE OF DEATH.
In some degree connected with the old painting of the Macaber Dance in the church-yard of the Innocents at Paris, was that of a black man over a vaulted roof, constructed by the celebrated N. Flamel, about the year 1390. This is supposed to have perished with the Danse Macabre; but a copy of the figure has been preserved in some of the printed editions of the dance. It exhibits a Negro blowing a trumpet, and was certainly intended as a personification of Death. In one of the oldest of the above editions he is accompanied with these verses:
Cry de Mort.
Tost, tost, tost, que chacun savance
Main à main venir a la danse
De Mort, danser la convient,
Tous et a plusieurs nen souvient.
Venez hommes femmes et enfans,
Jeunes et vieulx, petis et grans,
Ung tout seul nen eschapperoit,
Pour mille escuz si les donnoit, &c.
Before the females in the dance the figure is repeated with a second “Cry de Mort.”