Se mi potesti dare
Quanto si pote dimandare
Non te pote scampare la morte
Se te viene la sorte.[77]

It can hardly be supposed that this subject was not known in Spain, though nothing relating to it seems to have been recorded, if we except the poem that has been mentioned in p. [25], but no Spanish painting has been specified that can be called a regular Macaber Dance. There are grounds, however, for believing that there was such a painting in the cathedral of Burgos, as a gentleman known to the author saw there the remains of a skeleton figure on a whitewashed wall.

CHAPTER IV.

Macaber Dance in England.—St. Paul’s.—Salisbury.—Wortley Hall.—Hexham.—Croydon.—Tower of London.—Lines in Pierce Plowman’s Vision supposed to refer to it.

e are next to examine this subject in relation to its existence in our own country. On the authority of the work ascribed to Walter de Mapes, already noticed in p. [24], it is not unreasonable to infer that paintings of the Macaber Dance were coeval with that writer, though no specimens of it that now remain will warrant the conclusion. We know that it existed at Old Saint Paul’s. Stowe informs us that there was a great cloister on the north side of the church, environing a plot of ground, of old time called Pardon church-yard. He then states, that “about this cloyster was artificially and richly painted the Dance of Machabray, or Dance of Death, commonly called the Dance of Paul’s: the like whereof was painted about St. Innocent’s cloyster at Paris: the meters or poesie of this dance were translated out of French into English, by John Lidgate, Monke of Bury, the picture of Death leading all estates; at the dispence of Jenken Carpenter in the reigne of Henry the Sixt.”[78] Lydgate’s verses were first printed at the end of Tottell’s edition of the translation of his Fall of Princes, from Boccaccio, 1554, folio, and afterwards, in Sir W. Dugdale’s History of St. Paul’s cathedral.[79] In another place Stowe records that “on the 10th April, 1549, the cloister of St. Paul’s church, called Pardon church-yard, with the Dance of Death, commonly called the Dance of Paul’s, about the same cloister, costly and cunningly wrought, and the chappel in the midst of the same church-yard, were all begun to be pulled down.”[80] This spoliation was made by the Protector Somerset, in order to obtain materials for building his palace in the Strand.[81]

The single figure that remained in the Hungerford chapel at Salisbury cathedral, previously to its demolition, was formerly known by the title of “Death and the Young Man,” and was, undoubtedly, a portion of the Macaber Dance, as there was close to it another compartment belonging to the same subject. In 1748, a print of these figures was published, accompanied with the following inscription, which differs from that in Lydgate. The young man says:

Alasse Dethe alasse a blesful thyng thou were
Yf thou woldyst spare us yn ouwre lustynesse.
And cum to wretches that bethe of hevy chere
Whene thay ye clepe to slake their dystresse
But owte alasse thyne own sely selfwyldnesse
Crewelly werneth me that seygh wayle and wepe
To close there then that after ye doth clepe.