These criers did not cease to perambulate the streets of Paris until about the year 1690, and M. Langlois informs us that in remote provinces of France their doleful cry was heard as recently as 1850.
Blessed gift of humor! Against the most complicated and effective apparatus of terror ever contrived, worked by the most powerful organization that ever existed, the sense of the ludicrous asserted itself, and saved the human mind from being crushed down into abject and hopeless idiocy. The readers of "Don Quixote" can not have forgotten the colloquy in the highway between the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and the head of the company of strollers.
"'Sir,' replied the Devil, politely, stopping his cart, 'we are the actors of the company of the Evil Spirit. This morning, which is the octave of Corpus Christi, we have represented the play of the Empire of Death. This young man played Death, and this one an Angel. This woman, who is the wife of the author of the comedy, is the Queen. Over there is one who played the part of an Emperor, and the other man that of a Soldier. As to myself, I am the Devil, at your service, and one of the principal actors.'"
Death and the Cripple.
For centuries the comedy of Death was a standard play at high festivals, the main interest being the rude, sudden interruption of human lives and joys and schemes by the grim messenger. Art adopted the theme, and the Dance of Death began to figure among the decorations of ecclesiastical structures and on the vellum of illuminated prayer-books. No sculptor but executed his Dance of Death; no painter but tried his skill upon it; and by whomsoever the subject was treated, the element of humor was seldom wanting.
So numerous are the pictures and series of pictures usually styled Dances of Death, that a descriptive catalogue of them would fill the space assigned to this chapter; and the literature to which they have given rise forms an important class of the works relating to the Middle Ages. Two phases of the subject were especially attractive to artists. One was the impartiality of Death, noted by Horace in the familiar passage; and the other the incongruity between the summons to depart and the condition of the person summoned. When these two aspects of the subject had become hackneyed, artists pleased themselves sometimes with a treatment precisely the opposite, and represented Death dancing gayly away with the most battered, ancient, and forlorn of human kind, who had least reason to love life, but did not the less shrink from the skeleton's icy touch. Every one feels the comic absurdity of gay and sprightly Death hurrying off to the tomb a cripple as dilapidated as the one in the picture above. In another engraving we see Death, with exaggerated courtesy, handing to an open tomb an extremely old man just able to totter.
