actor who could growl his part most demoniacally won the applause of the men and the smiles of the women.
The relics of this age are yet to be seen in Europe. Many an ancient minster or chapel has its images over the door-way carved in stone, bedaubed in canvas, or illuminated in missal, representing the laughing prince of perdition. I remember one in Fribourg, Switzerland, where the devil appears with the head of a hog, and a basketful of sinners at his back. He weighs them in the scales, and while good angels in vain strive to make the beam kick in favor of heaven, the satellites of sin strive on the other side, and that successfully. When weighed, they are shovelled into a seething caldron, where grinning imps stir them into a hotch-potch of slab hell-broth, with an industry worthy of a better cause, and an indelicacy which would shock a Parisian cuisine.
The coarseness of the dark ages disappeared, and with it this ribald devil. But in cultivated minds there still lingered a terrible form of evil. It was a reality even as late as Luther—a reality at which the burly reformer hurled his ink-stand in the Wartburg. In the fourteenth century, hell and purgatory were realities, ever present to the eye of the Christian. The vices and follies of men had run riot with a prodigality which called for a retribution; and the stern justice of Dante's intellect created an Inferno, where, with dreadful distinctness, grim and gibbering fiends should add terror to the torments of the damned. At this time learning was just opening its way out of the cloister to the sun-shine; statuary began its mission by carving a Madonna or a crucifix; painting colored a missal, as initiatory to the frescoes which now glorify the domes of the Italian 'basilicas; eloquence, waiting its Luther and Erasmus, spake in panegyric of some favorite saint; and history toyed at legends preparatory to her more serious duties: then arose Dante, and with the same power with which he dared to scale a heaven of bliss, descended to the abodes of despair.
Yet even his retributive morality, elevated for his age, partakes somewhat of its coarseness. In his description of Satan he seems to have been stricken dumb by the dread apparition, so that his pen trembles in view of its awful office. The few etchings of Satan
