rally preferred the public rejoicings, which cost them nothing.
They were particularly fond of illuminations and fireworks, which are of
much later origin than the invention of gunpowder; although the Saracens,
at the time of the Crusades, used a Greek fire for illuminations, which
considerably alarmed the Crusaders when they first witnessed its effects.
Regular fireworks appear to have been invented in Italy, where the
pyrotechnic art has retained its superiority to this day, and where the
inhabitants are as enthusiastic as ever for this sort of amusement, and
consider it, in fact, inseparable from every religious, private, or public
festival. This Italian invention was first introduced into the Low
Countries by the Spaniards, where it found many admirers, and it made its
appearance in France with the Italian artists who established themselves
in that country in the reigns of Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I.
Fireworks could not fail to be attractive at the Court of the Valois, to
which Catherine de Medicis had introduced the manners and customs of
Italy. The French, who up to that time had only been accustomed to the
illuminations of St. John's Day and of the first Sunday in Lent, received
those fireworks with great enthusiasm, and they soon became a regular part
of the programme for public festivals (Fig. 176).

[Illustration: Fig. 176.--Fireworks on the Water, with an Imitation of a
Naval Combat.--Fac-simile of an Engraving on Copper of the "Pyrotechnie"
of Hanzelet le Lorrain: 4to (Pont-a-Mousson, 1630).]

We have hitherto only described the sports engaged in for the amusement of
the spectators; we have still to describe those in which the actors took
greater pleasure than even the spectators themselves. These were specially
the games of strength and skill as well as dancing, with a notice of which
we shall conclude this chapter. There were, besides, the various games of
chance and the games of fun and humour. Most of the bourgeois and the
villagers played a variety of games of agility, many of which have
descended to our times, and are still to be found at our schools and
colleges. Wrestling, running races, the game of bars, high and wide
jumping, leap-frog, blind-man's buff, games of ball of all sorts,
gymnastics, and all exercises which strengthened the body or added to the
suppleness of the limbs, were long in use among the youth of the nobility
(Figs. 177 and 178). The Lord of Fleuranges, in his memoirs