pares them. Even the women were hardly safe in
their company.

Sometimes a brief anecdote will stamp a character as no long
description will do. The following are typical of the manners of our
forbears:

One winter morning a stately matron was ascending the steps of the
church of St. Gudule at Brussels. They were covered with ice; she
slipped and took a precipitate and involuntary seat. In the anguish of
the moment, a single word, of mere obscenity, escaped her lips. When
the laughing bystanders, among whom was Erasmus, helped her to her
feet, she beat a hasty retreat, crimson with shame. Nowadays ladies do
not have such a vocabulary at their tongue's end.

The Spanish ambassador Enriquez de Toledo was at Rome calling on
Imperia de Cugnatis, a lady who, though of the demi-monde, lived like a
princess, cultivated letters and art, and had many poets as well as
many nobles among her friends. Her floors were carpeted with velvet
rugs, her walls hung with golden cloth, and her tables loaded with
costly bric-a-brac. The Spanish courtier suddenly turned and spat
copiously in the face of his lackey and then explained to the slightly
startled company that he chose this objective rather than soil the
splendor he saw around him. The disgusting act passed for a delicate
and successful flattery.

[Sidenote: 1538]

Among the students at Wittenberg was a certain Simon Lemchen, or
Lemnius, a lewd fellow of the baser {503} sort who published two
volumes of scurrilous epigrams bringing unfounded and nasty charges
against Luther, Melanchthon and the other Reformers and their wives.
When he fled the city before he could be arrested, Luther revenged
himself partly by a Catilinarian sermon, partly by composing, for
circulation among his friends, some verses about Lemnius in which the
scurrility and obscenity of the offending youth were well over-trumped.
One would be surprised at similar measures taken by a professor of
divinity today.

[Sidenote: Morals]

In measuring the morals of a given epoch statistics are not applicable;
or, at any rate, it is probably true that the general impression one
gets of the moral tone of any period is more trustworthy than would be
got from carefully compiled figures. And that one does get such an
impression, and a very strong one, is undeniable. Everyone has in his
mind a more or less distinct idea of the ethical standards of ancient
Athens, of Rome, of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance,