wilight of their
cathedrals, and their "pale cloisters," the most revolting emblems of
death. They startled the traveller on the bridge; they stared on the
sinner in the carvings of his table and chair; the spectre moved in the
hangings of the apartment; it stood in the niche, and was the picture
of their sitting-room; it was worn in their rings, while the illuminator
shaded the bony phantom in the margins of their "Horae," their primers,
and their breviaries. Their barbarous taste perceived no absurdity in
giving action to a heap of dry bones, which could only keep together in
a state of immovability and repose; nor that it was burlesquing the
awful idea of the resurrection, by exhibiting the incorruptible spirit
under the unnatural and ludicrous figure of mortality drawn out of the
corruption of the grave.

An anecdote of these monkish times has been preserved by old Gerard
Leigh; and as old stories are best set off by old words, Gerard
speaketh! "The great Maximilian the emperor came to a monastery in High
Almaine (Germany), the monks whereof had caused to be curiously painted
the charnel of a man, which they termed--Death! When that well-learned
emperor had beholden it awhile, he called unto him his painter,
commanding to blot the skeleton out, and to paint therein the image
of--a fool. Wherewith the abbot, humbly beseeching him to the contrary,
said 'It was a good remembrance!'--'Nay,' quoth the emperor, 'as vermin
that annoyeth man's body cometh unlooked for, so doth death, which here
is but a fained image, and life is a certain thing, if we know to
deserve it.'"[138] The original mind of Maximilian the Great is
characterized by this curious story of converting our emblem of death
into a parti-coloured fool; and such satirical allusions to the folly of
those who persisted in their notion of the skeleton were not unusual
with the artists of those times; we find the figure of a fool sitting
with some drollery between the legs of one of these skeletons.[139]

This story is associated with an important fact. After they had
successfully terrified the people with their charnel-house figure, a
reaction in the public feelings occurred, for the skeleton was now
employed as a medium to convey the most facetious, satirical, and
burlesque notions of human life. Death, which had so long harassed their
imaginations, suddenly changed into a theme fertile in coarse humour.
The Italians were too long accustomed to the study of th