proving from it the infallibility which it no less assumed in the middle ages than it does this moment. It is doubtful if those who took part in the apotheosis of the ass, and celebrated it by organ, fife, and drum, could be called irreverent or impious, whatever may be laid to the charge of those who celebrated the “Madman’s Day.” It was in the very nature of things that the festivals of the gloomy middle ages should take this frightful form of triviality; and the Church, when regarded in the light of a human institution, had no alternative but to join in them to a greater or lesser extent, when regarded from their own point of view. The people who got them up were by no means impious. They built in the very midst of their buffooneries those grand cathedrals which overpower the soul with a sense of the sublime. And no sooner had they gone through the orgies of “unreason,” than they were clad in hair-cloth, and upon their knees, beating their breasts, and exclaiming “Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” with a depth of contrition that none of us can understand. There was nothing sacrilegious in the laughter which re-echoed so wildly through the solemn naves of the churches which they alone knew how to build. An old manuscript sees only piety in it. This manuscript was written a short time previous to “The Scandalous Chronicle,” and says, in speaking of the Festival of the Ass, then celebrated annually with great pomp at Blois and Orleans, “The devout burghers made buffoons of themselves to amuse the Child-God; their gaiety was but a touching homage to Him, for in the Asses’ Feast they only strove to glorify the animal who lent his manger to the Virgin-Mother, or in the frosty nights of Christmas warmed with his breath the Holy Family, and a little later carried the Lord in triumph to Jerusalem.”
Such were the ideas of the middle ages about what will doubtless shock many who read about them. Owing to them the ox was almost deified in very many cities and provinces of Europe, because he was the humble witness of the Lord’s nativity.
The Church sometimes countenanced these follies, sometimes tolerated them, and occasionally lifted up her voice against them. Bishops, councils, and synods, expostulated about the terrible excesses which a “Christmas of the olden time” brought along with it. But whether the faithful, like the friar already cited, thought or not that the Holy Family wanted the society of brutes instead of saints, they went on as riotously as ever, till, with the aid of printing, the gradual transformation of ages did its work. The Parliament of Paris and the Sorbonne stood up gravely against what they thought the prudery of the bishops. “Our predecessors,” said a circular issued by the latter, “who were wise and prudent men, permitted this fête (the Madmen’s). Let us live as they have lived, and do as they have done. We don’t do these things seriously, but for mirth, and to divert ourselves, so that the folly that is natural to us, and which was born in us, may find vent and disgorge itself at least once a year. The wine-barrel would burst, were the plugs not taken out from time to time. We are old wine-barrels, badly hooped, which the fermenting wine of too much wisdom would break to fragments, if we were to allow it always to be kept boiling by a continual devotion at Divine service. We must therefore give vent to it and let in air, for fear that it may run about the ground, to the profit of none and the loss of many. The fathers teach us that our guardian angels never leave us so long as we are laughing; and even though it be for fear the Devil should then take possession of us, no harm can befall us so long as we are under their immediate protection—a reason for believing that buffooneries do not endanger our salvation.”
The Parliament of Paris long defended its favourite festival, which few are aware was, about the tenth century, to introduce into Europe the licensed fool or jester. That prominent personage in mediæval pageants at first made his appearance in the Church to bandy jests with the Pope of Unreason. It was the council of the Sorbonne that first banished him from the Church. Driven from it by that grave and learned body, he became a laic. But he did not so well succeed among the French as among the English in a lay capacity, and finally disappeared in the stiff but gallant century of Louis Quatorze, who was the last King of France that ever had a licensed jester to amuse him.
E. J.
A JOURNEY UNDERGROUND.
In the “Voyages Imaginaires de Milord Céton,” written about the year 1780, by the ingenious Marie-Anne de Roumier, we have an account of his lordship’s journey to the moon and six other planets. The lunatics, his lordship finds, are given up to many light and frivolous diversions, as would become the people of so changeable a planet. In Mercury we meet with misers, and those given to hiding and hoarding useless heaps of gold. In Mars the people think of nothing but going to war, and snatching by conquest the lands of others. In Venus, on the contrary, we have a Paphian court and inhabitants, who delight in compliments, courtship, and what is termed the “gentle passion.” In Saturn we find the good old Saturian times restored; times which gentlemen of a certain age longed for in the days of Virgil and Horace. In the Sun we meet with people deeply immersed in the pursuits of science and the cultivation of “pure reason.” Whilst in Jupiter everybody cultivates his own conceit and pride, each one thinking himself, in the true Jovian method, considerably better off than his neighbour.
This is tolerable fooling, indeed, and might have been written in our own days by the Prophet Zadkiel, or any one who had fancy enough to adapt the old tales of the stars to the assumed characters assigned them by the astrologers. But neither Milord Céton, nor his imaginative authoress, ever dreamt of describing a voyage such as we have realised to-day, under the surface of the earth, beneath the largest city in the world, whilst thousands, nay millions, of its inhabitants were pursuing their avocations over our heads.
Of course everybody will at once see that this talk about Milord Céton and his imaginary
