234
citizens rivalled their monarchs in magnificence. The burghers of Ghent and Bruges and Antwerp shone, on these occasions, in the gaudy pomp of princely patricians. All were invited to take part and dispute the prizes awarded by fair hands.
It can scarcely be expected that these guilds, composed in many cases of mechanics, should give rise to works of the highest order of merit. Their dramatic representations were rather gorgeous than tasteful, their attempts at wit little better than buffoonery, their humor mere personal vituperation. Yet even in matters of taste they are not much inferior to the then more pretentious academies of other lands. It was an age of long religious dramas, of tortured rhymes and impossible metres, when strange and new versification imported from France found favor among a people whose silks and linens and rich tapestries were destined to reach a wider circulation than all the poetical effusions of their guilds, the "Lily," the "Violet," and the "Jesus with the Balsam Flower."
It was Philip the Fair who, wishing to centralize the scattered efforts of these societies, established at Malines, in 1493, a sovereign chamber, of which he appointed his chaplain, Pierre Aelters, sovereign prince. With an admixture of religion, in accordance with the spirit of the Middle Ages, the sacred number was fifteen. There were fifteen members. Fifteen young girls were to form part of it, in honor of the fifteen joys of Mary. Fifteen youths were instructed in the art of rhetoric, and the assemblies were held fifteen times a year. Charles V. was the last chief of this assembly, which had previously been removed to Ghent. In 1577 it greeted the arrival of the Prince of Orange, but this was its last sign of vitality.
The Chambers of Rhetoric reached their climax in a time of fermentation. The impatience, the feeling of uneasiness and restraint, is felt in the drama of these days, which was wholly under the control of the Chambers. The stage, that "mirror of the times," is often