career they gave theatrical exhibitions.  “King Herod and his Deeds” was enacted in the cathedral at Utrecht in 1418.  The associations spread with great celerity throughout the Netherlands, and, as they were all connected with each other, and in habits of periodical intercourse, these humble links of literature were of great value in drawing the people of the provinces into closer union.  They became, likewise, important political engines.  As early as the time of Philip the Good, their songs and lampoons became so offensive to the arbitrary notions of the Burgundian government, as to cause the societies to be prohibited.  It was, however, out of the sovereign’s power permanently to suppress institutions, which already partook of the character of the modern periodical press combined with functions resembling the show and licence of the Athenian drama.  Viewed from the stand-point of literary criticism their productions were not very commendable in taste, conception, or execution.  To torture the Muses to madness, to wire-draw poetry through inextricable coils of difficult rhymes and impossible measures; to hammer one golden grain of wit into a sheet of infinite platitude, with frightful ingenuity to construct ponderous anagrams and preternatural acrostics, to dazzle the vulgar eye with tawdry costumes, and to tickle the vulgar ear with virulent personalities, were tendencies which perhaps smacked of the hammer, the yard-stick and the pincers, and gave sufficient proof, had proof been necessary, that literature is not one of the mechanical arts, and that poetry can not be manufactured to a profit by joint stock companies.  Yet, if the style of these lucubrations was often depraved, the artisans rarely received a better example from the literary institutions above them.  It was not for guilds of mechanics to give the tone to literature, nor were their efforts in more execrable taste than the emanations from the pedants of Louvain.  The “Rhetoricians” are not responsible for all the bad taste of their generation.  The gravest historians of the Netherlands often relieved their elephantine labors by the most asinine gambols, and it was not to be expected that these bustling weavers and cutlers should excel their literary superiors in taste or elegance.

Philip the Fair enrolled himself as a member in one of these societies.  It may easily be inferred, therefore, that they had already become bodies of recognized importance.  The rhetorical chambers existed in the most obscure villages.  The number of yards of Flemish poetry annually manufactured and consumed throughout the provinces almost exceed belief.  The societies had regular constitutions.  Their presiding officers were called kings, princes, captains, archdeacons, or rejoiced in similar high-sounding names.  Each chamber had its treasurer, its buffoon, and its standard-bearer for public processions.  Each had its peculiar title or blazon, as the Lily, the Marigold, or the Violet, with an appropriate motto.  By the year 1493, the associations had become so important, that Philip the Fair summoned them all to a general assembly at Mechlin.  Here they were organized, and formally incorporated under the general supervision of an upper or mother-society of Rhetoric, consisting of fifteen members, and called by the title of “Jesus with the balsam flower.”