The sovereigns were always anxious to conciliate these influential guilds by becoming members of them in person.  Like the players, the Rhetoricians were the brief abstract and chronicle of the time, and neither prince nor private person desired their ill report.  It had, indeed, been Philip’s intention to convert them into engines for the arbitrary purposes of his house, but fortunately the publicly organized societies were not the only chambers.  On the contrary, the unchartered guilds were the moat numerous and influential.  They exercised a vast influence upon the progress of the religious reformation, and the subsequent revolt of the Netherlands.  They ridiculed, with their farces and their satires, the vices of the clergy.  They dramatized tyranny for public execration.  It was also not surprising, that among the leaders of the wild anabaptists who disgraced the great revolution in church and state by their hideous antics, should be found many who, like David of Delft, John of Leyden, and others, had been members of rhetorical chambers.  The genius for mummery and theatrical exhibitions, transplanted from its sphere, and exerting itself for purposes of fraud and licentiousness, was as baleful in its effects as it was healthy in its original manifestations.  Such exhibitions were but the excrescences of a system which had borne good fruit.  These literary guilds befitted and denoted a people which was alive, a people which had neither sunk to sleep in the lap of material prosperity, nor abased itself in the sty of ignorance and political servitude.  The spirit of liberty pervaded these rude but not illiterate assemblies, and her fair proportions were distinctly visible, even through the somewhat grotesque garb which she thus assumed.

The great leading recreations which these chambers afforded to themselves and the public, were the periodic jubilees which they celebrated in various capital cities.  All the guilds of rhetoric throughout the Netherlands were then invited to partake and to compete in magnificent processions, brilliant costumes, living pictures, charades, and other animated, glittering groups, and in trials of dramatic and poetic skill, all arranged under the superintendence of the particular association which, in the preceding year, had borne away the prize.  Such jubilees were called “Land jewels.”

From the amusements of a people may be gathered much that is necessary for a proper estimation of its character.  No unfavorable opinion can be formed as to the culture of a nation, whose weavers, smiths, gardeners, and traders, found the favorite amusement of their holidays in composing and enacting tragedies or farces, reciting their own verses, or in personifying moral and esthetic sentiments by ingeniously-arranged groups, or gorgeous habiliments.  The cramoisy velvets and yellow satin doublets of the court, the gold-brocaded mantles of priests and princes are often but vulgar drapery of little historic worth.  Such costumes thrown around