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.