magistrates ordered the gates to be kept closed in the morning till long
after the usual hour. It was of no avail. Bolts and bars were but small
impediments to enthusiasts who had travelled so many miles on foot or
horseback to listen to a sermon. They climbed the walls, swam the moat
and thronged to the place of meeting long before the doors had been
opened. When these could no longer be kept closed without a conflict,
for which the magistrates were not prepared, the whole population poured
out of the city with a single impulse. Tens of thousands were assembled
upon the field. The bulwarks were erected as usual, the guards were
posted, the necessary precautions taken. But upon this occasion, and in
that region there was but little danger to be apprehended. The multitude
of Reformers made the edicts impossible, so long as no foreign troops
were there to enforce them. The congregation was encamped and arranged
in an orderly manner. The women, of whom there were many, were placed
next the pulpit, which, upon this occasion, was formed of a couple of
spears thrust into the earth, sustaining a cross-piece, against which the
preacher might lean his back. The services commenced with the singing of
a psalm by the whole vast assemblage. Clement Marot's verses, recently
translated by Dathenus, were then new and popular. The strains of the
monarch minstrel, chanted thus in their homely but nervous mother tongue
by a multitude who had but recently learned that all the poetry and
rapture of devotion were not irrevocably coffined with a buried language,
or immured in the precincts of a church, had never produced a more
elevating effect. No anthem from the world-renowned organ in that
ancient city ever awakened more lofty emotions than did those ten
thousand human voices ringing from the grassy meadows in that fervid
midsummer noon. When all was silent again, the preacher rose; a little,
meagre man, who looked as if he might rather melt away beneath the
blazing sunshine of July, than hold the multitude enchained four
uninterrupted hours long, by the magic of his tongue. His text was the