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."