Though the works of Belgian writers and artists of the period are very remarkable, they are somewhat misleading if we want to form an accurate idea of social life in the fifteenth century. Neither the _Libri Teutonici_, published by Ruysbroeck's followers, nor the great paintings of the brothers Van Eyck, Van der Weyden and Memling, suggest for one moment the laxity of morals prevalent at the time and revealed by the writers of the Chronicles. The number of illegitimate births was extraordinarily high, the example being set by the dukes themselves, Philip the Good alone being responsible for eighteen bastards and Jean de Heinsberg, Bishop of Liege, for nearly as many. It must be pointed out, however, that the illegitimate character of their birth did not stand in the way of many prominent men of the time, such as the Chancellor Rolin, the Dean of St. Donatian of Bruges, the great financier Pierre Bladelin, the Bishop of Tournai and many high officials. All these had, of course, received their letters of legitimation. Numerous edicts made by the dukes were unable to check gambling, prostitution and prodigality. The scant effect of the regulations relating to the latter may be easily understood when we read that, on the occasion of the marriage of Margaret of York to Charles the Bold, Belgian artists and artisans were ordered to prepare and to decorate a large wooden house which was subsequently transported by water from Brussels to Bruges. In a tower 41 feet high attached to this house, the noble company invited to the ceremony witnessed the movements and heard the cries of a number of mechanical animals, monkeys, wolves and boars, while a whale 60 feet long moved around the hall together with elephants, amid thirty large trees, a fountain of crystal and a pelican "spouting hippocras from his beak." The fact is that the situation in the Netherlands, in the second half of the fifteenth century, was very much the same as that in Florence at the same time, the people being swayed between an exuberant enjoyment of life and a severe asceticism. There are many points of contact between Charles the Bold and Lorenzo the Magnificent, and no figure comes closer to Savonarola than that of the Carthusian, Thomas Conecte, who stirred public feeling to such a pitch that the people crowding to listen to his fiery speeches, in market-places, threw into the braziers burning before his platform all the instruments of their worldly life--chessboards, cards, dice, skittles, silks and jewels.