It is not certain, however, that the artist had any comic intention in engraving this picture of retributive justice, with which the children of former ages were so familiar. It was a standard subject. The troops of Flemish carvers who roamed over Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, offering their services wherever a church was to be decorated, carried with them port-folios of stock subjects, of which this was one. Other carvings are unmistakable caricatures: a monk caught making love to a nun, a wife beating her husband, an aged philosopher ridden by a woman, monkeys wearing bishops' mitres, barbers drawing teeth in ludicrous attitudes, and others less describable. In the huge cathedral of English Winchester, which abounds in curious relics of the Middle Ages, there is a series of painted panels in the chapel of Our Lady, one of which is an evident caricature of the devil. He is having his portrait painted, and the Virgin Mary is near the artist, urging him to paint him blacker and uglier than usual. The devil does not like this, and wears an expression similar to that of a rogue in a modern police station who objects to being photographed. Often, however, in these old pictures the devil is master of the situation, and exhibits contempt for his adversaries in indecorous ways. If we turn from the sacred edifices to the sacred books used in them--those richly illuminated missals, the books of "Hours," the psalters, and other works of devotion--we are amazed beyond expression to discover upon their brilliant pages a similar taste in ornamentation. The school scene on the previous page, in which monkey-headed children are playing school, dates back to the thirteenth century. Burlesque tournaments, in the same taste, often figure in the prayer-books among representations of the Madonna, the crucifixion, and scenes in the lives of the patriarchs. The gallant hare tilts at the fierce cock of the barn-yard, or sly Reynard parries the thrust of the clumsy bear. [Illustration: From a Manuscript Mass-book of the Fourteenth Century.] One of the most curious relics of those religious centuries is a French prayer-book preserved in the British Museum, where it was discovered and described by Mr. Malcolm, one of the first persons who ever attempted to elucidate the subject of caricature. Besides the "Hours of the Blessed Virgin," it contains various prayers and collects, the office for the dead, and some psalms, all in Latin. It is illustrated by several brilliantly colored, well-drawn, but most grotesque and incomprehensible figures, designed, as has been conjectured, to "expose the wicked and inordinate lives of the clergy, who were hated by the manuscript writers as taking away much of their business." This was the explanation given of these remarkable pictures to the trustees of the Museum by the collector of whom they bought the volume. Several of them are submitted to the reader's ingenuity on the following page.