It is difficult to look at this picture without feeling that the artist must have been alive to the humors of the situation. It is, however, the opinion of students of these quaint relics that the authors of such designs honestly intended to excite horror, not hilarity. Queen Mary probably saw in this picture, as she turned the page of her sumptuous psalter, an argument to inflame her bloody zeal for the ancient faith. In the writings of some of the early fathers we observe the same appearance of joyous exultation at the sufferings of the lost, if not a sense of the comic absurdity of their doom. Readers may remember the passage from Tertullian (A.D. 200) quoted so effectively by Gibbon: "You are fond of all spectacles," exclaims this truly ferocious Christian; "expect the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe. How shall I rejoice, how laugh, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs and fancied gods groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates who persecuted the name of the Lord liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers--" [Illustration: Devils seizing their Prey. (Bas-relief on the Portal of a Church at Troyes.)] This is assuredly not the utterance of compassion, but rather of the fierce delight of an unregenerate Roman, when at the amphitheatre he doomed a rival's defeated gladiator to death by pointing downward with his thumb. In a similar spirit such pictures were conceived as the one given above. The sculptor, it is apparent, is "with" the adversary of mankind in the present case. Kings and bishops carried things with a high hand during their mortal career, but the devils have them at last with a rope round their necks, crown and mitre notwithstanding!