"_Elsie._ Ah, that is sad! And yet perhaps 'tis best That she should die with all the sunshine on her And all the benedictions of the morning, Before this affluence of golden light Shall fade into a cold and clouded gray, Then into darkness! "_Prince._ Under it is written, 'Nothing but death shall separate thee and me!' "_Elsie._ And what is this that follows close upon it? "_Prince._ Death playing on a dulcimer." And so the lovers converse on the bridge, all covered from end to end with these caricatures of human existence, until the girl hurries with affright from what she calls "this great picture-gallery of death." Tournaments were among the usual subjects of caricature during the century or two preceding the Reformation. Some specimens have already been given from the illuminated prayer-books (pp. 44, 46). The device, however, seldom rises above the ancient one of investing animals with the gifts and qualities of men. Monkeys mounted upon the backs of dogs tilt at one another with long lances, or monsters utterly nondescript charge upon other monsters more ridiculous than themselves. All the ordinary foibles of human nature received attention. These never change. There are always gluttons, misers, and spendthrifts. There are always weak men and vain women. There are always husbands whose wives deceive and worry them, as there are always wives whom husbands worry and deceive; and the artists of the Middle Ages, in their own direct rude fashion, turned both into caricature. The mere list of subjects treated in Brandt's "Ship of Fools," written when Luther was a school-boy, shows us that men were men and women were women in 1490. That quaint reformer of manners dealt mild rebuke to men who gathered great store of books and put them to no good use; to women who were ever changing the fashion of their dress; to men who began to build without counting the cost; to "great borrowers and slack payers;" to fools "who will serve two lords both together;" to them who correct others while themselves are "culpable in the same fault;" to "fools who can not keep secret their own counsel;" to people who believe in "predestinacyon;" to men who attend closely to other people's business, leaving their own undone; to "old folks that give example of vice to youth;" and so on through the long catalogue of human follies. His homely and wise ditties are illustrated by pictures of curious simplicity. Observe the one subjoined, in which "a foule" is weighing the transitory things of this world against things everlasting, one being represented by a scale full of castles and towers, and the other by a scale full of stars--the earthly castles outweighing the heavenly bodies in the balance of this "foule." [Illustration: Heaven and Earth weighed in the Balance. (From "The Ship of Fools.")]