We have in this strange, rude picture[8] a device of contemporary caricature to cast ridicule upon the movement of which Martin Luther was the conspicuous figure. It is reduced from a large wood-cut which appeared in Germany at the crisis of the lion-hearted reformer's career, the year of his appearance at the Diet of Worms, when he said to dissuading friends, "If I knew there were as many devils at Worms as there are tiles upon the houses, I would go." The intention of the artist is obvious; but, in addition to the leading purpose, he desired, as Mr. Chatto conjectures, to remind his public of the nasal drawl of the preaching friars of the time, for which they were as proverbial as the Puritans of London in Cromwell's day. Such is the poverty of human invention that the idea of this caricature has been employed several times since Luther's time--even as recently as 1873, when a London draughtsman made it serve his turn in the contentions of party politics. [Footnote 8: From "A Treatise on Wood-engraving," p. 268, by Jackson and Chatto, London, 1866.] The best humorous talent of Christendom, whether it wrought with pencil or with pen, whether it avowed or veiled its sympathy with reform, was on Luther's side. It prepared the way for his coming, co-operated with him during his life-time, carried on his work after he was gone, and continues it to the present hour. Recent investigators tell us, indeed, that the Reformation began in laughter, which the Church itself nourished and sanctioned. M. Viollet-le-Duc, author of the "Dictionnaire d'Architecture," discourses upon the gradual change which church decorators of the Middle Ages effected in the figure of the devil. Upon edifices erected before the year 1000 there are few traces of the devil, and upon those of much earlier date none at all; but from the eleventh century he "begins to play an important _rôle_," artists striving which should give him the most hideous form. No one was then audacious enough to take liberties with a being so potent, so awful, so real, the competitor and antagonist of the Almighty Lord of Heaven and Earth. But mortals must laugh, and familiarity produces its well-known effect. In the eyes of men of the world the devil became gradually less terrible and more grotesque, became occasionally ridiculous, often contemptible, sometimes silly. His tricks are met by tricks more cunning than his own; he is duped, and retires discomfited. Before Luther appeared on the scene, the painters and sculptors, not to mention the authors and poets, had made progress in reducing the devil from the grade of an antagonist of deity and arch-enemy of men to that of a cunning and amusing deceiver of simpletons. "The great devil," as the author just mentioned remarks, "sculptured over the door of the Autun Cathedral in the twelfth century is a frightful being, well designed to strike terror to unformed souls; but the young devils carved in bas-reliefs of the fifteenth century are