In the East, where, in our travels, we have sometimes the surprise of finding ancient customs still living {221} which we can at home only study in books, the fashion for buffoons and mimics survives, and even remains the great distraction of princes. The Bey of Tunis, when I was there years ago, had fools to amuse him in the evening, who insulted and diverted him by the contrast between their permitted insolence and his real power. Among the rich Moslem women of the same city, few of whom could read, the monotony of days spent by them till death came under the shadow of the same walls, behind the same gratings, was broken by the tales of the female fool, whose duty was to enliven the harem by sallies of the strangest liberty. As for dances, they frequently consist, in the East, in performances similar to that of Salome, such as shown in our manuscripts. Women dancing head downwards constantly appear in Persian pictures; several examples may be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the same subject often occurs on the valuable pencil-cases formerly made with so much taste and art in Persia. If our ancestors of the fourteenth century could enjoy such pleasures, no wonder that moralists declared more and more openly against both minstrels and mimics and ranked them with those rogues and vagabonds denounced as a public danger by parliament. As years pass the discredit grows. In the sixteenth century Philip Stubbes saw in minstrels the personification of all vices, and he justified in bitter words his contempt for “suche drunken sockets and bawdye parasits as range the cuntreyes, ryming and singing of uncleane, corrupt and filthie songes in tavernes, ale-houses, innes, and other publique assemblies.” Their life is like the shameful songs of which their heads are full, and they are the origin of all abominations; the more dangerous because their number is so great: “Every towne, citie, and countrey is full of these minstrelles to pype up a dance to the devill: but of dyvines, so few there be as they maye hardly be seene. {222} “But some of them will reply, and say, What, sir! we have lycences from justices of peace to pype and use our minstralsie to our best commoditie. Cursed be those lycences which lycence any man to get his lyving with the destruction of many thousands! “But have you a lycence from the archjustice of peace, Christe Jesus? If you have not . . . than may you, as rogues, extravagantes, and straglers from the heavenlye country, be arrested of the high justice of peace, Christ Jesus, and be punished with eternall death, notwithstanding your pretensed licences of earthly men.”[298]