unmixed with envy, "I thought myself the only queen here; but I see six hundred others who appear more so than I." The court of Phillip the Good seemed to carry magnificence and splendor to their greatest possible height. The dresses of both men and women at this chivalric epoch were of almost incredible expense. Velvet, satin, gold, and precious stones seemed the ordinary materials for the dress of either sex; while the very housings of the horses sparkled with brilliants and cost immense sums. This absurd extravagance was carried so far that Charles V. found himself forced at length to proclaim sumptuary laws for its repression. The style of the banquets given on grand occasions was regulated on a scale of almost puerile splendor. The Banquet of Vows given at Lille, in the year 1453, and so called from the obligations entered into by some of the nobles to accompany Philip in a new crusade against the infidels, showed a succession of costly fooleries, most amusing in the detail given by an eye-witness (Olivier de la Marche), the minutest of the chroniclers, but unluckily too long to find a place in our pages. Such excessive luxury naturally led to great corruption of manners and the commission of terrible crimes. During the reign of Philip de Male, there were committed in the city of Ghent and its outskirts, in less than a year, above fourteen hundred murders in gambling-houses and other resorts of debauchery. As early as the tenth century, the petty sovereigns established on the ruins of the empire of Charlemagne began the independent coining of money; and the various provinces were during the rest of this epoch inundated with a most embarrassing variety of gold, silver, and copper. Even in ages of comparative darkness, literature made feeble efforts to burst through the entangled weeds of superstition, ignorance, and war. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, history was greatly cultivated; and Froissart, Monstrelet, Olivier de la Marche, and Philip de Comines, gave to their chronicles and memoirs a charm of style since their days almost unrivalled. Poetry began to be followed with success in the Netherlands, in the Dutch, Flemish, and French languages; and even before the institution of the Floral Games in France, Belgium possessed its chambers of rhetoric (_rederykkamers_) which labored to keep alive the sacred flame of poetry with more zeal than success. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these societies were established in almost every burgh of Flanders and Brabant; the principal towns possessing several at once.