that he knew of three worthy heroes enchanted in a mountain,--King Arthur and his companions, Sigestab the Strong, and Ameylot the Happy,--whom he would disenchant, and arouse to a struggle against adventurers. At the festival itself a great wooden structure was presented to view, which represented a rock with an infernal opening, ravens flew out of it, devils danced busily round its summit, and scattered fire about them; at last the magician himself appeared, made his incantations, the hill opened, the knights sprang up into daylight in ancient armour, and awaited the foreign combatants, who in equally strange costume encountered them. Even before 1600, gala days, including pastoral _fetes_, were announced with a flourish by similar cartels, sometimes in verse, as, after the great war, were the common village weddings and fairs. These were especially welcome to the authorities and nobles, because in them etiquette was suspended, and many opportunities given for free pleasantry and confidential familiarity. In some courts, as at that of the Anhaltiners, the Landgrave of Hesse, and the Duke Philip of Pomerania, the nobles had opportunities of turning their attention to education, and the acquisition of knowledge; at these courts they began already to take pleasure in the possession of objects of art. The Emperor Rudolph collected the pictures of Albert Duerer, and the princes and some of the wealthy nobles around them collected rare coins, weapons, drinking-cups, and the works of the goldsmiths of Nueremberg and the cabinet makers of Augsburg. The patricians of the great Imperial cities, superior in education to the court nobility, as political agents and managers of the Imperial princes, were the purveyors of these novelties of art to the German courts and their cavaliers. It was not an unheard-of thing to find a courtier who avoided long drinking bouts, and knew how to value a conversation upon the course of the world; nay, could even compose a Latin distich, and leave to his heirs a collection of books; and it was even considered honourable among the better sort to concern themselves about their households, and to increase, as far as possible, the revenues of their property.