The teachers of the new sects were unwittingly preparing the people for the coming of printing by enforcing the duty of more careful reading and study of the Holy Scriptures. In the year 1380, Wickliffe completed a translation in English of the entire Bible. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, copies of a translation of the Scriptures in Provençal French, made by or under the direction of Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, and the founder of the Waldenses, were circulated in Burgundy and upon the borders of the Rhine. There were many new translations, or at least of the gospels and psalms, in other European languages.[95] Men and women [p182] gathered together in secret places to hear them read.[96] The timid and irresolute, alienated from the church, and deterred from frequenting prohibited associations, set up altars of the most unpretentious character within their own houses. Too poor to buy books, and perhaps too ignorant to read them, they sought from the formschneiders and image-makers the emblems they needed as visible symbols of their faith. In this hungering after the instruction or consolation afforded by religious pictures, we see the origin of the block-books. A growing fondness for pictures is a marked peculiarity in the intellectual development of the age. It was not confined to the buyers of printed images: it was manifested in the paintings on the walls and windows of magnificent churches, in the pictorial playing cards then in the hands of all people, gentle and simple, and more than all in the fearful pictures of the _Dance of Death_ upon the walls of convents, in the arcades of burying-grounds, and in market-places and town halls. In these hideous paintings, the saint saw the necessity of preparation for death; the sinner interpreted them as an assertion of the equality of all men and the final punishment of the [p184] unjust. In the inexorable impartiality of the grinning and stalking skeleton who rudely dragged away the resisting noble and protesting priest, there was a ghastly irony which was keenly appreciated even by the illiterate. [Illustration: The Abbot. Death despoils the Abbot of his mitre and crozier, and drags him away. The Abbot resists, and is about to throw his breviary at his adversary. The Mendicant Friar. He is about to enter his convent with his money-box and wallet, when Death seizes him by the cowl, and compels him to leave the world. The Preacher. Death, with a stole about his neck, stands behind the Preacher, and holds a jaw-bone over his head, intimating that he is the more forcible teacher. The Knight. After escaping perils in numerous combats, the Knight ineffectually resists the onset of Death, and is vanquished by one thrust of the spear. Holbein’s Illustrations of the Dance of Death. [From Douce.]]