1826.] Death's Doings. ATT 
dering machinery of the heathen Hades. Aristophanes, before him, had no scruple 
of bringing them on the stage, in farces, in which the wildest poetry is mixed with 
the grossest buffoonery ; as, for instance, in his “ Frogs.” This peculiar way 
of laughing at the hell of the heathens took its rise in the spirit of parody. As 
Homer had sent Ulysses.on a visit to hell, and there, with wonderful power of 
language—with terrible felicity of imaginative description—ventured to paint 
the secrets of the invisible world, these ideas were of course familiar to all 
Greece, and being familiar, were naturally the prey of parody. In Aristophanes 
aud Lucian, we meet no accession to the company which Homer has stationed 
in the world below. But, in Lucian’s hands, it went far beyond mere parody ; 
and haying enriched it with all the force of his wit, he has decidedly given the 
impress to almost all fictitious writing of this nature. Of all the ancients, he, 
in style and arrangement of his ideas, seems the most to have resembled the 
modern novelists; and those who have not considered it, would be amazed to 
find how much of our modern literature is drawn from his pages. Rabelais has 
taken from him the visit of Epistemon to hell; and the “ Visions” of Quevedo, 
and Swift’s “ Glubdubdrib,” are entirely suggested by him. In many minor 
authors and productions also, it would not be difficult to trace his hand. ° 
In the middle ages, the custom of representing mysteries—in which, of course, 
the Passion of our Saviour afforded an occasion, or rather indeed imposed the 
necessity of representing the spiritual agents of the other world on the stage— 
made a contemplation of such subjects, in a dramatic point of view, familiar ; 
and from the nature of the drama in general, but more particularly of the rude 
drama in those days, it was to be expected that they should occasionally be put 
into a ludicrous position. Accordingly, we find the mysteries full of jests, and 
jests occasionally of such a nature as to border on the blasphemous, The 
ludicrous passed from the drama into our incipient literature, and, in due 
course of time, produced satire. Hence we derive the “Ship of Fools” of 
Alexander Barclay, and similar compositions. These, in process of time, 
were tinctured by a Lucianic spirit, and began to belong to the higher literature ; 
but even in the rudest days we had such pictures. In Pearce Plowman there is 
a procession of death, which appears to have afforded hints even to Milton: 
“* Age the hoar he was in the vaward, 
And bore the banner before death, by right he it claimed,”— 
seems to be the original of, 
sis: eles . * That proud honour claimed 
Azazel as his right,” &c. ; 
and the dreadfully minute description of the lazar-house, in the eleventh book 
of “ Paradise Lost,” also finds a prototype in Pearce Plowman. 
The monks amused themselves with illuminating their missals with figures, of 
which the originals were, in many respects, drawn from the mysteries much more 
than from the Scriptures—just as we should be inclined to paint Macbeth and 
his wife from the figures that they make on our stage, rather than from the 
description in Boéthius or Buchanan. Their grotesque wood-work, of which 
so much abounds every where, was also frequently composed of processional 
groups, in which death and devils bore a very prominent part. From such 
sources as these Holbein, it is probable, drew his notions, which he has immor- 
talized in his‘ Dance of Death.” It would be merely waste of time to criticize that 
strange production, which has so often undergone already the careful attention of 
so many critics, inso many languages. Numerous have been the imitations which 
it has since called forth, in almost every country in Europe. In our own country 
and times, Combe, the author of Doctor Syntax, supplied verses to pictures by 
Rowlandson ; and thus between them they produced a “ Dance of Death.” Of 
this work it is impossible to speak in terms of favour, although it had a certain 
popularity. Combe and Rowlandson had no communication with one another ; 
and the poet laboured away at so much per foot, to illustrate what he imagined 
might have been the ideas of the artist. Nor was either of the men well qua- 
lified for producing a powerful, or even a very amusing work, under such cir- 
