of silver whereon is emprinted the figure of the hye Lord of the cuntree." The false God that blindeth him that turneth his eyes towards him and maketh fools to bend their eyes downwards. This God by whom she hath been disfigured and defamed is Avarice. The hands behind like griffin's claws are to symbolise "Rapine, Coutteburse, and Latrosynie."

In the next pair of hands she holds a bowl for alms, or for the money she extorts through beggary, and a hook, with which she enters the house of Christ and seizes his servants. Taking their croziers and shepherds' crooks, she furnishes them with this devil's prong instead, fished up by her out of the darkness of Hell, and this hand is named Simony. In the next hands she holds a yardmeasure, purse, and scales. With the measure she deals out false lengths, with the balances she weighs false measure, and into the purse she puts the ill-won gains of her treachery, gambling, and dishonesty. Round her neck hangs a bag, and nothing that is put therein can ever come out again; all things remain there to rot.

We may here insert the following extract from the old English translation of the passage in which this apparition is described:

66

"... Disgised shrewedliche* she was... Boystows she was and wrong shapen and enbosed and clothed with an old gret bultel† clouted with cloutes of old cloth and of lether. A sak she hadde honged at hire nekke. Wel it seemed that make flight wold she nouht for she putte ther inere bras and yren and sakked it. Hire tonge

Hire

whiche she hadde‡ . . out halp hire ther to faste. tunge was mesel and foule defaced. Sixe hondes she hadde and tweyne stumpes the tweyne hondes hadden nailes of griffouns, of whiche that oon was bihynde in strangie manere.

"In oon of that oother handes she heeld a fyle as thouh she shulde fyle brideles. And a balaunce wherinne she peisede the zodiac and the sunne in gret entente to putte hem to sale. A disch in that oother hande she heeld and a poket with bred. In the fifte she hadde a crochet and *Rough, churlish.

† A bolting cloth.

‡ Gap in MSS. suppie drawen sa langue que hors traicte auoit.

upon hire hed a mawmett* shee bar which made hire eyen biholde downward. The sixte hand she hadde lenynge upon hire brokene haunche and sum time she haf it hye to hire tunge and touchede it.

"The hondes of my yivinge ben kilte and doon from here stumpest Sixe hondes i haue for to gripe with in sixe maneres for to sakke in my sak to peise me and charge me with to that ende that if i falle adoun i mowe no more ryse aygen."

*Mawmet, i.e. idol.

tie. for giving with were cut.

ICONOGRAPHY OF DEATH.

RELIGIONS do not develop suddenly and fitfully any more than physical nature in its creations. They are connected by links and chains so gradually modified that no one faith can refuse to acknowledge that which it has inherited from its predecessor. Such links are often most distinctly perceptible in the iconography of different religious systems. Thus, when Christianity had recourse to images to propagate its lessons and to awaken the popular mind to a faith in its dogmas, it endued Death with an individual existence, a language, action, form, special physiognomy. Such a form was not borrowed from the Jews, but from Græco-Latin polytheism, whose figures and plastic images it adapted to newly formed ideas. Neophytes borrowed their images of Death from Greek and Latin Art, not the grand ideal art inspired by Poetry and Philosophy, but only the crude and popular art which was confined to the reproduction of the coarse ideas of the populace, in whose imaginations all evil things were identified with spectres, larvæ, lemures, whose figures they transferred to Death.

Such images form a strong contrast to the winged Thanatos on the column of the temple of the Ephesian Artemis, now in the British Museum, which, of all the figures we have met with, best embodies the classic Greek conception of Death, and which has been thus described by Sir Frederic Burton.* "A youth faces us with long drooping wings; his head, with heavy parted hair, inclines to his left with a pathetic expression, and his left hand is raised, as if beckoning. A weighty sheathed sword hangs

* See Saturday Review, No. 897, vol. xxxv. p. 50.

by his left haunch. . . . The pathetic character [of this nude winged youthful figure] points to the new Attic school, no less than the almost feminine softness of the forms. ... The workmanship of this figure is not careful. It is a mag

nificent sketch by a practised and fearless hand; the object being the expression of the whole rather than any careful individualizing of parts.... This mysterious figure, from wings and bodily type, has been thought to represent Eros; we should venture to call it Thanatos. The attribute

held in the now destroyed right hand was probably the inverted torch.

"But it is the head which most strongly answers to the character of the genius of Death, as conceived by the Greek imagination. A dreamy sehnsucht pervades the almost sexless face; a sadness as if Death himself felt that he too was but the victim of an inexorable fate, whose behests he must execute; and the lax, unwavy hair is drawn back behind the ears as if carelessly confined there. The ambrosial locks of Erōs* are, on the contrary, curly and rippled, and hang in tresses on the shoulders, or are knotted in clusters behind the head. We think, however, that the presence of the sword decides the question, and we recall the passage in the Alkestis of Euripides, where Thanatos appears, armed with a sword, ready, as ‘Priest of the Dying,' to sever the lock from the victim sacred to Persephone":

Death." This woman will descend to the mansions of Hades; and I am advancing against her that I may perform the initiatory rites with my sword; for that man is sacred to the gods beneath the earth, the hair of whose head this sword may have hallowed."

The Etruscans have their exterminating angel, who has been designated as the Etruscan Charon. His figure is constantly shown upon funereal monuments armed with a hammer. His face is repulsive, his hair and beard jagged, serpents crown his brow, his ears are pointed like those of a satyr. He watches at the entrance to Hell, and with another genius he accompanies Death. On one sarcophagus, two genii of the spirit-world assist at the deathbed of a wife. On one side a winged genius in female form seeks to draw the dying woman towards her gently while she addresses her last words to her husband; on the other side Charon, or rather the evil angel, holding a pincers in one hand and a torch in the other, prepares to accompany the dying woman into the dominions of the Shades.†

Christians had to seek in the ancient iconology for a more fitting representative of the offspring and avenger of

*Two images of Death hardly to be distinguished from Eros are mentioned by Mr. King, one on a Roman gem, the other on a fresco in the catacomb of Prætextatus. See King's Gnostics and their Remains, p. 155. n. 2. † See Micali, Storia degli antichi popoli Italiani Atlas, pl. text, vol. iii. p. 10, lx.