With an admixture of religion, in accordance with
the spirit of the Middle Ages, the sacred number was fifteen. There
were fifteen members. Fifteen young girls were to form part of it, in
honor of the fifteen joys of Mary. Fifteen youths were instructed in
the art of rhetoric, and the assemblies were held fifteen times a
year. Charles V. was the last chief of this assembly, which had
previously been removed to Ghent. In 1577 it greeted the arrival of
the Prince of Orange, but this was its last sign of vitality.
The Chambers of Rhetoric reached their climax in a time of
fermentation. The impatience, the feeling of uneasiness and restraint,
is felt in the drama of these days, which was wholly under the control
of the Chambers. The stage, that "mirror of the times," is often the
first manifestation of the unquiet heaving and subsequent up-bubbling
in the fluid compost of the mass that constitutes a nation. When
freely developed, it is the pulse-beat of the people. And so,
throughout the Netherlands, at the end of the fifteenth century and
the beginning of the sixteenth, we find the allegorical drama giving
way to more definite and direct personations. Those cold
representations of vices and virtues, of vice in its nakedness, such
as to render the reading, when not absolutely tedious, distasteful, to
say the least, to our modern ideas,--all such aimless productions were
giving way to the conscious expression of satire. Diatribes against
prevalent abuses, personal invectives scarcely veiled, were fast
becoming the order of the day.
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