shrivelled figure of skin and bones (in the mouth of a monster who is vomiting up flames), is accompanied by a snake, and has a toad in place of the conventional fig-leaf (see Fig. 40). So also, in the fifteenth-century engraving of "Death warning a Youth," by the "Meister des Amsterdamer Kabinets" (already referred to), the life-like shrivelled figure representing Death is accompanied by a toad and snake. In Part I. C. I have referred at some length to the horror-inspiring aspect of memento mori religious art, and to the ghastly spectacle of decay and putrefaction revealed in pictures by Valdes Leal, &c. A small panelpainting in the possession of Dr. Pietro Capparoni of Rome (which he has kindly allowed me to illustrate) seems to rival all others in this respect (see Fig. 41). It represents a man's head in a state of putrefaction and being "eaten by worms and coleoptera. The head rests on a closed book; 394 by the side is a winged hourglass; and above is suspended a small iron lamp, such Lucifer and his horrid crew into the mouth of a tusked monster. Still earlier the jaws of the whale were the accepted symbol of the mouth of hell. They stand for that in the tenth-century pictures which adorn the manuscript of Caedmon' (Professor H. Morley). Jonah's whale has long been an emblem of death." Cf. a late twelfth century drawing in the British Museum (Harley Roll, Y 6), representing St. Guthlac of Croyland at the mouth of Hell, receiving a whip from St. Bartholomew. Mr. H. C. Prideaux (Times Literary Supplement, London, December 13th, 1917, p. 620) suggests as a more striking phrase than Virgil's fauces Orci the words used by Lucretius (De Rerum Naturâ, i. 852), "Leti sub dentibus ipsis "; and he adds that Munro's note is as follows: "Faucibus is a more common metaphor: Lambinus quotes Arnobius II, 32, non esse animas longe ab hiatibus mortis et faucibus constitutas: but Lucretius agrees better with our use of 'jaws of death."" It may be noted that the "jaws of hell," represented as the open jaws of a huge whale-like monster, constituted an important part of the stage furniture in some Mediaeval (and later) mystery or miracle plays. 39 The allegorical closed book of the dead in contradistinction from the allegorical open book of the living. Diericht gotrecht Die leyt der heri bey dem tnecht Bischawent wer ther: od Encche sey FIG. 40.- Death in the Jaws of Hell." From a fifteenth-century German woodcut in the British Museum. The accompanying German verses express the levelling of all social distinctions by Death. With this design may be compared a fifteenth-century French woodcut (included in the so-called "Shepherds' Calendar "Le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, printed by Guiot Marchant, at Paris, in 1493, page g, vi.-see British Museum specimen), representing Death (the Hautskelett type) on horseback, holding a dart and a coffin, riding before the open jaws of a monster (hell). as might be used to illuminate a dismal vault. In the upper right corner is the inscription from Ecclesiasticus. FIG. 41.-A Memento mori panel-picture, representing decay xli. 1, "(Mors) amara habenti pacem in substantiis suis." The picture does not seem to me a very early one. In this connexion one may well remember that it is the imaginative anticipation of death rather than death itself that may be "the grisly terror the grisly terror" (Milton). Death itself may be a "prince of peace." Cf. the oftenquoted lines of Edward Young (Night Thoughts, 1742)— "The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave; The deep damp vault, the darkness, and the worm; These are the bugbears of a winter's eve, The terrors of the living, not the dead." 395 "The fantastic horrors with which the mind of the average sensual man has surrounded the grave" are expressed in a concentrated manner by Claudio's outburst in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (act iii., scene 1):— "Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds And blown with restless violence roundabout The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those, that lawless and uncertain thoughts Imagine howling!-'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathèd worldly life, To what we fear of death." A stately kind of fear of death is expressed by the Scottish poet, William Dunbar (about 1465-1530), in his "spacious" elegy, "The Lament for the Makaris [Poets]," 395 As the reviewer of this book in the British Medical Journal for April 24th, 1915 (p. 725), pointed out. He likewise referred to the description of the last agony in Cardinal Newman's Dream of Gerontius. and it seems that in 1508 Dunbar had cause to fear that his own health was failing. Following are some of the stanzas: "I that in health was and gladness, Timor mortis conturbat me. Our pleasance here is all vain glory, The flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee [sly, cunning]. Timor mortis conturbat me. The state of man doth change and vary, Timor mortis conturbat me. Unto the Death go all estates, Timor mortis conturbat me." These magnificent verses by Dunbar may be compared in their power and pathos with the famous Mediaeval Latin dirge by Thomas of Celano, Dies irae, dies illa, and with James Shirley's well-known English dirge (1659) commencing, The glories of our blood and state. Dunbar's "Testament of Maister Andro Kennedy " (a good specimen of one kind of "macaronic" verse), of which the following lines are a sample, may be contrasted with his above-quoted "Lament" :— "I wish na priestis for me sing, Dies illa, dies irae, Nar yet na bellis for me ring, John Henry, Cardinal Newman, in his Dream of Gerontius, makes the dying man give a wonderful "intellectual" description of the fancied last agony :"That sense of ruin which is worse than pain, That masterful negation and collapse Of all that makes me man As though Down; down for ever I was falling through |