Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/311

 PROSE AND POPULAR READING 299 ' So that the king, bearing crown and sceptre, dodged before and behind the sun, while his shadow, dragging in the mud, seemed to mock the royal dignity.' Marcolph is, however, surpassed by Till Eulen- spiegel, the jester par excellence of the lower classes, who got credit for all the jokes of the century. This book is the most complete collection of witticisms imaginable. It spares neither priest nor layman, learned nor un- learned, high nor low. It bears the imprint of the lower classes of society, from which it took its origin, and betrays a certain malicious cunning, which pervades all Eulenspiegel's characters, and which is a marked trait of the German peasant. The emblem on the title-page is well chosen. An owl peering into a mirror seems to re- flect the bitter, feline, mean attacks in the book. While, however, its ridicule of the higher classes is rude and uncouth, it never descends to obscenity. It is worthy of remark that even here, as in the vulgar plays of the carnival time, despite all the satires on the personal vices of the clergy, the Church itself is never attacked ; while, on the contrary, the same respect is not shown to the Eeformation. The taste for foreign travel which was so general in the fifteenth century gave a special character to the literature of the time, and made accounts of journeys particularly popular ; for instance, ' The Travels of Marco Polo,' ' The Adventurous Journey of Sir John Mandeville,' and the descriptions of the newly dis- covered Western world. The writings of Godfrey de Bouillon and the Crusaders, describing pilgrimages into the Holy Land, gave a religious colouring to this class of literature. ' There are many books describing the holy places