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But a large number of the statues are devoted to the Vices, which generally explain themselves. No more spirited semi-secular carvings are to be seen in England than the delightful row of the "Beverly Minstrels." They stand on brackets round a column in St. Mary's Church, Beverly, and are exhibited as singing and playing on musical instruments.
Prince Bleedel of Hungary bade empty many traveling chests of their silver and their gold; all this was given away. The king's champions were seen to live right merrily. Werbel and Swemmel, the minstrels of the king, each gained at the wedding feast, I ween, full thousand marks, or even better, when fair Kriemhild sate crowned at Etzel's side.
Pour out thy holy wine of song upon the soft-footed darkness, till, like a priest of the inmost temple, 'tis drunken with fair intelligences! Thus the old minstrels and minnesingers. Strong and full sang the nightingales that night Farina held watch by the guilty castle that entombed his living beloved. The castle looked itself a denser shade among the moonthrown shadows of rock and tree.
In a grey mantle from the top of bushes The cuckoo sings: Verily may the Lord shield me! Well do I write under the greenwood. Then there were always jugglers and tumblers, and men with performing bears, and minstrels to wheedle Bodo's few pence out of his pocket. And it would be a very tired and happy family that trundled home in the cart to bed.
"Ah, lady," said he, "I will obey you; but I beseech you that you will not for ever steel your heart against me." "Palamedes," she replied, "may I never taste of joy again if I ever quit my first love." Palamedes then went his way. The lovers remained a week in concealment, after which Tristram restored Isoude to her husband, advising him in future to reward minstrels in some other way.
Disappointed and baffled, he rose and left the chapel, not immediately from the organ loft, by a door and a few upward steps through the wall to the minstrels' gallery, as he had entered, but by the south door into the court, his readiest way to reach the rooms he occupied with his father, near the marquis's study.
Wilson called the kinglets wrens, but they have little to justify the name, except that the ruby-crown's song is of the same gushing, lyrical character as that referred to above. Dr. Brewer was entranced with the song of one of these tiny minstrels in the woods of New Brunswick, and thought he had found the author of the strain in the black-poll warbler.
He absolutely bewitched even the "Major," with his version of "Buffalo Gals," and the "Cackle, cackle, flap your wings and crow," chorus of the Christy Minstrels, who certainly, in his person, did perform on this occasion out of London! It was at this period, when the days seemed as if they would never end and the nights longer, that a memorable event occurred for two, at least, of the party.
The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded shelves of his big work, "La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Siècle," with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the old time.
For these two had once loved marvelously. Now minstrels everywhere made songs about their all-conquering love, which had derided death; and nobody denied that, even now, these two got on together amicably.
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