Finally, having made its way into the arts, the manners, and the laws, it enters even the Church.

In every Catholic city we see it organizing some one of those curious ceremonies, those strange processions, wherein religion is attended by all varieties of superstition--the sublime attended by all the forms of the grotesque.

To paint it in one stroke, so great is its vigour, its energy, its creative sap, at the dawn of letters, that it casts, at the outset, upon the threshold of modern poetry, three burlesque Homers: Ariosto in Italy, Cervantes in Spain, Rabelais in France.
It would be mere surplusage to dwell further upon the influence of the grotesque in the third civilization.

Every thing tends to show its close creative alliance with the beautiful in the so called "romantic" period.

Even among the simplest popular legends there are none which do not somewhere, with an admirable instinct, solve this mystery of modern art.