Every town of any importance had its Chamber of Rhetoric.

"These Chambers," says Longfellow in his _Poets and Poetry of Europe_, "were to Holland, in the fifteenth century, what the Guilds of the Meistersingers were to Germany, and were numerous throughout the Netherlands.

Brussels could boast of five; Antwerp of four; Louvain of three; and Ghent, Bruges, Malines, Middelburg, Gouda, Haarlem, and Amsterdam of at least one.

Each Chamber had its coat of arms and its standard, and the directors bore the title of Princes and Deans.

At times they gave public representations of poetic dialogues and stage-plays, called _Spelen van Sinne_, or Moralities.