much later origin than the invention of gunpowder; although the Saracens, at the time of the Crusades, used a Greek fire for illuminations, which considerably alarmed the Crusaders when they first witnessed its effects.  Regular fireworks appear to have been invented in Italy, where the pyrotechnic art has retained its superiority to this day, and where the inhabitants are as enthusiastic as ever for this sort of amusement, and consider it, in fact, inseparable from every religious, private, or public festival.  This Italian invention was first introduced into the Low Countries by the Spaniards, where it found many admirers, and it made its appearance in France with the Italian artists who established themselves in that country in the reigns of Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I. Fireworks could not fail to be attractive at the Court of the Valois, to which Catherine de Medicis had introduced the manners and customs of Italy.  The French, who up to that time had only been accustomed to the illuminations of St. John’s Day and of the first Sunday in Lent, received those fireworks with great enthusiasm, and they soon became a regular part of the programme for public festivals (Fig. 176).

[Illustration:  Fig. 176.—­Fireworks on the Water, with an Imitation of a Naval Combat.—­Fac-simile of an Engraving on Copper of the “Pyrotechnie” of Hanzelet le Lorrain:  4to (Pont-a-Mousson, 1630).]

We have hitherto only described the sports engaged in for the amusement of the spectators; we have still to describe those in which the actors took greater pleasure than even the spectators themselves.  These were specially the games of strength and skill as well as dancing, with a notice of which we shall conclude this chapter.  There were, besides, the various games of chance and the games of fun and humour.  Most of the bourgeois and the villagers played a variety of games of agility, many of which have descended to our times, and are still to be found at our schools and colleges.  Wrestling, running races, the game of bars, high and wide jumping, leap-frog, blind-man’s buff, games of ball of all sorts, gymnastics, and all exercises which strengthened the body or added to the suppleness of the limbs, were long in use among the youth of the nobility (Figs. 177 and 178).  The Lord of Fleuranges, in his memoirs written at the court of Francis I., recounts numerous exercises to which he devoted himself during his childhood and youth, and which were then looked upon as a necessary part of the education of chivalry.  The nobles in this way acquired a taste for physical exercises, and took naturally to combats, tournaments, and hunting, and subsequently their services in the battle-field gave them plenty of opportunities to gratify the taste thus developed in them.  These were not, however, sufficient for their insatiable activity; when they could not do anything else, they played at tennis and such games at all hours of the day; and these pastimes had so much attraction for nobles of all ages that they not unfrequently sacrificed their health in consequence of overtaxing their strength.  In 1506 the King of Castile, Philippe le Beau, died of pleurisy, from a severe cold which he caught while playing tennis.