The Iron Maiden
The “Torture Chamber” in the five-sided tower of the old burgh was for many years one of the show-places of Nuremberg. The collection of instruments of fiendishness, made by a Franconian nobleman, numbered between five and six hundred. There were all sorts of repulsive contrivances,—racks, wedges, hammers, clubs, pulleys, thumb-screws, iron boots to crush the limbs, metal collars for the neck, brass masks for the head, copper boilers for scalding water, and headsmen’s axes. Their removal, by purchase, has served as a reminder of the wisdom of the clause in the Constitution of the United States (Art. viii.) forbidding the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments.”
The central jewel, the Kohinoor of the relics of barbarism and diabolism, is one of the most awful graven images it ever entered into the heart of men to conceive, the world-infamous Eiserne Jungfrau, the “Iron Maiden,” of Nuremberg. This monstrous invention was an improvement in ferocity upon the brazen bull into which the ancient tyrant, after heating it red hot, was wont to thrust his naked victims. Many Americans have seen the Iron Maiden; all Americans ought to see her. The sight of the hideous figure is an excellent tonic for young Yankees of both sexes suffering from “over-culture,” and seduced into a fit of moonlit mediævalism by the picturesque and romantic attractions of such “quaint old towns of art and song” as the city of Hans Sachs and Albert Dürer. For the Iron Maiden was no ingenious toy devised to amuse the idle and frighten the thoughtless into good behavior. Clasped in her stifling embrace, pierced in all parts of the human body not absolutely vital by the sharpened spikes set into the steel valves which had closed upon him, a living man, many a wretch yielded up the ghost in torments not to be conceived of adequately save by the imagination of an Edgar Poe. And this not by the edict of a despot mad with unbridled power, but in the normal course of justice, or of religious persecution, as justice and religion were understood and administered during the “good old times.”