Tijl Uelenspiegel, the Flemish tramp from Damme, near Bruges —the hero of numerous popular accounts of mystification and farce, and also the tragic hero of the epic by Coster —is the archetype of revolutionary anarchism who. as a consequence of complete disenchantment in human authority, has neither faith nor law. His is the spirit of rebellion against all authority in the name of the freedom of the individual — the freedom of a vagabond who has nothing, who obeys no one, who is afraid of nothing, who expects no recompense and who fears no chastisement, beyond as well as here below. . . the mocking spirit who, at the same time, turns the temples and altars of humanity upside down, making them collapse by means of his magic wand: ridicule.