the Magi and of the Marriage of Cana, but saw the story in tableaux. In course of time the persons in these tableaux spoke and moved, and then it was but a logical step to the representation dramatically, by the priests before the altar, of the striking or significant events in the life of Christ.

Worshippers were approached through every avenue of expression: the churches in which they sat were nobly symbolical in structure; the windows were ablaze with Scriptural story; altar-pieces, statues, carvings, and pictures continually spoke to them in a language of searching beauty. In some churches the priests read from rolls upon which, as they were unfolded toward the congregation, picture after picture came to view. Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter services inevitably took on dramatic forms, and became beautiful in their reproduction of the touching and tender scenes in the life of Christ, and grewsome in their literal picturing of his sufferings and death. The dramatic instinct had been long at work in the development of worship; a play on the Passion, ascribed to Gregory of Nazianzen, dated back to the fourth century. This early drama was a succession of monologues, but it plainly predicted the mystery drama of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

There was nothing forced or artificial in the growth of this later and more complete drama; a description of a Durham Good Friday service makes us see the easy progression toward well-defined drama: "Within the church of Durham, upon Good Friday, there was a marvellous solemn service, in which service time,

after the Passion was sung, two of the eldest monks took a goodly large crucifix all of gold, of the semblance of our Saviour Christ, nailed upon the Cross. . . . The service being ended, the said two monks carried the Cross to the Sepulchre with great reverence (which Sepulchre was set up that morning on the north side of the choir, nigh unto the High Altar, before the service time), and then did lay it within the said Sepulchre with great devotion."

It is easy to follow the dramatic development of such a theme, and to understand how beautiful and impressive worship became when the divine tragedy was not only sung and described, but acted before the high altar by gorgeously robed priests. Thus the drama was born a second time at the foot of the altar.

But the time came when the drama parted company with the liturgy, and, as in its development in Greece, took on a life of its own. The vernacular was substituted for Latin; laymen took parts of increasing importance; the place of representation was changed from the church to the space outside the church; the liturgical yielded to the dramatic; humour, and even broad farce, were introduced; the several streams of dramatic tradition which had come down from an earlier time were merged in the fully developed Mystery or Miracle play.

The trade guilds had become centres of organized enterprise in the towns, and the presentation of plays, in which popular religious and social interest was now concentrated, fell into their hands. Cities like York, Chester, and Coventry fostered the growing art with

enthusiasm and generosity. By the beginning of the fifteenth century the presentation of the dramas was thoroughly systematized. In some places the Mayor, by proclamation, announced the dates of presentation; in other places special messengers or heralds made the round of the city and gave public notice. The different guilds undertook the presentation of different acts or scenes. Two-story wagons took the place of the stage in front of the church or in the square; on these wagons, or pageants, as they were called, the rude dressing-rooms were on the lower and the stage on the upper story. These movable theatres, starting from the church, passed through all the principal streets, and, at important points, the actors went through their parts in the presence of throngs of eager spectators in the windows, galleries, doorways, squares, and upon temporary scaffolds. The plays were in series and required several days for presentation, and the town made the occasion one of general and hilarious holiday.

On the pageants, handsomely decorated, the spectators saw scenes acted, with which they had been made familiar by every kind of teaching. The drama in the Garden of Eden was presented with uncompromising realism, Adam and Eve appearing in appropriate attire; the devil played a great and effective part, furnishing endless amusement by his buffoonery, but always going in the end to his own place. Pilate and Herod divided popular attention by their semihumorous or melodramatic rôles, and Noah's wife afforded an opportunity for the play of monotonous

and very obvious masculine wit on the faults and frailty of woman. The construction of these semi-sacred dramas, dealing with high or picturesque events and incidents in Biblical story, was rude; the mixture of the sacred and the comic so complete that the two are constantly merged; the frankness of speech and the grossness almost incredible to modern taste. It would be a great mistake, however, to interpret either the intermingling of the tragic and the comic or the grossness of speech as indicating general corruption; they indicate an undeveloped rather than a corrupt society. The English people were morally sound, but they were coarse in habit and speech, after the manner of the time. There was as much honest and sober living as to-day; the grossness was not a matter of character, but of expression. Men and women saw, without any consciousness of irreverence or incongruity, the figure of Deity enthroned on a movable stage, with Cherubim gathered about Him, creating the world with the aid of images of birds and beasts, with branches plucked from trees, and with lanterns such as were carried about the streets at night.

Religion was not a department or partial expression of life; it was inclusive of the whole range of feeling and action. It embraced humour as readily as it embraced the most serious conviction and the most elevated emotion. It was, therefore, entirely congruous with the deepest piety of the time that grotesque figures, monstrous gargoyles, broadly humorous carvings on miserere stalls, should be part of the structure of those vast cathedrals which are the most sublime

expressions in art of the religious life of the race. To read into the grossness and indecency of expression in the fifteenth century the moral significance which such an expression would have in the nineteenth century is not only to do a grave injustice to many generations, but to betray the lack of a sound historic sense. The great dramatists who followed these early unknown playwrights understood that the humorous cannot be separated from the tragic without violating the facts of life; and religion, in its later expressions, would have been saved from many absurdities and much destructive narrowness if the men who spoke for it had not so strangely misunderstood and rejected one of the greatest qualities of the human spiritthat quality of humour which, above all others, keeps human nature sane and sound.

To the Mysteries and Miracle plays succeeded the Moralities. Whether these later and less dramatic plays were developed out of the earlier dramatic forms is uncertain; that they were largely modelled along lines already well defined is apparently well established. No line of sharp division as regards time, theme, or manner can be drawn between the two; although certain broad differences are evident at a glance. The medieval mind dealt largely with types, and only secondarily with individuals; and the break in the slow and unconscious progression from the type to the sharply defined person, which registers the unfolding not only of the modern mind but of modern art, is not inexplicable. The characters in the Mysteries and Miracle plays were received directly