Yet here again the negro minstrel was not avid of overt originality. He was willing to find his profit in the past and to translate into negro dialect any farce, however ancient, which might contain comic situations or humorous characters that could be twisted to suit his immediate purpose. He seized upon the ingenious plots of certain of the pantomimes brought to America from France half a century ago by the Ravels. And on occasion he went, unwittingly, still further afield for his prey. There is in print, in a collection of so-called Ethiopian drama, an amusing sketch, entitled the 'Great Mutton Trial'; and the remote source of this is to be sought in the oldest and best farce which has survived in French literature. 'Maître Pierre Pathelin' is now acted occasionally by the Comédie-Française in Paris, in a version which preserves its original flavor; but in the eighteenth century an adaptation, made by Brueys and Palaprat, and called the 'Avocat Pathelin,' was popular. It was this later perversion which served as the basis of an English farce, entitled the 'Village Lawyer,' and the 'Great Mutton Trial' is simply the 'Village Lawyer' transmogrified to suit the bolder and more robust methods of the negro minstrels. III And here we may discover the real reason why negro-minstrelsy failed to establish itself. It neglected its opportunity to devote itself primarily to its own peculiar field--the humorous reproduction of the sayings and doings of the colored man in the United States. To represent the negro in his comic aspects and in his sentimental moods was what the minstrels pretended to do; but the pretense was often only a hollow mockery. Even the musical instruments they affected, the banjo and the bones, were not as characteristic of the field-hand, or even of the town darky, as the violin. Indeed, the bones cannot be considered as in any way special to the negro; they were familiar to Shakspere's Bottom, who declared: "I have a reasonable good ear in music; let us have the tongs and the bones." And the wise recorder of the words and deeds of Uncle Remus asserted that he had never listened to the staccato picking of a banjo in the negro-quarters of any plantation.