Hilarius, who lived in the first half of the twelfth century, and is understood to have been by birth an Englishman. Hilarius appears before us as a playful Latin poet, and among a number of short pieces, which may be almost called lyric, he has left us three of these religious plays. The subject of the first of these is the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the chief peculiarity of which consists of the songs of lamentation placed in the mouths of the two sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha. The second represents one of the miracles attributed to St. Nicholas; and the third, the history of Daniel. The latter is longer and more elaborate than the others, and at its conclusion, the stage direction tells us that, if it were performed at matins, Darius, king of the Medes and Persians, was to chant _Te Deum Laudamus_, but if it were at vespers, the great king was to chant _Magnificat anima mea Dominum_.[83] [83] "Hilarii Versus et Ludi," 8vo., Paris, 1835. Edited by M. Champollion Figeac. That this mediæval drama was not derived from that of the Roman is evident from the circumstance that entirely new terms were applied to it. The western people in the middle ages had no words exactly equivalent with the Latin _comœdia_, _tragœdia_, _theatrum_, &c.; and even the Latinists, to designate the dramatic pieces performed at the church festivals, employed the word _ludus_, a play. The French called them by a word having exactly the same meaning, _jeu_ (from _jocus_). Similarly in English they were termed _plays_. The Anglo-Saxon glossaries present as the representative of the Latin _theatrum_, the compounded words _plege-stow_, or _pleg-stow_, a play-place, and _pleg-hus_, a play-house. It is curious that we Englishmen have preferred to the present time the Anglo-Saxon words in _play_, _player_, and _play-house_. Another Anglo-Saxon word with exactly the same signification, _lac_, or _gelac_, play, appears to have been more in use in the dialect of the Northumbrians, and a Yorkshireman still calls a play a _lake_, and a player a _laker_. So also the Germans called a dramatic performance a _spil_, _i.e._ a play, the modern _spiel_, and a theatre, a _spil-hus_. One of the pieces of Hilarius is thus entitled "Ludus super iconia sancti Nicolai," and the French _jeu_ and the English _play_ are constantly used in the same sense. But besides this general term, words gradually came into use to characterise different sorts of plays. The church plays consisted of two descriptions of subjects, they either represented the miraculous acts of certain saints, which had a plain meaning, or some incident taken from the Holy Scriptures, which was supposed to have a hidden mysterious signification as well as an apparent one, and hence the one class of subject was usually spoken of simply as _miraculum_, a miracle, and the other as _mysterium_, a mystery. _Mysteries_ and _miracle-plays_ are still the names usually given to the old religious