The transition from antiquity to what we usually understand by the name of the middle ages was long and slow; it was a period during which much of the texture of the old society was destroyed, while at the same time a new life was gradually given to that which remained. We know very little of the comic literature of this period of transition; its literary remains consist chiefly of a mass of heavy theology and of lives of saints. The stage in its perfectly dramatic form--theatre and amphitheatre--had disappeared. The pure drama, indeed, appears never to have had great vitality among the Romans, whose tastes lay far more among the vulgar performances of the mimics and jesters, and among the savage scenes of the amphitheatre. While probably the performance of comedies, such as those of Plautus and Terence, soon went out of fashion, and tragedies, like those of Seneca, were only written as literary compositions, imitations of the similar works which formed so remarkable a feature in the literature of Greece, the Romans of all ranks loved to witness the loose attitudes of their _mimi_, or listen to their equally loose songs and stories. The theatre and the amphitheatre were state institutions, kept up at the national expense, and, as just stated, they perished with the overthrow of the western empire; and the sanguinary performances of the amphitheatre, if the amphitheatre itself continued to be used (which was perhaps the case in some parts of western Europe), and they gave place to the more harmless exhibitions of dancing bears and other tamed animals,[14] for deliberate cruelty was not a characteristic of the Teutonic race. But the mimi, the performers who sung songs and told stories, accompanied with dancing and music, survived the fall of the empire, and continued to be as popular as ever. St. Augustine, in the fourth century, calls these things _nefaria_, detestable things, and says that they were performed at night.[15] We trace in the capitularies the continuous existence of these performances during the ages which followed the empire, and, as in the time of St. Augustine, they still formed the amusement of nocturnal assemblies. The capitulary of Childebert proscribes those who passed their nights with drunkenness, jesting, and songs.[16] The council of Narbonne, in the year 589, forbade people to spend their nights "with dancings and filthy songs."[17] The council of Mayence, in 813, calls these songs "filthy and licentious" (_turpia atque luxuriosa_); and that of Paris speaks of them as "obscene and filthy" (_obscæna et turpia_); while in another they are called "frivolous and diabolic." From the bitterness with which the ecclesiastical ordinances are expressed, it is probable that these performances continued to preserve much of their old paganism; yet it is curious that they are spoken of in these capitularies and acts of the councils as being still practised in the religious festivals, and