came in, and played upon their musical instruments, these animals danced to the music, and performed all sorts of strange tricks. _Et pariles ursi.... Qui vas tollebant, ut homo, bipedesque gerebant. Mimi quando fides digitis tangunt modulantes, Illi saltabant, neumas pedibus variabant. Interdum saliunt, seseque super jaciebant. Alterutrum dorso se portabant residendo, Amplexando se, luctando deficiunt se._ Then followed dancing-girls, and exhibitions of other kinds.[19] [18] The reader is referred, for further information on this subject, to my "History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments," pp. 33-39. [19] This curious Latin poem was printed by Grimm and Schmeller, in their Lateinische Gedichte des x. und xi. Jh., p. 129. Although these performances were proscribed by the ecclesiastical laws, they were not discountenanced by the ecclesiastics themselves, who, on the contrary, indulged as much in after-dinner amusements as anybody. The laws against the profane songs are often directed especially at the clergy; and it is evident that among the Anglo-Saxons, as well as on the Continent, not only the priests and monks, but the nuns also, in their love of such amusements, far transgressed the bounds of decency.[22] These entertainments were the cradle of comic literature, but, as this literature in the early ages of its history was rarely committed to writing, it has almost entirely perished. But, at the tables of the ecclesiastics, these stories were sometimes told in Latin verse, and as Latin was not so easily carried in the memory as the vernacular tongue, in this language they were sometimes committed to writing, and thus a few examples of early comic literature have fortunately been preserved. These consist chiefly of popular stories, which were among the favourite amusements of mediæval society--stories many of which are derived from the earliest period of the history of our race, and are still cherished among our peasantry. Such are the stories of the Child of Snow, and of the Mendacious Hunter, preserved in a manuscript of the eleventh century.[21] The first of these was a very popular story in the middle ages. According to this early version, a merchant of Constance, in Switzerland, was detained abroad for several years, during which time his wife made other acquaintance, and bore a child. On his return, she excused her fault by telling him that on a cold wintry day she had swallowed snow, by which she had conceived; and, in revenge, the husband carried away the child, and sold it into slavery, and returning, told its mother, that the infant which had originated in snow, had melted away under a hotter sun. Some of these stories originated in the different collections of fables, which were part of the favourite literature of the later Roman period. Another is rather a ridiculous story of an ass belonging to two sisters