mester"; they cause God to be forgotten, and the vanity of the world to be cherished. Not a few among these English dramas, so popular in former days, have come down to us. Besides separate pieces, histories of saints (very scarce in England), or fragments of old series, several collections have survived, the property whilom of gilds or municipalities. A number of towns kept up those shows, which attracted visitors, and were at the same time edifying, profitable, and amusing. From the fourteenth century the performances were in most cases intrusted to the gilds, each craft having as much as possible to represent a play in accordance with its particular trade. Shipwrights represented the building of the ark; fishermen, the Flood; goldsmiths, the coming of the three kings with their golden crowns; wine merchants, the marriage at Cana, where a miracle took place very much in their line. In other cases the plays were performed by gilds founded especially for that purpose: gild of Corpus Christi, of the Pater Noster, &c. This last had been created because "once on a time, a play setting forth the goodness of the Lord's Prayer was played in the city of York, in which play all manner of vices and sins were held up to scorn and the virtues were held up to praise. This play met with such favour that many said: 'Would that this play could be kept in this city, for the health of souls and for the comfort of citizens and neighbours!' Hence the keeping up of that play in times to come" (year 1389).[786] In a more or less complete state, the collections of the Mysteries performed at Chester, Coventry, Woodkirk, and York have been preserved, without speaking of fragments of other series. Most of those texts belong to the fourteenth century, but have been retouched at a later date.[787] Old Mysteries did not escape the hand of the improvers, any more than old churches, where any one who pleased added paintings, porches, and tracery, according to the fashion of the day. These dramatic entertainments, which thrilled a whole town, to which flocked, with equal zeal, peasants and craftsmen, citizens, noblemen, kings and queens, which the Reformation succeeded in killing only after half a century's fight, enlivened with incomparable glow the monotonous course of days and weeks. The occasion was a solemn one; preparation was begun long beforehand; it was an important affair, an affair of State. Gilds taxed their members to secure a fair representation of the play assigned to them; they were fined by the municipal authority in case they proved careless and inefficient, or were behind their time to begin.