alarm among their great lords; and the ecclesiastics in vain proscribed these licentious revelries. It would be nothing more than a stroke of their accustomed policy if we imagine that, seeing the people were eager after such public entertainments, the monks should take them into their own hands; and offering a far more imposing exhibition than even the tricks of jugglers, combining piety with merriment, at once awe and delight the people by their scriptural histories and the legends of saints, in the language common to them all, thus enticing them from profane mummeries. It was a revolution in the history of the people, who, without education, seemed to grow learned in the mysteries and to be witnesses of miracles! This account is not incongruous with another probably not less true, and which indeed has been received as indisputable among the more ancient literary historians of France, and is well known by the verses of Boileau in his "Art of Poetry." Palmers and Pilgrims--the one returning from the East, bearing in their caps the hallowed palm-branch of Palestine, and the other from some distant shrine, their chaplets and cloaks covered with the many-coloured scallops--taking their stand in thoroughfares, and leaning on their staffs, while their pendent relics and images attracted the gazer, would win an audience from among the people. These venerable itinerants or semi-saints recited their sacred narratives in verse or even in prose; they had sojourned amid "the holy places," which they described; they had their adventures to tell, serious or comic; and that many of these have entered into the great body of ROMANCE, and were caught up by the Trouvères, we can easily imagine. These strollers excited the piety and contributed to the amusement of their simple auditors, who, in the course of time, occasionally provided for these actors a stage on a green in the vicinage of their town; thus an audience of burghers and clowns, and no critics, was first formed. The ecclesiastics adopted performances so certain of popular attraction, and became the sole authors of these inartificial dramas, as they were of romances and chronicles. They had but one object, and knew to treat it only in one way. They imagined that they were instructing the people by initiating them into scriptural history, the only history then known, and by keeping the sources of popular recreation in their own hands, they looked for their success in the degree they excited their terror or their piety, and not less their ribald merriment; and for the people the profane drollery and the familiar dialogue were as consistent with their feelings as the articles of their creed, for which they would have died, as well as laughed at.