In literature the Christ-Child had equal influence until Puritanism tried to remove Christmas from the calendar. Drama originated in the liturgy of Easter and of Christmas, and although Holy Week was more elaborate and in substance more dramatic, Christmas to Twelfth Night, offering more incentive to play and song and more holidays, exercised a larger influence on the stage. In lyric poetry at the beginning of the sixth century we have already the familiar, intimate and loving contact with the Christ-Child, which finds its latest expression in Thompson and Tabb. St. Ita, the Irish saint (480-570), is of their faith and tenderness in the song of “Isucan,” “Little Jesus,” given in Sigerson’s _Bards of the Gael and Gall_: Jesukin Lives my little cell within ... Jesu of the skies who art Next my heart thro’ every night. The bambino shines through medieval song in Adam of St. Victor and in other writers of hymns. The Catholic writers of the Renaissance celebrate the same theme in the revived meters of classicism. Sarbievius, the Jesuit lyricist of Poland, is full of the Christ-Child, and in his well-known lines “To the Violet” he calls upon that “dawn of spring” to crown his “Little Lad” with its flowers in place of the gold and gems and purple which weighted the Infant. Sarbievius was doing what the painters did, discarding the Byzantine ornament and convention. Test Puritanism with the child and it fails; test it with the Christ-Child, and you will get the ponderous “Hymn to the Nativity” of Milton, an imperialistic ode which must have gladdened Cromwell. No familiarity there, no mirthfulness, no Jesukin with violets for crown jewels, not even Byzantine immobility. Milton does not even doff the helmet of war, as Hector did; no, he sees from Juda’s land The dreaded Infant’s hand; The rays of Bethlehem blind his [Osiris’] dusky eyes. ... Our Babe to show His Godhead true Can in His swaddling clothes control the damnèd crew.