The best surviving sample of a non-scriptural rustic play is probably _Saint Guillaume of Poitou_, a Breton versified drama in seven acts. The history of the Troubadour Count whose wicked manhood leads to a preternaturally pious old age, corresponds to every requirement of the peasant play-goer. Time and space are set airily at defiance; saints and devils are not only called, but come at the shortest notice; the plot is exciting enough to satisfy the strongest craving for sensation, and the dialogue is vigorous, and, in parts, picturesque. One can well believe that the fiery if narrow patriotism of a Breton audience would be stirred by the scene where the reformed Count William, who has withstood all other blandishments, is almost lured out of his holy seclusion by the Evil One coming to him in the shape of a fellow-townsman who represents his city as hard pressed by overwhelming foes, and in its extremest need, imploring his aid; that the religious fervour of Breton peasants would be moved by the recital of the vision in which a very wicked man appears at the bar of judgment: his sins out-number the hairs of his head, you would call him an irredeemable wretch; yet it does so happen that once upon a time he gave two pilgrims a bed of straw in a pig-stye, and now St Francis throws this straw into the balance, and it bends down the scale! So in the Song of the Sun, in Saemund's _Edda_, a fierce freebooter, who has despoiled mankind, and who always ate alone, opens his door one evening to a tired wayfarer, and gives him meat and drink. The guest meditates evil; then in his sleep he murders his host, but he is doomed to take on him all the sins of the man he has slain, while the one-time evil-doer's soul is borne by angels into a life of purity, where it shall live for ever with God. This motive is repeatedly introduced into folk-lore, and was made effective use of by Victor Hugo in _Sultan Mourad_, the infamous tyrant who goes to Heaven on the strength of having felt momentary compassion for a pig. In plays of the _Saint Guillaume_ class, the plain language in which the vices and oppression of the nobles is denounced shows signs of the slow surging up of the democratic spirit whose traces through the middle ages are nowhere to be more fruitfully sought than in popular literature--though they lie less in the rustic drama than in the great mediaeval satires, such as _Reynard the Fox_ and _Marcolfo_, the latter of which is still known to the Italian people under the form of _Bertoldo_, in which it was recast in the sixteenth century, by G. B. Croce, the rhyming blacksmith of Bologna. VII.