No sufficiently authenticated particulars enable the literary historian to furnish any thing like positive information respecting the history of the spiritual dramas of the Spaniards at the period now under review. Considered generally their origin is sufficiently known; for dramas of this kind, intended either for amusement or instruction, were, in the middle ages, performed throughout the whole of the south of Europe. In Spain, pilgrims assiduously devoted themselves to the dramatic representation of sacred histories, when they wished to find an edifying and agreeable relaxation from their severer duties of praying and journeying from place to place. In these sacred dramas, the authors often interwove the adventures, whether serious or comic, in which they had been engaged, or described what they had seen and learnt in their holy pilgrimages; and the whole was usually seasoned with a sufficient quantity of jests in the popular style. To manifest in as palpable a way as possible the power of the sacrament, and the miraculous effects of faith, were the great objects of the pilgrims; and there seems to be no doubt that their rude efforts formed the origin of that class of spiritual plays, which, at a subsequent period, were performed on the festival of Corpus Christi, and on other solemn occasions; and which, from their allusion to the mystery of the sacrament, were styled _Autos Sacramentales_. But at what particular period examples of these spiritual exhibitions were first committed to writing, and formed a portion of literature, cannot now be ascertained. They have sometimes been confounded with the lives of the saints (_vidas de santos_[293]), which were originally dramatized in monasteries, and performed by the pupils of the monks, but which are in fact quite a distinct class of representations. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century the practice of acting these biographical dramas was continued in monasteries in different parts of Spain, particularly in Galicia;[294] and perhaps in that province they yet afford a source of amusement and edification on festival days, to the pilgrims who visit the shrine of St. Iago de Compostela. The burlesque interludes, called _Entremeses_ and _Saynetes_, which were subsequently divided into various kinds, and were performed between the preludes (_loas_) and the play, properly so called, appear also to have had their origin in the first half of the sixteenth century. Cervantes could refer to no entremeses of an older date, when he contributed to give to this class of dramatic compositions a literary form and character.