and fear, truth and superstition, fitted to the age and furnishing a transition to something better. “When friars, monks, and priests of former days Apocrypha and Scripture turned to plays, The Festivals of Fools and Asses kept, Obeyed boy-bishops and to crosses crept, They made the mumming Church the people’s rod, And held the grinning bauble for a God.” But quite aside from all these dramatic excrescences of the church, these artifices for catering to and influencing the public, there has been always imbedded in the very substance of Christianity, ever since the great ecclesiastical system of dogmatic theology was evolved, a profound and awful tragedy, the incomparable Drama of Redemption, whose subject is the birth, life, teachings, sufferings, death, and resurrection of Christ, whose action sweeps from the creation of the world to the day of doom, whose characters are the whole human race, God and his angels, Satan and his demons, and whose explicating close opens the perfect bliss of heaven for the elect and seals the hopeless agony of hell for the damned. This is the unrivalled ecclesiastical drama whose meaning the Protestant Church makes implicit in its creed but the Catholic Church makes explicit not only in the colossal pathos and overpowering _miserere_ of Passion Week, but also in every celebration of the mass, at whose infinite dénouement of a dying God the whole universe might well stand aghast. In the course of time the companies of actors who, in connection with the priests or under their permission and oversight, had played in the Mysteries and Moralities, gradually detached themselves from ecclesiastical localities and management, and, with licenses obtained from sacred and secular authority, set up on their own account, strolled from place to place, giving entertainments in public squares, at fairs, in the court-yards of inns, in the mansions of nobles, and in the palaces of royalty. Then kings and great dukes came to have their own select companies of players, who wore their livery, obeyed their orders, and ministered to their amusement and ostentation. Herein the drama was degraded from its proper dignity to be a vassal of vanity and luxury. In a masque performed at the marriage of an Italian duke in the sixteenth century, Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Diana, Venus, and Mars appeared bringing in dishes of dainties and waiting on the guests. The immortal gods represented as servants to honor and ornament a human festival!