Mr. Collier, in the second volume of his excellent History of English Dramatic Poetry, has carefully analyzed the Coventry Mysteries, with occasional notices of resemblances or dissimilarities in the method in which the same subjects are treated in the other collections. It will, therefore, be unnecessary for me in this place to enter on the general question of the chain in the evidence of dramatic history which these mysteries afford. The Coventry Mysteries are contained in a quarto volume, the principal part of which was written in the year 1468, now preserved in the Cottonian collection of manuscripts, under the press-mark Vespas. D. viii. The date of the MS. is ascertained from the verso of fol. 100, a fac-simile of which page will be found at the commencement of this work. The history of the manuscript is unfortunately wrapped in obscurity, and it cannot be distinctly traced back to those who are presumed to have been its former possessors—the Grey Friars of Coventry. The principal authority for its appropriation to this body is contained in the following memorandum on the fly-leaf of the manuscript in the hand-writing of Dr. Richard James, librarian to Sir Robert Cotton:—“Contenta Novi Testamenti scenice expressa et actitata olim per monachos sive fratres mendicantes: vulgo dicitur hic liber Ludus Coventriæ, sive Ludus Corporis Christi: scribitur metris Anglicanis.” The MS. was previously in the possession of Robert Hegge of Christ Church, Oxford, who died in 1629,[2] and was, most probably, purchased by James about that time for Cotton, as it appears from a letter in the same library[3] that James was engaged about that period at Oxford in procuring manuscripts for his patron. James, in his MS. collections in the Bodleian, does not notice the MS. of the Ludus Coventriæ, and I have been unsuccessful in endeavouring to trace either the destination of Hegge’s library, or the authority for James’s assertion that this volume was commonly (vulgo dicitur) known under the above title.[4] That it was so, there cannot, I imagine, be the slightest doubt, for what object could James—a man who was, most probably, uninterested about the subject of the manuscript, and inserted the account above given as Cotton’s librarian, according to his usual custom—have had in making a misrepresentation? It must be remembered, also, that the last leaf, or, perhaps, the last few leaves, are now deficient, and there is no improbability in the conjecture that these may not have been lost when James wrote his description, and that a colophon supplied him with his information.