But, it will be objected, are we not, or most of us, still Christians? Are we not still capable of understanding prayers, miracles, saintliness, raising from the dead, “conversion,” and all the other subject-matter of _Callimachus_? To be sure we are; hence my “reverent” smile. If Christianity were dead (or, as in Swift’s ironical pamphlet, abolished by Act of Parliament) _Callimachus_ would be simply meaningless for us, a nothing, mere mummery. It is not the matter of the play that provokes our smile; but its form. The “fun,” says Miss St. John, is “not justified by the text.” She is thinking of the matter, abounding in piety and tending to edification; but in point of fact the language, the “text”—at any rate in theatrical representation (far be it from me to prejudice her forthcoming book)—has its comic side. Callimachus’s abrupt declaration of his passion to Drusiana and the terms of her rejection of him are both, to a modern audience, irresistibly comic. They are not meaningless, but they are delightfully impossible: they are love-making as imagined by a nun, the very person who _ex hypothesi_ knows nothing about it. You have, in fact, precisely the same delicious absurdity, proceeding from an imagination necessarily uninstructed by experience, as you get in Miss Daisy Ashford’s book. (Several critics have made this comparison. I am really chagrined not to have thought of it myself. But it should show Miss St. John that I am, at any rate, not the only one who found _Callimachus_ comic.) Further, and quite apart from the exquisite naïveties of its text, the form of the play is so childlike and bland as to be really funny. The players, when not engaged in the action, stand motionless in a semi-circle. Changes of scene are indicated by two performers crossing the stage in opposite directions—a genuine cricket “over.” Characters are understood to be stricken with death when they composedly lie down on their backs. Others trot in pairs round Drusiana’s prostrate form and you understand they are journeying to her tomb. All this, of course, is merely primitive “convention.” Could we put ourselves back into Hroswitha’s time, it would pass unnoticed. In our own time, with a different set of “conventions,” that make some attempt at imitation of reality, we naturally laugh at these old conventions. We laugh, but we are interested; our curiosity is being catered for, we like to see what the old conventions were. The curio, in short, is amusing in the fullest sense of the term.