tribes, dexterous and bold, dancers, singers, and actresses, in brilliant cavalcades. When they shook the Greek tambourine or the Asiatic castanets, in the licentious mazes of the bacchanalian dance, they were generally irresistible to the German barons, but were extremely offensive to serious people. In the year 554 a Frank king interposed with his authority against the nuisance of these foreign _rovers_, and the worthy Hinkmar, paternally warned his priests also against these women, whose foreign sounding designation was expressed by the true-hearted monk with a very well-known but bitter word. To these foreign jugglers were speedily added numerous German recruits. The German races had had wandering singers from the primitive times, bearers of news, spreaders of epic songs and poems. These also moved from farm to farm, highly welcome in the large houses of persons of distinction, honoured guests, trusted messengers, who often received from their hosts a more affectionate reward than golden bracelets or new dresses. They had once upon a time sung to the harp by the fireside, of the adventurous expedition of the thunder god to the world of giants, and of the tragic fall of the Nibelungen, then of Attila's battle, and the wonders of southern lands. But to the new Christian faith, this treasure of old native songs was obnoxious. The high-minded Charlemagne made a collection of the heroic songs of the German race, but his Popish son Louis hated and despised them. These songs undoubtedly were so thoroughly heathen, that the Church had reason to remonstrate against them in synodical resolutions and episcopal decrees. Together with them, the race of singers who carried and spread them, fell into disfavour with the church. The songs did not however cease, but the singers sank to a lower scale, and finally a portion of them at least fell into the class of vagrants, and the people were accustomed to hear the fairest heritage of their past from the lips of despised players. Another heritage also from German heathendom fell to these strollers. Even before the time of Tacitus there were simple dramatic processions in Germany; on the great feast days of the German gods, there already appeared the humorous ideas of the pious German regarding his world of deities, associating with them comic processions of mummers, the figures of goblins and giants, gray winter and green spring, the bear of Donar, and probably the magic white horse of Woden, which in the oldest form of dramatic play opposed each other either in mimic combat, or for their rights. The wandering jugglers, with great facility, added these German masks to the grotesque Roman figures which they had brought into the country; and in the churchyard of the new Christian congregation, the bear of the bacchanalian Asen bellowed beside the followers of the Roman god of wine, and the satyr with his goats' feet and horns.