which were maintained in the midst of them, and which also gradually became German. The personages in the Biblical plays still appear under the same comic figures, with the coarse jokes and street wit which the roving people had introduced into the churchyards. Generally the fool entered as servant of a quack. From the oldest times these strollers had carried about with them through the country, secret remedies, especially such as were suspicious to the Church, primitive Roman superstitions, ancient German forms of exorcism, and others also which were more noxious and dangerous. At the great Church festivals and markets, there were always doctors' booths, in which miraculous remedies and cures were offered for sale to the believing multitudes. These booths also of the wandering doctors are older than the Augustine age; they are to be seen depicted on the Greek vases, and came to Germany through Italy, with the grotesque masks of the doctors themselves and their attendant buffoons, and were the most profitable trade of the strollers. These doctors and their servants were introduced as interludes to the spiritual plays, with long spun out episodes of the holy traffic, in which ribaldry and drubbing are not wanting. But the strollers introduced another popular person into the holy plays, the devil, probably his first appearance in the church. Long had this spirit of hell spit out fire under the tents of the churchyard, and wagged his tail, and probably he had often been beaten and cheated, to the delight of the spectators, by clever players, before he assisted in the thirteenth century as a much-suffering fellow-actor, in the holy Easter dramas, to the edification of the pious parishioners. Such was the active industry carried on by these strollers through the middle ages. Serving every class and every tendency of the times, coarse in manners and morals, as privileged jesters both cherished and ill treated, they were probably united amongst themselves in firm fellowship, with secret tokens of recognition; they were distinguished by their outward attire, and chiefly by fantastic finery, and by the absence of long hair and beard, the honourable adornment of privileged people, which they were forbidden to wear. In the fifteenth century the severity of the laws against them were relaxed, for the whole life of all classes had become more frivolous, daring, and reckless; an inordinate longing after enjoyment, an excessive pleasure in burlesque jesting, in music and dancing, in singing and mimic representations, was general in the wealthy towns. Thus many of the race of strollers contrived to make their peace with the burgher society. They became domestic fools in the courts of princes, the merry-andrews of the towns, associates of the town pipers, and players to the bands of Landsknechte.