during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,--comedy of domestic romance with all or some of the characters common to the kind--youth and maid, wife and paramour, enamoured cleric, faithless husband, cuckold, enraged father, parasite, slave, go-between, and double,--is rendered probable by the survival of two such poems, one of which bears internal evidence of its origin in England, while the only manuscripts extant of the other were found in that country. The first lacks a title, but has been called the _Baucis_ after the manipulator of the intrigue, a procuress; the second is named _Babio_ for the unhappy hero who is at one and the same time fooled by his wife whom he doesn't love, and his step-daughter whom he does. Both comedies display the influence of classical Latin, but the latter sparkles with the humour and spontaneity of the comedy of contemporary life.[7] I agree, therefore, with Dr. Ward that the burden of proof is with those who assert that the Latin comedy of the Middle Ages made no impression upon the earlier drama of England. That the former was one of the tributaries of the farce interlude and the principal source of the romantic play of domestic intrigue I have no doubt whatever. And, considering the influx of French clerics and culture during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and the French affiliations of Geoffrey of St. Albans and Hilarius, our earliest recorded writers of saints' plays, not to speak of the latinity of our Maps, Wirekers, and other scholars of Henry II.'s reign, and their familiarity with the literature of the Continent, which was Latin,--it would be unreasonable to assume that the authors of our saints' plays, whether in Latin or not, did not derive something of their technique from the elegiac comedies of their contemporary latinists in France and England, or indeed from the adaptations of Plautus and Terence in previous centuries, or from the originals themselves.