The consideration of our early farce interludes may be conveniently postponed for the present in favour of the more popular plays, or shows, with which our forefathers celebrated festival occasions. Of the pageants in honour of royal entries, to which reference has already been made, it is impossible to say more here than that, developing gradually into dramatic spectacles, and at the same time retaining their symbolic character, they must have contributed to the taste for allegorical plays, the moral, and the moral interlude. If we turn to the secular shows presented on regular festivals, such as May-day, Hox Tuesday, and the Eve of St. John and St. Peter, while we may at once conclude that they were less efficient as dramas than some of which we have spoken, such as the Sacrament play, they have the advantage, from our present point of view, of indicating more directly the nature of popular demand and the primitive conditions of popular art. Indeed, Dodsley regards the mummers who commonly acted them as the earliest genuine comedians of England. Of such disguisings, masks, and mummeries there is evidence in the Wardrobe Accounts of 1389, according to which a company of twenty-one men was disguised as the Ancient Order of the Coif for a play before the king at Christmas; and of other mummings--not satiric nor in mockery of church ritual, but genial--we have mention in Stow and citations in Warton and Collier that take us to the first half of the fourteenth century. They doubtless existed much earlier, though I do not think that they anticipated the parodies of sacred rites or the ecclesiastical saints' plays.