The existence of tropes at a period earlier than that in which mention is made of plays based upon the miracles of the saints appears to me to negative Professor Ten Brink's conjecture that in the development of our sacred drama legendary subjects preceded the biblical. Indeed, the fact that dramas on subjects both biblical and legendary, and of a technique even more highly developed than that of the Shrewsbury, were, as early as 1160, produced for liturgical functions in France, not only by Frenchmen, but by one Hilarius, who was presumably an Englishman, favours the opinion that the earliest saints' plays in England, also, were as frequently derived from scriptural as from legendary sources. It is, moreover, likely that the first saints' plays on legendary subjects in England of which we have record were neither the first of their kind in the period attributed to their presentation, nor a notable advance in dramatic art when they were presented. There is nothing in the earliest record of a legendary saint's play, the miracle of St. Katharine, presented by Geoffrey, afterwards Abbot of St. Albans, at Dunstable about 1100, to warrant the inference that it was a novelty, even at that date. Since Geoffrey was at the time awaiting a position as schoolmaster, he was probably within his function, _de consuetudine magistrorum et scholarum_,[3] when he produced the play; and it is to be noticed that when Matthew of Paris writes concerning the matter, about 1240, he appears to be much more interested in an accident which attended the performance than in the mere composition and presentation of what he calls "some play or other of St. Katharine, of the kind that we _commonly_ call Miracles."[4] Indeed, William Fitzstephen, writing some seventy years before Matthew, speaks of such plays of the saints as in his time quite customary. The probabilities are, then, that this first legendary saint's play recorded as acted in England had been preceded by others of its kind, and they in turn by miracles of biblical heroes and by liturgical plays and dramatic tropes of the services of the church. It is not unreasonable to surmise that this legendary kind of miracle, although sometimes used as part of the church service on the saint's day, and originally possessed of serious features, speedily developed characteristics helpful in the progress of the comic drama. All we know of the St. Katharine play is that it was written for secular presentation at a date when no mention is yet made of the public acting of scriptural plays. The dramatist would, however, be more likely to adorn the useful with the amusing in the preparation of a play not necessarily to be performed within the sacred precincts; and while the technique of the legendary miracle was presumably akin from the first to that of the biblical, it is natural to suppose that the plot was handled with larger imaginative freedom.