to the saint even to the last French refrain, after Nicholas has forced the robbers to restitution, we are well over the brink of the comic. By the concluding scene, serious and in Latin of the church, setting forth the conversion of the pagan, the feelings of the congregation are restored to the level of the divine service, momentarily interrupted by the comedy but now resumed. These, and all saints' plays not, like the St. Anne's play, of a cyclic character, were, from the first, dramatic units; they represented a single general plot, generally of a single hero; the action was focussed on the critical period of his life; and a considerable incitement was consequently offered to invention of incident and development of character. A comparative study of the plays concerning St. Nicholas will justify the statement that the dramatist was by way of taking liberties with, or varying, his selection from legend. The Einsiedeln Nicholas play of the twelfth century deals with a different miracle from that dramatized by Hilarius; and of the four Fleury plays of St. Nicholas, probably composed in the same century, the two that deal with these miracles vary the treatment; the other two are on different themes, but all would appear, from the editions which we have of them, to be promising little comedies. The possibilities of this kind of drama are best displayed in still another play of St. Nicholas, written in the vernacular by a Frenchman of Arras, Jean Bodel, about the year 1205. Throwing the traditional legends entirely overboard, he gives his imagination free course with favouring winds of knightly adventure, but over the waters of everyday life. He produces a play at once comic, fanciful, and realistic, the first of its kind--of so excellent a quality that Creizenach says that it would appear as if dramatic poetry were even then well on the way of development from the ecclesiastical model to a romantic kind of art in the style of the later English and Spanish drama: chivalric, fantastic, and realistic.[6] Unfortunately, other plays of this kind, like the _Theophilus_ of Rutebeuf, do not always avail themselves of their chances; but we may in general surmise that such plays in English--and we have evidence of many--contributed as much as the biblical miracle to the cultivation of a popular taste for comedy and the encouragement of inventive power in the handling of dramatic fable. I believe that they contributed more than the pre-Reformation morals, and from an earlier period.