The harper continued throughout the Middle Ages to be the most dignified of the minstrel craft, the reciter, and often the composer, of heroic legend and historical tale, of wild romance and amorous song. Frequently, and perhaps especially in the case of the higher class of harpers, he travelled alone, as in the cases which we have already seen of Baldulf, and Alfred, and Anlaff. But he also often associated himself with a band of minstrels, who filled up the intervals of his recitations and songs with their music, much as vocal and instrumental pieces are alternated in our modern concerts. With a band of minstrels there was also very usually associated a mime, who amused the audience with his feats of agility and leger-de-main. The association appears at first sight somewhat undignified--the heroic harper and the tumbler--but the incongruity was not peculiar to the Middle Ages; the author of the "Iliad" wrote the "Battle of the Frogs,"--the Greeks were not satisfied without a satiric drama after their grand heroic tragedy; and in these days we have a farce or a pantomime after Shakspeare. We are not all Heraclituses, to see only the tragic side of life, or Democrituses, to laugh at everything; the majority of men have faculties to appreciate both classes of emotion; and it would seem, from universal experience, that, as the Russian finds a physical delight in leaping from a vapour-bath into the frozen Neva, so there is some mental delight in the sudden alternate excitation of the opposite emotions of tragedy and farce. If we had time to philosophise, we might find the source of the delight deeply seated in our nature:--alternate tears and laughter--it is an epitome of human life! In the accompanying woodcut from a Late Saxon MS. in the British Museum (Cott. Tiberius C. vi.) we have a curious evidence of the way in which custom blinded men to any incongruity there may be in the association of the harper and the juggler, for here we have David singing his Psalms and accompanying himself on the harp, the dove reminding us that he sang and harped under the influence of inspiration. He is accompanied by performers who must be Levites; and yet the Saxon illuminator was so used to see a mime form one of a minstrel band, that he has introduced one playing the common feat of tossing three knives and three balls. [Illustration: _Saxon Band of Minstrels._]