At any rate, if there was any hope in the mind of any ecclesiastical person at any time of confining dramatic performances to sacred subjects, that hope was doomed to disappointment, and in France at least to very speedy disappointment. The examples of Mystery or Miracle plays which we have of a date older than the beginning of the fourteenth century are not numerous, but it is quite clear that at an early time the necessity for interspersing comic interludes was recognised; and it is needless to say to any one who has ever looked even slightly at the subject that these interludes soon became a regular part of the performance, and exhibited what to modern ideas seems a very indecorous disregard of the respect due to the company in which they found themselves. The great Bible mysteries, no less and no more than the miracle plays of the Virgin[153] and the Saints, show this characteristic throughout, and the Fool's remark which pleased Lamb, "Hazy weather, Master Noah!" was a strictly legitimate and very much softened descendant of the kind of pleasantries which diversify the sacred drama of the Middle Ages in all but its very earliest examples. [Footnote 153: Several of these miracles of the Virgin will be found in the volume by Monmerque and Michel referred to above: the whole collection has been printed by the Societe des Anciens Textes. The MS. is of the fourteenth century, but some of its contents may date from the thirteenth.] It was certain, at any rate in France, that from comic interludes in sacred plays to sheer profane comedy in ordinary life the step would not be far nor the interval of time long. The _fabliaux_ more particularly were farces already in the state of _scenario_, and some of them actually contained dialogue. To break them up and shape them into actual plays required much less than the innate love for drama which characterises the French people, and the keen literary sense and craft which characterised the French _trouveres_ of the thirteenth century. [Sidenote: _Adam de la Halle._] The honour of producing the first examples known to us is assigned to Adam de la Halle, a _trouvere_ of Arras, who must have been a pretty exact contemporary of Ruteboeuf, and who besides some lyrical work has left us two plays, _Li Jus de la Feuillie_ and _Robin et Marion_.[154] The latter, as its title almost sufficiently indicates, is a dramatised _pastourelle_; the former is less easy to classify, but it stands in something like the same relation to the personal poems, of which, as has just been mentioned in the case of Ruteboeuf himself, the _trouveres_ were so fond. For it introduces himself, his wife (at least she is referred to), his father, and divers of his Arras friends. And though rough in construction, it is by no means a very far-off ancestor of the comedy of manners in its most developed form. [Footnote 154: Besides the issue above noted these have been separately edited by A. Rambeau. Marburg, 1886.]