The symbolical dramas of the seasons stand alone and independent, but it may safely be asserted that drama first arose at the village feasts in close relation to the dance. That dancing, like all the arts, tends to be mimetic is a fact which did not escape the attention of Aristotle[652]. The pantomimes of the decadent Roman stage are a case in point. Greek tragedy itself had grown out of the Dionysiac dithyramb, and travellers describe how readily the dances of the modern savage take shape as primitive dramas of war, hunting, love, religion, labour, or domestic life[653]. Doubtless this was the case also with the _caroles_ of the European festivals. The types of _chanson_ most immediately derived from these are full of dialogue, and already on the point of bursting into drama. That they did do this, with the aid of the minstrels, in the _Jeu de Robin et de Marion_ we have seen[654]. A curious passage in the _Itinerarium Cambriae_ of Giraldus Cambrensis (†1188) describes a dance of peasants in and about the church of St. Elined, near Brecknock on the Gwyl Awst, in which the ordinary operations of the village life, such as ploughing, sewing, spinning were mimetically represented[655]. Such dances seem to survive in some of the _rondes_ or ‘singing-games,’ so frequently dramatic, of children[656]. On the whole, perhaps, these connect themselves rather with the domestic than with the strictly agricultural element in village cult. A large proportion of them are concerned with marriage. But the domestic and the agricultural cannot be altogether dissociated. The game of ‘Nuts in May,’ for instance, seems to have as its kernel a reminiscence of marriage by capture; but the ‘nuts’ or rather ‘knots’ or ‘posies’ ‘in May’ certainly suggest a setting at a seasonal festival. So too, with ‘Round the Mulberry Bush.’ The mimicry here is of domestic operations, but the ‘bush’ recalls the sacred tree, the natural centre of the seasonal dances. The closest parallels to the dance described by Giraldus Cambrensis are to be found in the _rondes_ of ‘Oats and Beans and Barley’ and ‘Would you know how doth the Peasant?’, in which the chief, though not always the only, subjects of mimicry are ploughing, sowing and the like, and which frequently contain a prayer or aspiration for the welfare of the crops[657].