wrong if we assume them to have been beast-masks, and to have taken the place of the actual skins and heads of sacrificial animals, here, as so often, worn at the feast by the worshippers. An attempt has been made to find an oriental origin for the Feast of Fools[1153]. Gibbon relates the insults offered to the church at Constantinople by the Emperor Michael III, the ‘Drunkard’ (842-67)[1154]. A noisy crew of courtiers dressed themselves in the sacred vestments. One Theophilus or Grylus, captain of the guard, a mime and buffoon, was chosen as a mock ‘patriarch.’ The rest were his twelve ‘metropolitans,’ Michael himself being entitled ‘metropolitan of Cologne.’ The ‘divine mysteries’ were burlesqued with vinegar and mustard in a golden cup set with gems. Theophilus rode about the streets of the city on a white ass, and when he met the real patriarch Ignatius, exposed him to the mockery of the revellers. After the death of Michael, this profanity was solemnly anathematized by the council of Constantinople held under his successor Basil in 869[1155]. Theophilus, though he borrowed the vestments for his mummery, seems to have carried it on in the streets and the palace, not in the church. In the tenth century, however, the patriarch Theophylactus won an unenviable reputation by admitting dances and profane songs into the ecclesiastical festivals[1156]; while in the twelfth, the patriarch Balsamon describes his own unavailing struggle against proceedings at Christmas and Candlemas, which come uncommonly near the Feast of Fools. The clergy of St. Sophia’s, he says, claim as of ancient custom to wear masks, and to enter the church in the guise of soldiers, or of monks, or of four-footed animals. The superintendents snap their fingers like charioteers, or paint their faces and mimic women. The rustics are moved to laughter by the pouring of wine into pitchers, and are allowed to chant _Kyrie eleison_ in ludicrous iteration at every verse[1157]. Balsamon, who died in 1193, was almost precisely a contemporary of Belethus, and the earlier Byzantine notices considerably ante-date any records that we possess of the Feast of Fools in the West. A slight corroboration of this theory of an eastern origin may be derived from the use of the term ‘patriarch’ for the _dominus festi_ at Laon and Avallon. It would, I think, be far-fetched to find another in the fact that Theophilus, like the western ‘bishops’ of Fools, rode upon an ass, and that the _Prose de l’Âne_ begins: ‘Orientis partibus, adventavit asinus.’