As for the distribution of rôles, all that can be said, so far as the _débats_ and _dits dialogués_ go, is, that while some of them may conceivably have been represented by more than one performer, none of them need necessarily have been so, and some of them certainly were not. There is generally a narrative introduction and often a sprinkling of narrative interspersed amongst the dialogue. These parts may have been pronounced by an _auctor_ or by one of the interlocutors acting as _auctor_, and some such device must have been occasionally necessitated in the religious drama. But there is really no difficulty in supposing the whole of these pieces to have been recited by a single minstrel with appropriate changes of gesture and intonation, and in _The Harrowing of Hell_, which begins ‘A strif will I tellen of,’ this was clearly the case. The evidences of impersonation given above are of course quite consistent with such an arrangement; or, for the matter of that, with sheer monologue. The minstrel who recited Rutebeuf’s _Dit de l’Erberie_ may readily be supposed to have got himself up in the character of a quack[320]. But the possibilities of secular mediaeval drama are not quite exhausted by the _débats_ and _dits dialogués_. For after all, the written literature which the minstrels have left us belongs almost entirely to those higher _strata_ of their complex fraternity which derived from the thoroughly undramatic Teutonic _scôp_. But if mediaeval farce there were, it would not be here that we should look for it. It would belong to the inheritance, not of the _scôp_, but of the _mimus_. The Roman _mimus_ was essentially a player of farces; that and little else. It is of course open to any one to suppose that the _mimus_ went down in the seventh century playing farces, and that his like appeared in the fifteenth century playing farces, and that not a farce was played between. But is it not more probable on the whole that, while occupying himself largely with other matters, he preserved at least the rudiments of the art of acting, and that when the appointed time came, the despised and forgotten farce, under the stimulus of new conditions, blossomed forth once more as a vital and effective form of literature? In the absence of data we are reduced to conjecture. But the mere absence of data itself does not render the conjecture untenable. For if such rudimentary, or, if you please, degenerate farces as I have in mind, ever existed in the Middle Ages, the chances were all against their literary survival. They were assuredly very brief, very crude, often improvised, and rarely, if ever, written down. They belonged to an order of minstrels far below that which made literature[321]. And one little bit of evidence which has not yet been brought forward seems to point to the existence of something in the way of a secular as well as a religious mediaeval drama. In the well-known Wyclifite sermon against miracle plays, an