The closing section of this essay may fitly be introduced by a brief retrospect of the conclusions already arrived at. The investigation, however it may have lingered by the way, has not been altogether without its _logos_ or rational framework. The first book began with a study of the conditions under which the degenerate stage of the Roman Empire ceased to exist. The most important of these were the indifference of the barbarians and the direct hostility of the Church. A fairly clean sweep was made. Scarcely a thread of dramatic tradition is to be traced amongst the many and diverse forms of entertainment provided by mediaeval minstrelsy. But the very existence of minstrelsy, itself a singular blend of Latin and barbaric elements, is a proof of the enduring desire of the western European peoples for something in the nature of _spectacula_. In the strength of this the minstrels braved the ban of the Church, and finally won their way to at least a partial measure of toleration from their hereditary foes. In the second book it was shown that the instinct for _spectacula_ had its definitely dramatic side. The ludi of the folk, based upon ancient observances of a forgotten natural religion, and surviving side by side with minstrelsy, broke out at point after point into _mimesis_. Amongst the villages they developed into dramatic May-games and dramatic sword-dances: in their _bourgeois_ forms they overran city and cathedral with the mimicries of the Feast of Fools and the Boy Bishop; they gave birth to a special type of drama in the mask; and they further enriched Tudor revels with the characteristic figures of the domestic fool or jester and the lord of misrule. Upon the folk _ludi_, as upon the _spectacula_ of the minstrels, the Church looked doubtfully. But the mimetic instinct was irresistible, and in the end it was neither minstrels nor folk, but the Church itself, which did most for its satisfaction. The subject of the third book is a remarkable growth of drama within the heart of the ecclesiastical liturgy, which began in the tenth century, and became, consciously or unconsciously, a powerful counterpoise to the attraction of _ludi_ and _spectacula_. So popular, indeed, did it prove that it broke the bonds of ecclesiastical control; and about the thirteenth century a process of laicization set in, which culminated during the fourteenth in the great Corpus Christi cycles of the municipal guilds. The subject-matter, however, remained religious to the end, an end which, in spite of the marked critical attitude adopted by the austerer schools of churchmen, did not arrive until that attitude was confirmed by successive waves of Lollard and Protestant sentiment. Nor was the system substantially affected by certain innovations of the fifteenth century, a tendency to substitute mere spectacular pageantry for the spoken drama, and a tendency to add to the visible presentment of