as a name for the religious plays which he is condemning[528]. In the fifteenth century, again, although ‘interlude’ is of course not one of the commonest terms for a miracle-play, yet I find it used for performances probably of the miracle-play type at New Romney in 1426 and at Harling in 1452, while the jurats of the former place paid in 1463 for ‘the play of the interlude of our Lord’s Passion[529].’ The term, then, appears to be equally applicable to every kind of drama known to the Middle Ages. As to its philological derivation, both the _New English Dictionary_ and Dr. Ward treat it as a _ludus_ performed in the intervals of (_inter_) something else, although they do not agree as to what that something else was. For the performance of farces ‘between the acts of the long miracle-plays’ there is no English evidence whatever[530]. The farcical episodes which find a place in the Towneley plays and elsewhere are in no way structurally differentiated from the rest of the text. There are some French examples of combined performances of farces and miracles, but they do not go far enough back to explain the origin of the word[531]. A certain support is no doubt given to the theory of the _New English Dictionary_ by the ‘mirry interludes’ inserted in Sir David Lyndsay’s morality _Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits_, but, once more, it is difficult to elucidate a term which appears at the beginning of the fourteenth century from an isolated use in the middle of the sixteenth. Dr. Ward’s hypothesis is perhaps rather more plausible. No doubt plays were performed at court and elsewhere between the banquet and the ‘void’ or cup of spiced drink which followed later in the evening, and possibly also between the courses of the banquet itself[532]. But this fact would not differentiate dramatic _ludi_ from other forms of minstrelsy coming in the same intervals, and the fact that miracle-plays are called interludes, quite as early as anything else, remains to be accounted for. I am inclined myself to think that the force of _inter_ in the combination has been misunderstood, and that an _interludium_ is not a _ludus_ in the intervals of something else, but a _ludus_ carried on between (_inter_) two or more performers; in fact, a _ludus_ in dialogue. The term would then apply primarily to any kind of dramatic performance whatever.