The chief of these forces is, of course, the influence of classical comedy and tragedy. These, as vital forms of literature, did not long survive the fall of the theatres, with which, indeed, their connexion had long been of the slightest. In the East, a certain tradition of Christian book dramas begins with the anti-Gnostic dialogues of St. Methodius in the fourth century and ends with the much disputed Χριστὸς Πάσχων in the eleventh or twelfth[613]. It is the merest conjecture that some of these may have been given some kind of representation in the churches[614]. In the West the _Aulularia_ of Plautus was rehandled under the title of _Querolus_ at the end of the fourth century, and possibly also the _Amphitruo_ under that of _Geta_[615]. In the fifth, Magnus, the father of Consentius, is said by Sidonius, as Shakespeare is said by Ben Jonson, to have ‘outdone insolent Greece, or haughty Rome[616].’ Further the production of plays cannot be traced. Soon afterwards most of the classical dramatists pass into oblivion. A knowledge of Seneca or of Plautus, not to speak of the Greeks, is the rarest of things from the tenth century to the fourteenth. The marked exception is Terence who, as Dr. Ward puts it, led ‘a charmed life in the darkest ages of learning.’ This he owed, doubtless, to his unrivalled gift of packing up the most impeccable sentiments in the neatest of phrases. His vogue as a school author was early and enduring, and the whole of mediaevalism, a few of the stricter moralists alone dissenting, hailed him as a master of the wisdom of life[617]. At the beginning of the eleventh century, Notker Labeo, a monk of St. Gall, writes that he has been invited to turn the _Andria_ into German[618]. Not long before, Hrotsvitha, a Benedictine nun of Gandersheim in Saxony, had taken Terence as her model for half a dozen plays in Latin prose, designed to glorify chastity and to celebrate the constancy of the martyrs. The dramaturgy of Hrotsvitha appears to have been an isolated experiment and the merest literary exercise. Her plays abound in delicate situations, and are not likely to have been intended even for cloister representation[619]. Nor is there much evidence for any representation of the Terentian comedies themselves. A curious fragment known as _Terentius et Delusor_ contains a dialogue between the _vetus poeta_ and a _persona delusoris_ or mime. The nature of this is somewhat enigmatic, but it certainly reads as if it might be a prologue or _parade_ written for a Terentian representation. In any case, it is wholly unparalleled[620]. In fact, although the Middle Ages continued to read Terence, the most extraordinary ideas prevailed as to how his dramas were originally produced. Vague reminiscences of the pantomimic art of later Rome led to the mistaken supposition that the poet himself, or a _recitator_, declaimed the text from a _pulpitum_ above the stage, while the actors gesticulated voicelessly below[621]. By a further confusion