the name of Calliopius, a third- or fourth-century grammarian through whose hands the text of Terence has passed, was taken for that of a _recitator_ contemporary with the poet, and the _Vita Oxoniensis_ goes so far as to describe him as a powerful and learned man, who read the comedies aloud in the senate[622]. The same complete ignorance of things scenic declares itself in the notions attached to the terms _tragoedia_ and _comoedia_, not only vulgarly, but in the formal definitions of lexicographers and encyclopaedists[623]. The characteristics which really differentiate the drama from other forms of literature, dialogue and scenic representation, drop out of account, the latter entirely, the former very nearly so. Both tragedy and comedy are regarded as forms of narrative. Tragedy is narrative which concerns persons of high degree, is written in a lofty style, and beginning happily comes to a sad conclusion. Comedy, on the other hand, concerns itself with ordinary persons, uses humble and everyday language, and resolves its complications in a fortunate ending[624]. Even these distinctions are not all consistently maintained, and the sad or happy event becomes the only fixed and invariable criterion[625]. The origin of such conceptions is to be found partly in the common derived classical use of _tragoedia_ and _comoedia_ to describe tragic and comic events as well as the species of drama in which these are respectively represented; partly in a misunderstanding of grammarians who, assuming the dialogue and the representation, gave definitions of tragedy and comedy in relation to each other[626]; and partly in the solecism of the fifth-century epic writer Dracontius, who seems to have called his _Orestes_ a tragedy, merely because it was from tragedies that the material he used was drawn[627]. The _comoedia_ and _tragoedia_ of the Latin writers, thus defined, was extended to all the varieties of narrative, in the widest sense of the word. The epics of Lucan and Statius, the elegies of Ovid, are _tragoediae_; the epistles of Ovid, the pastoral dialogues of Virgil, are _comoediae_; the satires of Horace, Persius, Juvenal, are one or the other, according to the point of view[628]. It is curious that, with all this wide extension of the terms, they were not applied to the one form of mediaeval Latin composition which really had some analogy to the ancient drama; namely to the liturgical plays out of which the vernacular mysteries grew. These must have been written by learned writers: some of them were probably acted by schoolboys trained in Terence; and yet, if Hrosvitha, as she should be, is put out of the reckoning, no inward or outward trace of the influence of classical tragedy or comedy can be found in any one of them. In the manuscripts, they are called _officium_, _ordo_, _ludus_, _miraculum_, _repraesentatio_ and the like, but very rarely _comoedia_ or _tragoedia_, and never before 1204[629]. From the Latin