It must be borne in mind that during these early stages of humanism classical models and neo-Latin imitations alike were merely read and not acted. There is no sign whatever that as yet the mediaeval misconception as to the nature of Roman scenic representation had come to an end. It was certainly shared by Nicolas Treveth and probably by both Petrarch and Boccaccio[639]. It was not indeed in these regular dramas that the habit of acting Latin first re-established itself, but in a mixed and far less classical type of play. It is probable that in schools the exercise of reciting verse, and amongst other verse dialogue, had never died out since the time of the Empire. In the fourth century the _Ludus Septem Sapientum_ of the Bordeaux schoolmaster Ausonius, which consists of no more than a set of verses and a ‘_Plaudite!_’ for each sage, was doubtless written for some such purpose[640]. Such also may have been the destiny of the ‘elegiac’ and ‘epic’ comedies and tragedies of which a fair number were produced, from the eleventh century to the thirteenth. These are comedies and tragedies, primarily, in the mediaeval sense. They are narrative poems in form. But in all of them a good deal of dialogue is introduced, and in some there is hardly anything else. Their subject-matter is derived partly from Terence and partly from the stock of motives common to all forms of mediaeval light literature. Their most careful student, Dr. Cloetta, suggests that they were intended for a half-dramatic declamation by minstrels. This may sometimes have been the case, but the capacity and the audience of the minstrels for Latin were alike limited, and I do not see why at any rate the more edifying of them may not have been school pieces[641]. By the fifteenth century it will be remembered, students, who had long been in the habit of performing miracle-plays, had also taken to producing farces, morals, and those miscellaneous comic and satiric pieces which had their origin in the folk-festivals. Many of these were in the vernaculars; but it is difficult to avoid classing with them a group of Latin dialogues and loosely constructed comedies, written in Terentian metres and presenting a curious amalgam of classical and mediaeval themes. Of hardly any of these can it be said positively that they were intended to be acted. This is, however, not unlikely in the case of the anonymous _Columpnarium_, which goes back to the fourteenth century. Pavia probably saw a performance of Ugolini Pisani’s _Confabulatio coquinaria_ (1435), which has all the characteristics of a carnival drollery, and certainly of Ranzio Mercurino’s _De Falso Hypocrita_, which is stated in the manuscript to have been ‘_acta_’ there on April 15, 1437. The _Admiranda_ of Alberto Carrara was similarly ‘_acta_’ at Padua about 1456. The exact way in which these pieces and others like them were performed must remain doubtful. Acting in the strict sense can only be distinctly asserted of