unity was at once provided for the great cosmic drama of the future. And the important motive seems to have been still further emphasized in a lost play performed at Regensburg in 1195, which treated, besides the Prophets and the Creation and Fall of Man, the Creation of the Angels and the Fall of Lucifer[248]. Yet another step towards the completion of the Christmas cycle was taken when the _Prophetae_ and the _Stella_ were brought together in a single drama. Such a merging is represented by two related texts from German sources[249]. One is from a fourteenth-century manuscript now at St. Gall[250]. The structure is of the simplest. The setting of the pseudo-Augustine sermon has altogether disappeared. Eight prophets deliver a speech apiece, announcing their own identities after a naïve fashion—_Ich bin der alte Balaam_, and so forth—which strongly recalls the ‘folk’ or ‘mummers’’ plays. Then follows without break a _Stella_, whose scenes range from the Marriage of the Virgin to the Death of Herod. Far more elaborate is the Christmas play found in the famous repertory of the _scholares vagantes_ from Benedictbeuern[251]. A peculiarity of this is that for the first time Augustine appears _in propria persona_. He presides over the prophecies, taking the place of the _Precentor_ of the Limoges _Prophetae_, and the _Appellatores_ or _Vocatores_ of Laon and Rouen. The only prophets are Isaiah, Daniel, the Sibyl, Aaron, and Balaam, and there is once more a special episode for Balaam’s ass. ‘_Quinto loco procedat Balaam sedens in asina et cantans_: vadam, vadam, ut maledicam populo huic. _Cui occurrat Angelus evaginato gladio dicens_: cave, cave ne quicquam aliud quam tibi dixero loquaris. _Et asinus cui insidet Balaam perterritus retrocedat. Postea recedat angelus et Balaam cantet hoc_: orietur stella ex Iacob, etc.’ A long _disputatio_ follows between Augustine, an _Archisynagogus_, and the prophets, in which at one point no less a person intervenes than the _Episcopus Puerorum_, affording an interesting example of that interrelation between the religious plays and the festivities of the _triduum_ and the Feast of Fools, about which something has already been said[252]. Presently the prophets retire and sit _in locis suis propter honorem ludi_. The _Stella_ extends from the Annunciation to the Flight into Egypt. Here the original play seems to have ended; but a later writer has added a scene in Egypt, in which the idols fall at the approach of the Holy Family, and some fragments adapted from the _Antichristus_, and hardly worked up into anything that can be called a scene.