The discussions of the first volume have often wandered far enough from the history of the stage. But two or three tolerable generalizations emerge. The drama as a living form of art went completely under at the break-up of the Roman world: a process of natural decay was accelerated by the hostility of Christianity, which denied the theatre, and by the indifference of barbarism, which had never imagined it. If anything of a histrionic tradition survived, it took the shape of pitiable farce, one amongst many heterogeneous elements in the _spectacula_ of disreputable mimes. For the men of the Middle Ages, however, peasants or burghers, monks or nobles, such _spectacula_ had a constant attraction: and the persistence of the deep-rooted mimetic instinct in the folk is proved by the frequent outcrops of primitive drama in the course of those popular observances which are the last sportive stage of ancient heathen ritual. Whether of folk or of minstrel origin, the _ludi_ remained to the last alien and distasteful to the Church. The degradation of Rome and Constantinople by the stage was never forgotten; nor the association with an heathenism that was glossed over rather than extinct: and though a working compromise inevitably tended to establish itself, it remained subject to perpetual protest from the austerer spirit in the counsels of the clergy. It is the more remarkable that the present volume has to describe a most singular new birth of the drama in the very bosom of the Church’s own ritual. One may look at the event as one will, either as an audacious, and at least partly successful, attempt to wrest the pomps of the devil to a spiritual service, or as an inevitable and ironical recoil of a barred human instinct within the hearts of its gaolers themselves. From either point of view it is a fact which the student of European culture cannot afford to neglect. And apart from its sociological implications, apart from the insight which it gives into the temper of the folk and into the appeal of religion, it is of the highest interest as an object lesson in literary evolution. The historian is not often privileged to isolate a definite literary form throughout the whole course of its development, and to trace its rudimentary beginnings, as may here be done, beyond the very borders of articulate speech.