In France it was better, but France had something which may fairly be called literature before any other country in Europe, not literature in the highest sense, of course, but something, at any rate, that may be still read with pleasure for its delicate beauty, like “Aucassin and Nicolete,” or for its downright vigor, like the “Song of Roland,” or for its genuine humor, like “Renard the Fox.” There is even one French Miracle Play of the thirteenth century, by the trouvère Rutebeuf, based on the legend of Theophilus of Antioch, which might be said to contain the germ of Calderon’s “El Magico Prodigioso,” and thus, remotely, of Goethe’s “Faust.” Of the next century is the farce of “Patelin,” which has given a new word with its several derivatives to the French language, and a proverbial phrase, _revenons à nos moutons_, that long ago domiciled itself beyond the boundaries of France. “Patelin” rises at times above the level of farce, though hardly to the region of pure comedy. I saw it acted at the Théâtre Français many years ago, with only so much modernization of language as was necessary to make it easily comprehensible, and found it far more than archæologically entertaining. Surely none of our old English Interludes could be put upon the stage now without the gloomiest results. They were not, in my judgment, the direct, and hardly even the collateral, ancestors of our legitimate comedy. On the other hand, while the Miracle Plays left no traces of themselves in our serious drama, the play of Punch and Judy looks very like an impoverished descendant of theirs.