and girdlers--are lost, though Dr Craig has made the shrewd guess that the subject of the first was the _Assumption_.[687] The story of _Christ's Trial and Crucifixion_ was the theme of the smiths' show, the _Burial_ or the "taking down of God from the Cross" was played by the pinners and needlers, the _Harrowing of Hell_ and the _Resurrection_ was enacted on the stage furnished by the cardmakers, later cappers, and this, with the drapers' _Doomsday_, closes the list of the plays that are known to us. It will thus be seen that the inferior clothing crafts represented the Christmas cycle, and the workers in iron, smiths, pinners, cardmakers, the Passion-Resurrection one, so that we may suppose that the subject of the girdlers' pageant, since they were workers in iron, would be a subject nearly connected with this latter group--possibly the "Maundy" and _the Agony in the Garden_. The shearmen and tailors' pageant of the _Nativity_ and the weavers' _Presentation in the Temple_, both plays whereof the text has been preserved, were discovered by the antiquary, Thomas Sharp, and printed early in the last century, a fortunate circumstance, since the former with all Sharp's collection perished in the fire at Birmingham in 1879. One manuscript alone remains, now in the possession of the broad weavers and clothiers, a small volume of seventeen leaves, one missing, bound in ancient boards and leather, with end-papers of Holbeinesque wood-cuts. The whole--save two songs at the end--is in the handwriting of Robert Croo, by whom it was "newly translate" in 1534. Both these plays are written in many metres, and obviously show the workmanship of many hands. Rhythm and versification often betray the 'prentice; indeed on the whole it is but clumsy writing; and yet here and there that wonderful instrument, the English language, gives out its music though it be stricken with an unsure and careless hand. Isaiah's prologue, the scenes between Simeon and Anna,[688]--even the lines of that sublime braggart, Herod, have a hint of that wonderful quality to which English verse attained when Spenser wrote it. The kernel of the story is told in rough, simple quatrains; here and there--particularly in the comic parts--a rollicking stanza, derived apparently from one employed in the Chester cycle, breaks in; while some portions of the piece have been so worked over that the verse defies metrical analysis.[689] There is no comedy connected with the shepherds' scenes in the Coventry Christmas plays, such as occurs in the Towneley (Wakefield) cycle, where the sheep-stealing episode is the work of a master-hand. Nor is the presentation of their gifts to the Child as charming as the "bob of cherries" passage in the northern dramatist's verses, still the scene is full of the tender feeling, which it never fails to draw forth. "I have nothing," says the first shepherd to Mary,--