Constantine delivers the Christian Church from persecution. The prologue ends with Perseus giving Andromeda over to the charge of his friend Phineus. The first act represents Constantine's camp and the marshalling of his host.

The second entr'acte treats of the faithless Phineus, intent on securing Andromeda for himself, building a bridge with the bones of the sea-monster. Perseus appears on the winged horse, exhibits the Gorgon's head. Phineus plunges into the sea, his companions are turned to stone. The second act represents the battle of the Milvian Bridge. Maxentius is precipitated into the Tiber, the labarum strikes terror into the hearts of his soldiers, and the Senate of Rome fall prostrate in worship before the triumphant Cross.

The story of Andromeda also serves as prelude to a play of the Sacrifice of Isaac' performed in 1725.

Any one who has seen the Ober-Ammergau, Mittewald, or Brixleg Passion Plays will recognise at once three features of the Medieval Mystery which are preserved in them the chorus singing the intermezzo on the podium; the proscenium enclosing only a third of the stage; and the allegorical tableaux from the Old Testament introducing each scene in the Gospel narrative.

Miracle Plays are not limited to these three spots. I have seen the Life of Our Lord' enacted by strolling companies in the Black Forest, and in the Pyrenees. But perhaps the most curious representation of the last scenes of the sacred history I have witnessed was at Mechlin, a few years ago, on the fête of St. Rumbold. A travelling band of players had erected a large tent with stage in it, in the market-place; and their programme of entertainments consisted of :

1. Tight-rope dancing, tumbling, and performing dogs.

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2. The laughable farce of A Ghost in spite of himself.' 1

3. The Passion and Resurrection of Christ.

It was more than startling to see the spangled sprite of the shining shower,' who pirouetted on the tight-rope, figure half-an-hour later as the Mater Dolorosa, and the human spider, a man in fleshings, who walked backwards on hands and feet, transformed into the Beloved Disciple; but the Brabant peasants seemed aware of no incongruity, and were as ready to weep at the crucifixion as they were to laugh at the dancing dogs. The peasant mind of the present day is constituted like that of their Medieval forefathers, who insisted on the introduction of an element of grotesqueness into every tragedy and religious mystery.

This has been banished from the Ober-Ammergau performance in deference to the taste of Munich visitors; but it survives at Brixleg, where Judas hanging himself, and Malchus pulling his ear to ascertain whether it is fast fixed, elicit roars of laughter. In Mahlmann's tearful tragedy of Herod before Bethlehem' there is a comic chorus of the children over lollipops scattered among them.

But it is in the Opera and the Oratorio that the most flourishing descendants of the old Mystery Plays are to be met with. It is in them that they have touched the ground and arisen with renewed strength. The sacred opera is not known to us in England: its less charming quaker sister, the Oratorio, is preferred. But in Germany, as we shall see presently, it long held its ground, and at the present day Méhul's 'Joseph in Egypt' and Rubinstein's 'Maccabeus,' &c., are played wherever there is an operatic company.2

The English farce of that name translated into Flemish.

2 In 1877, at Berlin, Joseph thrice, The Maccabees five times; at Hanover, Joseph once, Cassel twice, Wiesbaden once, in the season.

At the end of the fifteenth century a new species of dramatic performance came into existence to dispute the This was the school comedy, a The zeal with which, at this

ground with the Mystery. nursling of the learned. period, the Greek and Latin authors were studied led to the performance by scholars of the plays of Terence. Then the learned were seized with ambition to write Latin imitations of the classic authors, and to set their pupils to act them. But these performances were of little influence on the drama, except to emancipate it from the Church. The language was dead, the manners represented belonged to a dead civilisation-there was nothing in them to live or give life.

At the same time, in taverns and in the streets, strolling players, seldom more than three at a time, performed little farces of the meanest merit and most jejune wit. Hans Rosenblut, a master-singer, was renowned as a composer of such pieces. They were performed without stage or costume. Their representatives survive. Whilst writing this chapter, I saw a couple performed at a peasant's wedding near Klein-Laufenburg. One turned on the contrast between the new style of fashionable shoemaker and the old style of cobbler. The other was on the blunders made by a Swabian servant in the service of a baron. These simple plays were the first feeble beginnings of the secular drama. They appeared at the time when the schism between the people and the Church was beginning to show.

But Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of Nürnberg, gave the drama its new direction. Hans Sachs,' says Gervinus, stands at the middle point between the old and the new art; he drew into his poetry history and the whole circle of science and common life, broke the bounds of nationality, and gave German poetry its characteristic

stamp. He was a reformer in poetry as truly as was Luther in religion, and Hutten in politics.' Sachs adapted to the stage alike the stories of the Old and New Testaments, from the Creation to the Redemption, the fables of antiquity, the legends of the Heldenbuch, the novels of Boccaccio, Greek tragedies, Roman comedies, and the follies and crimes of his own time. In his sixty-nine carnival pieces, fifty-two secular comedies, twenty-eight secular tragedies, and fifty-two sacred tragedies and comedies, he broke down the partition which existed between the religious stage and the secular drama, and brought the theatre into sympathy with the citizen life of his period. Hans Sachs' plays show us dramatic art getting out of swaddling-clothes, nothing more. There is no attempt at delineation of character, none at producing effective situations. The comedy of the Children of Eve' shows us the great simplicity of the cobbler-poet. The Almighty appears 'like a condescending but stiff school inspector,' says Tieck, and walks about attended by two angels, examining Adam's children in Luther's catechism. Eve has to take Cain to task for holding out his left to shake hands with God, and for forgetting to doff his cap on His first appearance. It was probably under the direction of Sachs that the first German theatre was erected at Nürnberg, in 1550, by the guild of the master-singers. Augsburg followed the example of Nürnberg. These theatres were without roofs, but the stage was covered, and the patricians occupied chairs on the stage on each side a right they claimed long after the whole house was covered in.

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In France the first was erected by the Brothers of the Passion in the village of S. Maur, near Vincennes, in 1398. In Italy, the old amphitheatres were used. The Brothers of the Passion, 'del gonfalone,' since 1264 when founded, performed annually in the Colosseum. The first wooden theatre erected in London was in 1576.

These theatres, like those for the Mysteries, were without curtain. At the beginning of an act the performers entered, at the end they retired. The drama had not yet conceived the idea of beginning or closing in the midst of a situation.

Adam Puschmann, a pupil of Hans Sachs, also a shoemaker and master-singer, carried the Nürnberg art to Breslau. He wrote a great comedy of Joseph and his Brothers' with valuable stage directions. He particularly urges that all the properties and costumes be got together before the beginning of a performance. The brothers of Joseph are to have coats of one sort, hats and shepherds' staves, Jacob a long grey beard, the angel yellow frizzled hair and a gilt nimbus. Pharaoh must wear royal robes ' and a beautiful royal beard,' Joseph a slashed and puffled dress, parti-red.

At this time, as in the Middle Ages, women were not tolerated on the stage, and the female parts were enacted by boys. Charles V., in an enactment on stage dress, excluded women from appearing on the boards. Philip II. strictly prohibited female performers, but with the introduction of the opera, they became a necessity. The Reformers laid eager hold of the drama, as a lively means of popularising their attacks on Rome. Not only rectors of colleges and professors of universities, but village pastors and superintendents of dioceses, rivalled each other in the composition of pieces for the stage. But it was not only for polemic purposes that they courted Melpomene; they felt that by making a clean sweep of the old religious services of the Church, they had lost one great means of impressing on the minds of the people the great story of Redemption, carried out in the ecclesiastical ritual of the Christian year in a dramatic but educative manner. They therefore sought to make the stage do for