. In France all the notaries'
clerks, and the monks in the cloisters as well, used to give
grand performances, dramatic plays in which long scenes were
enacted by the Madonna, the angels, the saints, Christ, and even
by God Himself. In those days, everything was very artless and
primitive. An instance of it may be found in Victor Hugo's drama,
Notre Dame de Paris, where, at the Municipal Hall, a play called
Le Bon Jugement de la Tres-sainte et Gracieuse Vierge Marie, is
enacted in honour of Louis XI, in which the Virgin appears
personally to pronounce her 'good judgment.' In Moscow, during
the prepetrean period, performances of nearly the same character,
chosen especially from the Old Testament, were also in great
favour. Apart from such plays, the world was overflooded with
mystical writings, 'verses'--the heroes of which were always
selected from the ranks of angels, saints and other heavenly
citizens answering to the devotional purposes of the age. The
recluses of our monasteries, like the Roman Catholic monks,
passed their time in translating, copying, and even producing
original compositions upon such subjects, and that, remember,
during the Tarter period!... In this connection, I am reminded of
a poem compiled in a convent--a translation from the Greek, of
course--called, 'The Travels of the Mother of God among the
Damned,' with fitting illustrations and a boldness of conception
inferior nowise to that of Dante. The 'Mother of God' visits
hell, in company with the archangel Michael as her cicerone to
guide her through the legions of the 'damned.' She sees them all,
and is witness to their multifarious tortures. Among the many
other exceedingly remarkably varieties of torments--every
category of sinners having its own--there is one especially
worthy of notice, namely a class of the 'damned' sentenced to
gradually sink in a burning lake of brimstone and fire. Those
whose sins cause them to sink so low that they no longer can rise
to the surface are for ever forgotten by God, i.e., they fade out
from the omniscient memory, says the poem--an expression, by the
way, of an extraordinary profundity of thought, when closely
analysed. The Virgin is terribly shocked, and falling down upon
her knees in tears before the throne of God, begs that all she
has seen in hell--all, all without exception, should have their
sentences remitted to them. Her dialogue with God is colossally
interesting. She supplicates, she will not le