prose. One drama, and only one, of the fourteenth century,
chooses another heroine than our Lady--the _Histoire de Griselidis_,
which presents, with pathos and intermingling mirth, those marvels
of wifely patience celebrated for other lands by Boccaccio, by
Petrarch, and by Chaucer.

The fifteenth-century Mystery exhibits the culmination of the
mediaeval sacred drama. The word _mystere_,[2] first appropriated
to tableaux vivants, is applied to dramatic performances in the royal
privilege which in 1402 conferred upon the association known as the
_Confrerie de la Passion_ the right of performing the plays of our
Redemption. Before this date the Blessed Virgin and the infant Jesus
had appeared upon the scene. The Mystery presents the course of sacred
story, derived from the Old and the New Testaments, together with
the lives of the saints from apostolic times to the days of St. Dominic
and St. Louis; it even includes, in an extended sense, subjects from
profane history--the siege of Orleans, the destruction of Troy--but
such subjects are of rare occurrence during the fifteenth century.

[Footnote 2: Derived from _ministerium_ (_metier_), but doubtless
often drawing to itself a sense suggested by the _mysteries_ of
religion.]

For a hundred years, from 1450 onwards, an unbounded enthusiasm for
the stage possessed the people, not of Paris merely, but of all France.
The _Confreres de la Passion_, needing a larger repertoire, found
in young ARNOUL GREBAN, bachelor in theology, an author whose vein
was copious. His _Passion_, written about the middle of the fifteenth
century, embraces the entire earthly life of Christ in its thirty-four
thousand verses, which required one hundred and fifty performers and
four crowded days for the delivery. Its presentation was an
unprecedented event in the history of the theatre. The work of Greban
was rehandled and enlarged by Jean Michel, and great was the triumph
when it was given at Angers in 1486. Greban was not to be outdone
either by his former self or by another dramatist; in collaboration
with his brother Simon, he composed the yet more enormous _Actes des
Apotres_, in sixty-two thousand lines, demanding the services of five
hundred performers. When presented at Bourges as late as 1536, the
happiness of the spectators was extended over no fewer than forty
days. The Mystery of the Old Testament, selecting whatever was
supposed to typify or foreshadow the coming of the Messiah, is onl