y
less vast, and is not less incoherent. Taken together, the Mysteries
comprise over a million verses, and what remains is but a portion
of what was written.

Though the literary value of the Mysteries is slight, except in
occasional passages of natural feeling or just characterisation,
their historical importance was great; they met a national
demand--they constituted an animated and moving spectacle of
universal interest. A certain unity they possessed in the fact that
everything revolved around the central figure of Christ and the
central theme of man's salvation; but such unity is only to be
discovered in a broad and distant view. Near at hand the confusion
seems great. Their loose construction and unwieldy length
necessarily endangered their existence when a truer feeling for
literary art was developed. The solemnity of their matter gave rise
to a further danger; it demanded some relief, and that relief was
secured by the juxtaposition of comic scenes beside scenes of gravest
import. Such comedy was occasionally not without grace--a passage
of pastoral, a song, a naive piece of gaiety; but buffoonery or vulgar
riot was more to the taste of the populace. It was pushed to the
furthest limit, until in 1548 the Parlement of Paris thought fit to
interdict the performance of sacred dramas which had lost the sense
of reverence and even of common propriety. They had scandalised
serious Protestants; the Catholics declined to defend what was
indefensible; the humanists and lovers of classical art in
Renaissance days thought scorn of the rude mediaeval drama. Though
it died by violence, its existence could hardly have been prolonged
for many years. But in the days of its popularity the performance
of a mystery set a whole city in motion; carpenters, painters,
costumiers, machinists were busy in preparation; priests, scholars,
citizens rehearsed their parts; country folk crowded to every
hostelry and place of lodging. On the day preceding the first morning
of performance the personages, duly attired--Christians, Jews,
Saracens, kings, knights, apostles, priests--defiled through the
streets on their way to the cathedral to mass. The vast stage hard
by the church presented, with primitive properties, from right to
left, the succession of places--lake, mountain, manger, prison,
banquet-chamber--in which the action should be imagined; and from
one station to another the actors passed as the play proceeded. At
one end of the sta