lets of _Mingo Revulgo_ (i.e. Domingo Vulgus, the common
people), and about the same time another dialogue by the same author,
offer examples of a sort resembling the Italian _contrasti_ (see below).

Germany.

The German religious plays in the vernacular, the earliest of which date
from the 14th and 15th centuries, and were produced at Trier,
Wolfenbuttel, Innsbruck, Vienna, Berlin, &c., were of a simple kind; but
in some of them, though they were written by clerks, there are traces of
the minstrels' hands. The earliest complete Christmas play in German,
contained in a 14th-century St Gallen MS., has nothing in it to suggest
a Latin original. On the other hand, the play of _The Wise and the
Foolish Virgins_, in a Thuringian MS. thought to be as early as 1328, a
piece of remarkable dignity, was evidently based on a Latin play. Other
festivals besides Christmas were celebrated by plays; but down to the
Reformation Easter enjoyed a preference. In the same century
miracle-plays began to be performed, in honour of St Catherine, St
Dorothea and other saints. But all these productions seem to belong to a
period when the drama was still under ecclesiastical control. Gradually,
as the liturgical drama returned to the simpler forms from which it had
so surprisingly expanded, and ultimately died out, the religious plays
performed outside the churches expanded more freely; and the type of
mystery associated with the name of the Frankfort canon Baldemar von
Peterweil communicated itself, with other examples, to the receptive
region of the south-west. The Corpus Christi plays, or (as they were here
called) _Frohnleichnamsspiele_, are notable, since that of Innsbruck
(1391) is probably the earliest extant example of its class. The number
of non-scriptural religious plays in Germany was much smaller than that
in France; but it may be noted that (in accordance with a long-enduring
popular notion) the theme of the last judgment was common in Germany in
the latter part of the middle ages. Of this theme _Antichrist_ may be
regarded as an episode, though in 1469 an _Antichrist_ appears to have
occupied at Frankfort four days in its performance. The earlier (12th
century) _Antichrist_ is a production quite unique of its kind; this
political protest breathes the Ghibelline spirit of the reign (Frederick
Barbarossa's) in which it was composed.

Though many of the early German plays contain an element of the
moralities, there were few re