.

Another of these admirers says, evidently alluding to the rite of
baptism,----

Sire, oyez que fait ce fol prestre:
Il prend de l'yaue en une escuele,
Et gete aux gens sur le cervele,
Et dit que partants sont sauves!

Sir, hear what this mad priest does:
He takes water out of a ladle,
And, throwing it at people's heads,
He says that when they depart they are saved!

This piece then proceeds to entertain the spectators with the tortures
of St. Dennis, and at length, when more than dead, they mercifully
behead him: the Saint, after his decapitation, rises very quietly, takes
his head under his arm, and walks off the stage in all the dignity of
martyrdom.

It is justly observed by Bayle on these wretched representations, that
while they prohibited the people from meditating on the sacred history
in the book which contains it in all its purity and truth, they
permitted them to see it on the theatre sullied with a thousand gross
inventions, which were expressed in the most vulgar manner and in a
farcical style. Warton, with his usual elegance, observes, "To those who
are accustomed to contemplate the great picture of human follies which
the unpolished ages of Europe hold up to our view, it will not appear
surprising that the people who were forbidden to read the events of the
sacred history in the Bible, in which they are faithfully and
beautifully related, should at the same time be permitted to see them
represented on the stage disgraced with the grossest improprieties,
corrupted with inventions and additions of the most ridiculous kind,
sullied with impurities, and expressed in the language and
gesticulations of the lowest farce." Elsewhere he philosophically
observes that, however, they had their use, "not only teaching the great
truths of scripture to men who could not read the Bible, but in
abolishing the barbarous attachment to military games and the bloody
contentions of the tournament, which had so long prevailed as the sole
species of popular amusement. Rude, and even ridiculous as they were,
they softened the manners of the people, by diverting the public
attention to spectacles in which the mind was concerned, and by creating
a regard for other arts than those of bodily strength and savage
valour."

_Mysteries_ are to be distinguished from _Moralities_, and _Farces_, and
_Sotties_. _Moralities_ are dialogues where the interlocutors
represented feigned or allegorical p