their
circumstances or their needs might happen to dictate.

[Footnote 150: Ed. Jubinal, 2d ed., Paris, 1874; or ed. Kressner,
Wolfenbuettel, 1885.]

[Sidenote: _Drama._]

The obscure but not uninteresting subject of the links between the
latest stages of classical drama and the earliest stages of mediaeval
belong to the first volume of this series; indeed by the eleventh
century (or before the period, properly speaking, of this book opens)
the vernacular drama, as far as the sacred side of it is concerned,
was certainly established in France, although not in any other
country. But it is not quite certain whether we actually possess
anything earlier than the twelfth century, even in French, and it is
exceedingly doubtful whether what we have in any other vernacular is
older than the fourteenth. The three oldest mystery plays wherein any
modern language makes its appearance are those of _The Ten
Virgins_,[151] mainly in Latin, but partly in a dialect which is
neither quite French nor quite Provencal; the Mystery of _Daniel_,
partly Latin and partly French; and the Mystery of _Adam_,[152] which
is all French. The two latter, when first discovered, were as usual
put too early by their discoverers; but it is certain that they are
not younger than the twelfth century, while it is all but certain that
the _Ten Virgins_ dates from the eleventh, if not even the tenth. In
the thirteenth we find, besides Ruteboeuf's _Theophile_, a _Saint
Nicolas_ by another very well-known _trouvere_, Jean Bodel of Arras,
author of many late and probably rehandled _chansons_, and of the
famous classification of romance which has been adopted above.

[Footnote 151: Ed. Monmerque et Michel, _Theatre Francais au Moyen
Age_. Paris, 1874. This also contains _Theophile_, _Saint Nicolas_,
and the plays of Adam de la Halle.]

[Footnote 152: Ed. Luzarches, Tours, 1854; ed. Palustre, Paris, 1877.]

It was probably on the well-known principle of "not letting the devil
have all the best tunes" that the Church, which had in the patristic
ages so violently denounced the stage, and which has never wholly
relaxed her condemnation of its secular use, attempted at once to
gratify and sanctify the taste for dramatic performances by adopting
the form, and if possible confining it to pious uses. But there is a
school of literary historians who hold that there was no direct
adoption of a form intentionally dramatic, and that the modern sacred
drama--the only d