fad also sprang up of writing
everything, even school-books, petitions, and calendars in versified
form, which was known as _virshi_, and imported from Poland to Moscow by
Simeon Polotzky. At that time, also, it was the fashion for school-boys
to act plays as a part of their regular course of study in the schools
in southwest Russia; and in particular, in Peter Moghila's Academy in
Kieff. Plays of a religious character had, naturally, been imported
from western Europe, through Poland, in the seventeenth century, but as
early as the beginning of the sixteenth century certain church
ceremonies in Russia were celebrated in a purely dramatic form,
suggestive of the mystery plays in western Europe. The most curious and
famous of these was that which represented the casting of the Three Holy
Children into the Fiery Furnace, and their miraculous rescue from the
flames by an angel. This was enacted on the Wednesday before Christmas,
during Matins, in Moscow and other towns, the first performance, so far
as is known, having been in the beginning of the sixteenth century, it
being mentioned, in the year 1548, in the finance-books of the
archiepiscopal residence of St. Sophia at Novgorod. The "furnace" was a
circular structure of wood, on architectural lines, gayly painted with
the figures of appropriate holy men; specimens have been preserved, one
being in the Archeological Museum in St. Petersburg.

The second famous "Act" (for such was their title) was known under the
name of "The Riding on the Foal of an Ass," and took place (beginning
with the end of the sixteenth century) in Moscow and other towns,
generally on Palm Sunday. It represented the triumphal entry of Christ
into Jerusalem, and in Moscow it was performed in accordance with a
special ritual by the Patriarch, in the presence of the Tzar himself;
the Patriarch represented Christ, the Tzar led the ass upon which he was
mounted. In other towns it was acted by the archbishops and the
Voevodas. The third, and simplest, of these religious dramas, the "Act
of the Last Judgment," generally took place on the Sunday preceding the
Carnival.

In 1672 Tzar Alexei Mikhailovitch ordered Johann Gregory, the Lutheran
pastor in Moscow, to arrange "comedy acts," and the first pieces acted
before the Tzar on a private court stage were translations from the
German--the "Act of Artaxerxes," the comedy "Judith," and so forth. But
under the influence of southwestern Russia, as already ment