and the final discovery of the stolen sheep, are represented in the broadest style of caricature, which is heightened by the pointed allusions to contemporary manners, and even to local circumstances and events. While the shepherds are rejoicing over the recovery of their lost property, an angel suddenly enters on the stage, and announces the birth of the Redeemer, and the play of the Mystery goes on as usual. Such are the scenes to which the term farce was first applied.

In France, these farces began to be separated from the Mysteries in the course of the fifteenth century, a circumstance which arose partly from the existence in that country of certain joyous societies or clubs. One of the oldest of these societies was that of the clerks of the Bazoche, or lawyers' clerks of the Palace of Justice, who had their president, a sort of king of misrule, and, among other ceremonies, performed drolleries of the kind we have been describing. This society had existed from the fourteenth century. Early in the reign of Charles VI., that is, about the end of the fourteenth century, there was formed at Paris another society of young people of education and mirthful disposition, who took the name of Enfans sans Souci, (or Careless Boys,) and chose a chief, to whom they gave the title of Prince des Sots, (the Prince of Sots, or Fools.) While the Bazochians, as the others called themselves, performed their farces, the Enfans sans Souci got up a sort of dramatic satires, which they called Sotties, which had sufficient analogy with the others to excite considerable jealousy, for it appears that each had obtained a privilege for the sole performance of their peculiar representations. The jealousy between them was finally appeased by a sort of treaty, whereby the Bazochians gave their rivals the permission to perform farces, and the Enfans sans Souci allowed the Bazochians to perform sotties. The Bazochians, meanwhile, had invented a new class of dramatic compo

sitions, which they called Moralities, and in which they sometimes introduced real personages, and at others allegorical personages, such as Good Advice, Instruction, Discipline, Luxury, etc. These various productions, especially the farces, soon became extremely popular in France, and great numbers of them were printed in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, and many of them are preserved, though they are regarded among the rare productions of the popular literature of the age, and fetch high prices among collectors. The character of these farces was entirely identical with the humorous scenes which had been introduced into the Mysteries, and they were equally barren of invention. A popular story, an ancient fable, a contemporary adventure-any thing of this kind served for a plot. Many of them are mere tavern scenes; others expose family quarrels and domestic mishaps. The adventures of two rogues, one of whom steals a tart from a pastry-cook, while the other is caught in the attempt to follow his example, are the subject of one farce. In another, the wives, dissatisfied with their husbands because they were growing too old for them, discover a method of making them young again. Sometimes the scene is laid in a court of law. But the most common subjects are love intrigues, and these, as well as the general character of these pieces, speak little for the morality of the age in which they were composed. In one of these farces, the wife sends her good man to the tavern to fetch wine, while she enjoys the company of her amoureux; and the repeated return of the husband to ask some frivolous question relating to his errand causes many disagreeable interruptions to the confidence of the lovers, in which the mirth of the piece consists. The Sotties and Moralities were more fanciful and extravagant in their plan, but they always combined more or less of satire on the character and condition of the age. The title of one of these

pieces will be sufficient to give a notion of their general character; it is: 'A new Morality of the Children of Now-a-days, (Maintenant,) who are the scholars of Once-good, (Jabien,) who shows them how to play at cards and at dice, and to entertain Luxury, whereby one comes to Shame, (Honte,) and from Shame to Despair, (Desespoir,) and from Despair to the gibbet of Perdition, and then turns himself to Good-doing.' All these personifications, Now-a-days, Oncegood, Luxury, Shame, Despair, Perdition, and Good-doing, are personages in the play. This arbitrary personification is sometimes carried to an extraordinary length. The three personages in one of these Moralities are Everything, (Tout,) Nothing, (Rien,) and Everybody, (Chacun.) The idea of personifying Nothing on the stage is certainly ingenious, and could hardly have entered the head of any body but one of the Enfans sans Souci.

For some reason or other, the Moralities and Sotties found more imitators in England (when at the beginning of the sixteenth century these compositions were introduced there) than the farces. Perhaps this arose in a great measure from the general preoccupation of people's minds with the religious and social revolution which was then in progress, and the aptness of a morality or a sottie for conveying instruction or reproof. The fashion for this class of dramatic compositions did not, however, last very long in England, and, as the Mysteries also went out of repute at the time of the Reformation, their place was supplied gradually by a new class of plays. The reformers saw at once the advantage which might be taken of the stage in spreading in a popular form their principles and opinions, although they were shocked by the irreverence and profanity of the representations which had previously occupied it, and they introduced in place of these, plays in which were acted by personages histories of different kinds which illustrated the crimes and evils of the Papal govern

ment. Such was the play of King John, by the celebrated Bishop Bale, and other similar compositions might be mentioned. These, however, were heavy and dull, and they wanted that principal element of popularity- the comic scenes which had been the great support of the Mysteries. But the taste for dramatic performances was now so strongly established, that, as these disappeared from the stage, they were succeeded by plays which differed from them only in subject, and which differed from the farces in the much greater extent of their outline. They also formed a feature of the new and more masculine character of the literature of the age. It was, however, nothing more than the Mysteries enlarged, and their subjects changed; for the new playwrights only took stories from profane history, or from romance, or from the narratives of the story-tellers, and arranged them so as to be represented by personages, and they followed so closely the old plan that they introduced into these histories and stories the same sort of comic scenes, and in the same manner, which, indeed, had been preserved in the Sotties and Moralities, where, in consequence of these comic scenes being given ordinarily, as in the Mysteries, to the more vicious or the more foolish of the personages of the piece, these characters were termed, technically, the Vices, or the Fools of the play. The Moralities themselves, which in England took the more scholastic title of Interludes, which had, indeed, been sometimes given in the previous period to the Mysteries, gradually ran into this new form of composition. The struggle between the Interlude, or Morality, and the new class of drama, was going on during the earlier part of the reign of Elizabeth; and although several attempts had already been made, the latter was not brought to its perfect form until the middle of her reign. Soon after that period it was raised to its most glorious and elevated point by the genius of Shakspeare. But even in Shakspeare

himself we still see the influence of the old medieval forms, the boldness of the personification, the carelessness of the dramatic unities, the reckless anachronisms, and, especially, the interweaving of the favorite comic scenes with the most serious and even tragical plotsthose characteristics, indeed, which the foreign critics of Shakspeare have so often misunderstood. It may be added, that the old Mysteries were still performed to the lower classes in a debased form by mountebanks in booths at fairs, though they had lost all their former importance; the memory of which, however, was still preserved in the use of the term a play, a farce, etc., and in such phrases as to play, to bring on the stage, and the like, which we still pre

serve.

Our sketch of the history of the English drama ends with the close of the medieval period; but we may cast a glance at what was going on in the literature of neighboring countries while in England it was experiencing this won

derful development. In Germany, the same kind of development was showing itself more feebly, and there was there, contemporary with Shakspeare, a drama which differed from his mainly in its want of energy and vitality. In fact, it did not live long. In France, the development itself was wanting. The Moralities and other plays of that class gradually became obsolete, and had no successors but the mere routine of masques and court pageantry. The French can hardly be said to have possessed a stage of their own, until, in the following century, they formed one upon the model of the ancients, which was formal and cold; and though France has since had her great and perfect dramatists, she cannot be said to possess, like England, a national drama, which has grown up and firmly rooted itself in the genius of the people, and the first seed of which, as before observed, was sown in the Mysteries of the middle ages.

RENAN'S

THE times in which we live are eminently progressive. Science awaking from her slumber of ages is pressing onward with giant strides towards a goal which an eternity is too short to reach, because the mind of the INFINITE must ever remain even to the highest and most intellectual of created beings, an unfathomable mystery. Yet has controlled the great steam-power; making it subservient to ends of industry and pleasure; he has arrested the rapid lightning in its course, and now converses, in words that burn, with the North, the South, the East, and the West. Like Puck, he can place a

man

girdle round the earth in forty minutes.' Astronomy, so long at a standstill, has advanced of late rapidly; no sooner have modern experiments shown the close analogy between electricity and magnetism, and discovered the part these subtle forces play in the animal and vegetable economy of our globe, than it has come to our knowledge that the solar atmosphere, that great source of light and vitality, comprises in a state of vapor most of the known and some of the hitherto unknown metallic ingredients of our globe. And we indeed have little doubt that that which was termed by the great Newton at

traction of gravitation will one of these days be proved synonymous with magnetic or electric affinity; for all true science tends towards unity, as does the truth in each religion ever point towards HIM who is truth itself.

Not the least important sign of these progressive times is the inner or spiritual movement which pervades each sect or branch of the great Catholic church of CHRIST. Scarcely has Anglo-Saxon orthodoxy recovered from the shock experienced from the sacrilegious attempts of the authors of 'Essays and Reviews' to throw doubt upon the infallibility of the thirty-nine articles, when there appears no less than a Bishop-Colenso who makes a daring attack on the veracity of the letter of the sacred text itself, boldly denying plenary inspiration to Moses.

a better Christian than

many

Almost simultaneously, too, from amid the well-nigh pagan darkness of a rival sect, the Church of Rome, has arisen in the person of M. Renan, a bright light, and we believe in very truth who swing censers of incense to the sound of silver bells in adoration of the bread they profess to believe is the actual body of our blessed LORD, forgetting that while clothed in His divine humanity the SAVIOUR trod the earth, He never permitted His disciples to worship HIм as GOD.

M. Renan (notwithstanding the unfair prejudices existing against his work) has done great service to the cause of the MASTER he so dearly loves. He has proved incontrovertibly a fact strenuously denied by Strauss and other learned infidels, the great fact of the existence and real personality of JESUS. True that in words he denies the divinity of the LORD; but this does not prevent him from eulogizing in the most glowing terms the divinity of His character and mission. And how much better, is it not, to raise a mortal to the skies' than, as is daily done in the churches, to drag the DEITY down to a level with ourselves to suppose HIм

actuated in His dealings with mankind by revenge, anger, and cruelty! How far more divine is M. Renan's JESUS than the God of orthodoxy!!

The one great exception which may be taken to this book is on account of the author's obstinate and irrational persistence in ignoring all that may be termed supernatural or miraculous. This fixed idea causes him occasionally to speak in a manner if not actually ridiculous, certainly puerile, of the miracles of JESUS. For instance, referring to the raising of Lazarus, he admits that 'something took place at Bethany which was regarded as a resurrection.'

'Ir seems that LAZARUS was sick, and that it was indeed in consequence of a message from his alarmed sisters, that JESUS left Perea.* The joy of His coming might recall LAZARUS to life. Perhaps also the ardent desire to close the mouth of those who furiously denied the divine mission of their friend, may have carried these enthusiastic persons beyond all bounds. Perhaps LAZARUS, still pale from his sickness, caused himself to be swathed in grave-clothes, as one dead, and shut up in his family tomb. the rock, into which they entered through a These tombs were large chambers cut in square opening which was closed by an

enormous flat stone. MARTHA and MARY came out to meet JESUS, and, without permitting HIM to enter Bethany, conducted HIM to the sepulchre. The emotion which JESUS experienced at the tomb of His friend, whom He thought dead, may have been mistaken by the witnesses for that groaning, that trembling ‡ which accompanies miracles; popular opinion holding that the divine virtue is in man an element, as it were, epileptic and convulsive. JESUS (still following the hypothesis above enunciated)

desired to see once more him whom He had LAZARUS came forth with his grave-clothes loved, and, the stone having been removed, and his head bound about with a napkin.’

Truly having read this page of perhaps's, one is tempted to exclaim with Arago: 'None are so credulous as the incredulous!' In this place we trust it