in one scene, naked and not ashamed, and in the next covered with fig leaves, exactly a topic for criticism. The Devil was a particular favourite with the audience; usually displaying horns, a very wide mouth, large eyes and nose, a flamecoloured beard, a cloven foot, and a tail. A nimble personage, called the Vice, was his constant companion, whose wit consisted in jumping on the devil's back, and in the buffoonery of chastising him with a wooden sword, till his satanic majesty bellowed lustily under the infliction. The altercation of Noah and his wife in the Deluge, is a specimen of the treatment of sacred subjects, when converted into mysteries. "Welcome, wife, into this boat," is the polite salutation of the attentive husband on handing his lady into the ark; "Take thou that for thy note," with the dutiful accompaniment of a box on the ear, is the eloquent rejoinder of the mother of the modern world. These productions, wretched and impious as they seem to us, were deemed serviceable to the interests of religion. Festivals and saints' days were selected for their performance; a pardon of one thousand days was awarded by the Pope, and forty additional days by the bishop of the diocese, to all who resorted in Whitsun week to the representation of the series of mysteries at Chester, " beginning

with the Creation and fall of Lucifer, and ending with the general judgment of the world." Monasteries, abbeys, and churches, were the usual places of their exhibition, and, for some time, the clergy themselves the only performers; but, by degrees, many of the parts fell into the hands of the scholars and choir-boys, attached to the monastic establishments, and on them the entire performance ultimately devolved, the clergy being prohibited, by an injunction from the Mexican council, ratified at Rome in 1589, from ever playing in mysteries again. The parish

clerks of London availed themselves of their ability to read, and performed spiritual plays at Skinner's Well, for three days successively, before Richard the Second, his queen, and the nobles of the realm.

The popularity of miracle-plays and mysteries continued through four centuries. Early in 1500 their performance was, however, more occasional than heretofore. The Chester mysteries were revived for the last time in 1574, and the exhibition, in the reign of James the First, of Christ's Passion, on Good Friday, was the final degradation which subjects so solemn experienced on the stage.

The first departure in mysteries from the literal representation of scriptural and legendary

stories, was the introduction of allegorical characters as auxiliary to the main design. Some attention was then bestowed on plot, description of manners, and discrimination of character. Sin, death, faith, hope, charity, and the leading passions or vices of mankind, personified, at length became the principal agents, and dramas so constructed were called moralities, in contradistinction to mysteries. Moralities made their appearance about the middle of the fifteenth century, from which time they divided popularity pretty equally with mysteries, till the improved understanding of the audience drove both from the stage.

Mysteries naturally paved the way for the adoption of historical or romantic tales, as the subject of a drama; and from moralities, wherein the characters were allegorical, and the plot fanciful, the transition was easy to entertainments of nearer approach to the regular play.

The custom of exhibiting pageants on great public occasions, in honour, and for the recreation, of royalty, powerfully aided the introduction of the drama. Appropriately habited, historical and allegorical characters represented stories in dumb-shew on temporary moveable stages in the streets. In the reign of Henry the Sixth, dialogue and set speeches in verse were

added. Hence may be deduced those most incongruous productions, masques; hence ideas were derived of the introduction of profane characters on the stage, and the mixture, subsequently met with, of pantomime and dialogue in the same play, and the allegorical representation in dumb shew of the matter of the scenes which followed.

It is to the universities, inns of court, and public seminaries, however, that we are indebted for the first regular dramas which our language boasts. The scholars of these establishments assiduously engaged in free translations of the classical models of antiquity, and in the composition and performance of plays constructed on their model. The earliest tragedy, Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, the joint effort of Sackville Lord Buckhurst, and Thomas Norton, was performed at the Inner Temple in 1561-2; and the first comedy, Gammar Gurton's Needle, a ju'venile production of Bishop Still, was acted at Christ's Church, Cambridge, in 1566.

There is a general similarity between all the plays that preceded Shakspeare's dramatic efforts. Their authors had no notion of a plot comprehending one great design, nor of a plot consisting of several actions emanating from the same source, or combining for the promotion of

the same end, consistent with, though varying from, each other. They either ran into the error of framing their story with such bald simplicity, that it was scarcely worthy the name of story at all, or they placed in the same play two, or more, stories unconnected by one single link. Incidents are either made the subject of long and tedious conference, or they follow each other in such quick succession, that actions and their results, which a lapse of time only could produce, stand in immediate contact, so that the passing scene wears the appearance of arbitary arrangement, rather than of a natural progress of events. One of two faults generally marks the concluding act. The denouement is delayed, after the result is obvious, and all interest in it has evaporated, or, the main story being finished, the author's ingenuity is put to the rack to eke out his scene to its prescribed extent, with whatever extraneous circumstances he could graft upon it.

The chorus very commonly formed a portion of the earlier English plays, sometimes taking a part in the performance, sometimes supplying the deficiencies of the action by narrative or explanation, and sometimes performing the office of a moral commentator on the passing events. A more incongruous accompaniment was the cumbrous machinery of the dumb-shew which