belonged to city-guilds, they were generally represented in the streets
and squares.

It must be borne in mind by any who would understand the influence of
these plays upon the people, that much in them appearing to us grotesque,
childish, absurd, and even irreverent, had no such appearance in the eyes
of the spectators. A certain amount of the impression of absurdity is
simply the consequence of antiquity; and even that which is rightly
regarded as absurd in the present age, will not at least have produced
the discomposing effects of absurdity upon the less developed beholders
of that age; just as the quaint pictures with which their churches were
decorated may make us smile, but were by them regarded with awe and
reverence from their infancy.

It must be confessed that there is in them even occasional coarseness;
but that the devil for instance should always be represented as a baffled
fool, and made to play the buffoon sometimes after a disgusting fashion,
was to them only the treatment he deserved: it was their notion of
"poetic justice;" while most of them were too childish to be shocked at
the discord thus introduced, and many, we may well hope, too childlike to
lose their reverence for the holy because of the proximity of the
ridiculous.

There seems to me considerably more of poetic worth scattered through
these plays than is generally recognized; and I am glad to be able to do
a little to set forth the fact. I cannot doubt that my readers will be
interested in such fragments as the scope and design of my book will
allow me to offer. Had there been no such passages, I might have regarded
the plays as but remotely connected with my purpose, and mentioned them
merely as a dramatic form of religious versification. I quote from the