veritable dramas drawn from holy writ or legends of saints. This
developed in the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth
it was prolific in immense dramatic poems which needed several days for
their performance. These were _Mysteries_, as they were termed, or
_Miracles_, wherein comedy and tragedy were interwoven and a great
deed in religious history or sometimes in national history commemorated,
such as the _Mystery of the Siege of Orleans_, by Greban.

FARCES; FOLLIES; MORALITIES.--The comic theatre also existed. It provided
_farces_, which were really little comedies (the most famous was the
_Farce of the Lawyer Patelin_); _follies_, which are farcical
but good-humoured caricatures of students and clerks; and
_moralities_, which are small serious dramas, interspersed with
comedy, having real personages mingled with allegorical ones. The drama
of the Middle Ages was very living and highly original, coming from the
soil and exactly adapted to the sentiments, passions, and ideas of the
people for whom and, a little later, by whom it was written.




CHAPTER VI


THE MIDDLE AGES: ENGLAND

Literature in Latin, in Anglo-Saxon, and in French. The Ancestor of
English Literature: Chaucer.