Not with shamefastëness but jocundly,
And holly boughs about; and all aside
The brenning fire them eaten and them drink,
And laughen merrily, and maken rout,

And pipe and dancen and them rage; ne swink
Ne nothing else twelve day they wouldë not."

The Mysteries exhibited on holidays, either general Church holidays or days sacred to the memory of some patron saint, were part and parcel of this hearty enjoyment. At York, previous to the year 1426, the revelling and drunkenness at the representation of the Mysteries was such that they had to be discontinued. We have a curious evidence of the amusing character of Mysteries generally in a portion of a Latin story quoted by Mr Wright. Certain persons walking in a meadow " saw before them a vast crowd of people assembled, and heard them now hushed and silent, now bursting into loud laughter. Wondering, therefore, why there was so great a congregation in such a place, they concluded that a performance was going on of those plays that we call miracles." What could be more significant? One class of personages seem to have been special objects of merriment-the devil and his attendant demons got up with horns, tails, claws, and hideous mask. Professor Morley, who holds that the chief interest of the Mysteries was tragic, affirms that the whole endeavour in the make-up of the demons was to render them terrible. I am very far from agreeing with this. The women and children among the spectators might be horrified, as they still are at ugly masks; but a sturdy Englishman out for a holiday and well lined with beer would probably laugh the louder the more shrilly his weaker friends were excited to scream. When we study the demons closely, it becomes obvious that terror was not the sole aim of their existence. Take, for example, the devil of the Coventry Mysteries,' the most serious of our three sets. How does he express himself when cast by God out of heaven ?—

"At thy bidding thy will I werk,
And pass fro joy to painë smert,

A single utterance like this, accompanied doubtless by the sound of a horn, as the blowing of the nose is still rendered in pantomimes, would effectually destroy the devil's influence for terror, at least in that representation, not to say that it would unsettle any serious impression from what preceded. I have noticed two other places in the 'Coventry Mysteries' where the great enemy of mankind expresses his emotion in the same way. So far from helping to make demons more terrible, the Mysteries embodied the hideous ideals of the popular imagination, and raised temporary laughter by making them ridiculous-treated them, for the time being, as so much ludicrous capital. If superstitious fears had been absolutely bodiless before then - if the Mysteries had been the means of clothing the devil in popular imagination with claws, hoofs, horns, and tail-it might have been argued that they did add to the dreadful attributes of his fallen majesty. And even as it is, it may reasonably be maintained that the laughter was temporary, and that the actual representation of the hideous being had a permanent effect of terror. I am inclined, however, to believe that the Mysteries left the fear of the devil where they found it, and simply provided the vulgar with a good day's sport.

4. METRICAL ROMANCES.

The mythopoeic faculty or unstudied imagination of the Middle Ages was occupied in the main with two kinds of matter: the heroism of religion and the heroism of chivalry, miraculous saints and no less miraculous knights. The legends of the saints and the romances of the knights grew out of the same unchastened desire of the natural man after superhuman ideals; the desire to escape from the chilling

limitations to perfection of character and nobility of achievement in actual life. Such, in the broadest view, was the origin of Middle Age romances, religious as well as secular; they were produced by the generating force that created Romulus, Numa, and Egeria, Achilles, Ulysses, and Circe,— a passion for the marvellous that still survives and operates, and promises to bid defiance for many coming generations to all appliances for the discovery and diffusion of verified knowledge. Doubtless in all ages many less generous motives have conspired to the invention and spread of fictions; patron saints have been made wonderful in the eyes of devotees, and ancestors have been magnified to move the bounty of descendants. In most cases, too, the passion has taken a patriotic turn. It was inevitable that men should, in creating heroes, show a preference for their own country and kindred. Still, vanity much less than disinterested love of the marvellous has ever presided over all such creations.

In the voluminous discussions regarding the origin of mediæval romance-whether it was Scaldic, or Arabic, or Classic-too little respect has been shown to the permanent sources of romance in the human mind. It has never required any great impulse to excite those sources to productive activity. The magnificent enthusiasm of religion and chivalry that sent the crusaders to Palestine could not have failed to evoke a frenzy of romantic invention. When the English began to be conscious of a national unity, they made for themselves a fabulous connection with such ancient history as was known to them: derived their government from the Trojans, and their Christianity from Joseph of Arimathea. They provided themselves with a national hero, surrounded him with knights, and engaged him and them in honourable adventures. It is vain to look for a historical basis to the operations of the romantic imagination; this faculty owns no allegiance to fact. Our business, however, is not with romance in general, but with the very humble romances extant in English in the time of Chaucer.

F

Chaucer has burlesqued the metrical romances of the wandering minstrels in his tale of Sir Thopas. He enumerates some of the productions that will bear comparison with his parody

"Men speaken of romans of price

Of Horn Child and of Ypotis,

Of Bevis and Sir Guy,

Of Sir Libeaux and Pleindamour;
But Sir Thopas beareth the flower
Of real chivalry."

All these romances, or at least romances on all these heroes, except Pleindamour, are still in existence; and if they are the same, the parody cannot be said to depart far from the original. They deal with the usual subjects of romance-giants, enchantments, obstructive knights, and invincible champions-and their diction may fairly be described as unmitigated doggerel. The following two stanzas are from 'Lybeaus Disconus,' Le Beau Desconnu, The Fair Unknown (Ritson's Metrical Romances) :

The said Lybeaus, Sir Constable,
Telleth me withouten fable,

What is the knightës name,

That holdeth so in prison

The lady of Synadon

That is so gentle a dame."

All, or nearly all, English romances were translated from the French. In the case of a few unimportant ones, no French originals have been discovered, and they may therefore be presumed to have been written in English to begin with; but all the romances belonging to the great Arthurian cycle were originally composed in French, though some, if not most of them, by Englishmen for Anglo-Norman readers. The Romance of Ywain and Gawain, sons respectively of Urien, King of Gore, and Lot of Orkney, and nephews of Arthur, is ascribed by Ritson to the reign of Richard II. This romance is considerably superior to Horn Child or Lybeaus. The two cousins, and firm friends, are really noble mirrors of knighthood. Their prowess is supreme at Arthur's Court, and they are the very flowers of courtesy and generosity. Ywain (Ewen, or Owen) is the hero of the piece in so far that its object is to relate his adventures. He kills a fair lady's husband, marries her, rides away on promise of returning within a twelvemonth, is tempted by his love of tourneying to stay beyond his time, incurs his lady's fierce displeasure, goes mad, is restored to his wits, and, after many perils and successes, is reunited to the object of his faithful affections. The romance abounds in the marvels of its class. A knight-errant comes to a well of cold water, with a basin of gold hanging near; he takes the basin and sprinkles some water on an emerald stone; immediately there arises a furious tempest of hail, rain, snow, sleet, thunder, and scorching lightning. When the storm subsides, a flock of birds alight near him, and by-and-by comes a knight, with the sound of many horsemen, spurring on eagerly to do battle to the stranger who has dared so to trouble the realm. Ywain's lady gives him an enchanted ring with various wonderful properties