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ill-repressed instinct of conquest and travel, the priests, missionaries, and poets, presented marvellous torments, everlasting perils, invasions to attempt, but without change of place, in unknown regions. The terrestial paradise, which the christian muse showed in perspective to the barbarians, a place of delight where they could arrive only by a long road and after severe hardships, was like that Rome which they had formerly sought at the extremity of the world, amidst a thousand dangers, torch and sword in hand.

The voyage of Ulysses to the Cimmerian fields, and the descent of Eneas to Tartarus, comprehend the primitive idea of these fictions. This idea was communicated to the christian ages by classic literature; it is met with throughout the whole of the middle ages, by the title of visio inferni. The tree of fire, from the branches of which are suspended the souls of the covetous, is the elm to which dreams resort in the vestibule of Tartarus. (Eneid.

B. VI.)

The three works of the trouvère of St. Bradan, Marie of France, and Adam de Ross, remind one of the paradise, the purgatory, and the hell, of the Divina Commedia. St. Paul is conducted to hell by the archangel Michael, as

Dante by Virgil. St. Paul is filled with pity, like Dante. St. Bradan finds Judas, as Dante met with him, the most tortured of the damned. In the trouvère, the pains of Judas are varied (the trouvère fixes the duration of his torments at one hundred and forty thousand years); in the poet his misery is uniform, constant, as eternity.

Cancellieri asserts that Dante derived the ground-work of his composition from the Visions of Hell by Alberic, a monk of Monte Cassino, about the year 1120.

MIRACLES-MYSTERIES-SATIRES.

The miracles and mysteries formed an essential part of the literature of all christian countries, from the tenth to the sixteenth century. Geoffrey, abbot of St. Alban's, composed the miracle of St. Catherine in the language of Oil: this was, as far as we yet know, the first drama written in French. The author had it performed in a church in 1110, and borrowed the copes of St. Alban's abbey for the use of the actors.

The clergy encouraged these exhibitions as conveying public instruction in the history of christianity. The Grecian theatre had the same religious origin. The miracles and mysteries were performed in broad daylight, in churches, in the court-yards of courts of justice, in cemeteries, and in the crossings of streets in towns.

They were announced from the pulpit by the preacher, and frequently an abbot or a bishop presided at them with the crosier in his hand. The entertainment sometimes concluded with fights of animals, jousts, wrestling, dancing, and racing. Clement VI. granted one thousand years' indulgence to those pious persons who should attend the series of sacred dramas at Chester.

These performances were for the commonalty what tournaments were for the nobles. The middle ages observed a much greater number of solemnities than modern times; genuine enjoyments are every where the offspring of national creeds. The revolution has not had the power to create a single durable festival; and if there are still popular holidays in spite of incredulity, they all belong to the old christianity; mankind do not attach themselves strongly to any pleasures but such as are at once recollections and hopes. Philosophy makes men dull; an atheist people has but one festival-that of death.

Theatrical representations passed from the clergy to the laity. The merchant drapers of London exhibited the Creation. Adam and Eve appeared stark naked. The dyers enacted the Deluge. Noah's wife refused to go into the ark, and soundly boxed her husband's ears.

The course of lectures which M. Magnin is at this moment delivering will complete the circle of knowledge respecting the mysteries and the epoch which preceded them-a subject replete with interest and inherent in the bowels of our history.

Satires occupied a large place in the poetry of Norman England. The ladies, whatever respect was paid them by the knights, received very little from the jongleurs; these reproached them with their fondness for dress and dogs. "If you are going to visit a lady, wrap yourself up well, nay, borrow the cowl of St. Peter of Rome; for the moment you enter you will be attacked by dogs of all sorts. You will encounter the little ones leaping like squirrels, and enormous greyhounds rampant as lions. (Abbé de la Rue.)

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The ladies are also abused in the Wedding of the Devil's Daughter," and in the " Apparition of St. Peter," a poem against marriage. The pope, the bishops, the monks, the nobles, the rich, the physicians, the different conditions of life come in for their share in the Roman des Romans, the Bezant de Dieu, the Paternoster des Gourmands, the Litanies des Vilains, the Credo du Juif, the Epitre et l'Evangile des Femmes, and es

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