Christian virgins. He is blackened all over by his imaginary sweethearts. "That is right," comments one of the maids (Roswitha speaking through her lips); "it is the color or Satan, who possesses him." Roswitha wrote six comedies in Latin prose on the model of Terence. Her pictures of vice aimed, as we see, at the teaching of virtue.

Long after this enthusiastic nun's realistic plays followed such medieval mysteries and moralities as are familiar in the dramatic annals of all European countries. Like the English plays these sacred themes were treated in naïve fashion, and quaint contemporary personages and practices were introduced. Thus, Judas tests his thirty pennies; and a vender of quack medicines seeks to unload his ointments on the mourners going to the grave of Jesus with the singing of dirges. The human and secular element came prominently to the fore in the Shrove Tuesday, or Carnival, plays, which flourished particularly at Nuremberg and many of which were written by the cobbler poet, Hans Sachs. The Shrove-Tuesday plays were merely dialogues setting forth some scene or other of noisy fun or quarrel, and were recited in inns and before the great men's doors. Besides Hans Sachs, a barber named Hans Folz was noted for such plays. Jacob Ayrer (died 1569) invented the Singspiel, the germ of the German national opera.

With the seventeenth century the established stage was given over to vapid pomp, to the blood-curdling and bombastic tragedies of Andreas Gryphius (1616–64) and his contemporaries. Gryphius was a man of genius, of almost Shakespearean fibre at bottom, but the terrible events of the Thirty Years' War had exaggerated his naturally gloomy temperament. He grew to love the horrible. And yet he remains as one of the greatest dramatists before Goethe. He had the courage, moreover, to attack contemporary history, and in his "Charles Stuart of England" he depicts that ill-fated monarch as a martyr. This tragedy followed close on the actual execution. Gryphius was the first German to divide his tragedies into five acts. But it is only in his comedies that he became natural and unstilted. In "Peter Squentz" he adapted the familiar interlude of Shakespeare's "Midsum

mer Night's Dream" into a caricature of German bourgeoisie. Bottom the weaver transmuted into Pickelhæring, the court fool, and his comrades comprise a spool-maker, village blacksmith, carpenter and weaver among them. In "Horribilicribrifax," an overdrawn comedy, he shows the swaggering, swearing soldiery of the Thirty Years' War. In "Die Geliebte Dornrose" (The Beloved Briar-Rose), he tells of a village Romeo and Juliet—with happy ending, however. This comedy depicts Silesian village life (in the Silesian dialect).

Petty German village life—already with its military officialism encroaching upon the domestic government—is also the background of "Bauerischer Machiavellus" (Village Machiavel), of Christian Weise (1642-1708). Amusing, indeed, is his portrayal of the scheming schoolmaster, the Gerichtsschulze and the Landschoeppe, and the timid aldermen of Querlequitsch.

Despite Gryphius' acquaintance with Shakespeare, the pedant Gottsched and his school (1700-66) enforced the French rules and denounced the Elizabethan dramatists as barbarians. But Wieland translated Shakespeare's drama; Johann Gottfried Herder, the great linguist and discoverer of the Volkslied, praised Shakespeare and Ossian together in his "Leaves on German Literature and Art;" and Lessing arose to reform by example the German stage.

THE LOST CHILD.

THE earliest known dramatic attempt by a German was by Roswitha (or Hrosvitha), a learned nun of Gandersheim, in the tenth century. It is indeed the earliest in all modern European literature. There was in her day some revival of interest in the Latin classics, in which even the cloistered nuns appear to have shared. To amuse their leisure Roswitha composed some dramatic dialogues which exhibit keen observation of human nature. In one of these a hermit Abraham learns that his adopted daughter, who had eloped with an adventurer, is reduced to the lowest depths of sin and misery. He finds her in a house of ill-fame. He gains access in disguise, but when he meets his daughter, makes himself known.

Abraham. O daughter of my adoption! part of my soul, Maria! do you not recognize the oid man who brought you up? Did I not train you with a father's tenderness for the service of the Son

of God Almighty? Did I not lead you to the fold of the Heavenly Shepherd?

Maria. O God! Woe is me! It is my father Abraham! It is my teacher whose voice I hear.

Abraham. What say you?

Maria. Oh, woe! Oh, misery!

Abraham. Alas! where is that sweet angelic voice which used to sing sweet hymns?

Maria. Gone! Forever gone!

Abraham. Where is your girlish modesty? Where is your virgin purity?

Maria. Lost! Forever lost!

Abraham. Oh! what judgment is before you, unless you, my child, repent! Have you not leaped from the height of heaven to the depth of hell?

Maria. Oh! I am lost!

Abraham. Why did you flee from me? Why did you hide your misery from your father? I would have prayed for you. I would have done penance for your sin.

Maria. Ah, no! After I yielded myself to sin, I did not dare to approach you.

Abraham. O my child! To sin is human, to persist in sin is devilish. One who falls may repent. Not he who stumbles and falls deserves our blame; but one who neglects to rise quickly must be blamed.

Maria (casting herself down). Ah, woe is me! I am lost! Lost! Abraham. Why do you cast yourself down? Why do you lie prostrate and motionless? Arise! Listen to my words.

Maria. I am stricken with terror; I cannot support the weight of your fatherly remonstrance.

Abraham. Think, my daughter, of my tender care of you, and cease to fear.

Maria. I cannot.

Abraham. Is it not for your sake that I have left so pious a calling, and one famed for its submission to regular discipline? Was it not for you that I, hermit as I am, have made myself the boon companion of degraded men? I, so long vowed to silence, have joined in jovial talk, to escape recognition. Why cast your eyes down on the ground? Why refuse to answer and tell me thy thoughts?

Maria. The knowledge of my guilt overwhelms me. I dare not look up.

OLLAND'S greatest contribution to the literature of the world was made by Erasmus, yet that genius stands apart, as he discarded the vernac

ular even in his name and embalmed his learning and wit in racy Latin. By his own acts and wish he practically belonged to the whole of Europe in the sixteenth century. Dutch literature, as commonly understood, presents little of interest before the rise of the picturesque Kamers van Rhetorica (Chambers of Rhetoric) in the fifteenth century. A few names are here enrolled without further treatment. Willem the Minstrel sang of the Fox (Reinecke Fuchs) in Flemish (1250); John I., Duke of Brabant, enriched folksong with his Minneliede; Jakob van Maerlant, the first original Dutch writer (circa 1225-1291), gave forth his "Flowers of Nature," a collection of moral and satirical addresses, his celebrated Rijmbijbel (Rhyming Bible), and his masterpiece, "De Spieghel Historiel" (Mirror of History); Jan van Boendale (1280-1365) wrote a rhyming history of his country; Jan van Heelu indited epic poems on the Battle of Woeronc and the War of Grimbergen; Dirk Potter projected a vast love poem, "Boc der Minnen Loep;" Jean Baptista Houwaert (1533-1599) won fame as the "Homer of Brabant" by his didactic "Pegasides Pleyn" (Palace of Maidens), sixteen books of poetry on earthly love; and the victorious Reformers known as "the Beggars" (Geuzen) gave the world in their volume of battle-songs-"Geuzen Lieden

Boecxken" (1588)—the rough but stirring ballad of Egmont and Horn, the song of the storming of Leyden and the ballad of Heiligula.

Modern Dutch literature practically begins, however, with Anna Byns, who was famous in her day as "the Sappho of Brabant." She was a lay nun, a Catholic schoolmistress of Antwerp about 1500. In both prose and verse she strove to impugn the faith and character of Luther. Then, according to Edmund W. Gosse, "the Dutch language, oscillating before her time between French and German, formless, corrupt, invertebrate, took the shape and comeliness, which none of the male pedants could give it, from the impassioned hands of a woman."

In contrast to this Catholic Sappho may be mentioned Filipo van Marnix, lord of St. Aldegonde (1538-1598), who used both sword and pen for the Calvinists, was a friend of William of Orange, and wrote the Wilhelmuslied (1568), the national hymn of Dutch, as Luther's "Ein' feste Burg" is virtually the national hymn of German liberty and Protestantism.

Meanwhile there flourished throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Chambers of Rhetoric, mediæval literary guilds of burgher condition, adorned with such flowery and mystical titles as the "Marigold," "Alpha and Omega," "Violet Book," "Blossoming in Love," "White Lavender," "Fig Tree," "Corn Flower," "Blue Columbine," and even "Holy Ghost" (Bruges), "Garland of Mary," "Jesus with Balsam" (Ghent). The chief of all came to be the "Eglantine" of Amsterdam. These Kamers held "tournaments of rhetoric," and sixty-six such festivals occurred between 1426 and 1620, the most brilliant being that at Atwerp in 1561, when that town presented a ton of gold for distribution among 1893 rhetoricians. The burgher element predominated in these guilds, for the Northern burgher life had early begun that vigorous growth which led to the town aristocracy of the seventeenth century. Dutch trade and business flourished with the Dutch arms and liberty.

Amsterdam stood at the head of the United Provinces, and there Roemer Pieterssen Visscher (1545-1620), extravagantly