Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. MIRACLE PLAYS ENUMERATION. English literature is fortunate in the survival of four of her Mystery cycles, — of five, indeed, if to Cornwall be accorded an English recognition. Yet these are but a portion, and the smaller portion, of Great Britain's original store. The sea of time has an indiscriminate appetite, and swallows, with equal gusto, an yEschylean trilogy and the dramatic patchwork of blundering old monks. A little wreckage from the sunken cycles hate been picked up by diligent antiquarians, — the Dublin Abraham play, the Newcastle-on-Tyne Noah play, and by the side of these have drifted ashore other stray pageants with a cyclic suggestion abeuj: them, an- indefinable air of missing something, like teaspoons that have outworn their set. There are chance notices, too, in out-of-the-way old parchments, of cycles whose manuscripts have long since gone ta fatten church- tower rats, and doubtless there ere still other cycles, once the boast of goodly towns, that have left of themselves not the faintest record or tradition. It is strangest of all that no London cycle has been preserved. Beside the long and elaborate series acted there by the parish clerks, the "joly Absolons," that dissipated series which required a week and a day.for presentation, there seems to have been a secondary London group, a three-days' performance, in addition to a number of isolated pageants pertaining in one way or another to the metropolis. There was a conspicuous Beverly cycle of thirty-six Corpus Christi plays, a list of whose titles, nearly corresponding to those of the York series, is extant. There was a Worcester cycle, probably consisting of five Corpus Christi plays acted by the guilds. The old cathedral town of Canterbury, magnet of pilgrims the kingdom over, was...