logue,
however, more often consisted in a dramatisation of the earlier _dit_,
in which some person or thing is made to declare its own attributes. Of
very similar character is the so-called _sermon joyeux_, which, however,
preserves more or less the form of an address from the pulpit, of course
travestied and applied to ludicrous subjects.

[Sidenote: Farces.]

The farce, on the other hand, is one of the most important of all
dramatic kinds in reference to French literature. It is a genuine
product of the soil, and proved the ancestor of all the best comedy of
France, on which foreign models had very little influence. Until the
discovery and acquisition by the British Museum of a unique collection
of farces the number of these compositions known to exist was not large,
and such as had been printed were difficult of access. It is still not
easy to get together a complete collection, but the reimpression of the
British Museum pieces in the _Bibliotheque Elzevirienne_[127] with M.
Ed. Fournier's _Theatre avant la Renaissance_[128] contains ample
materials for judgment. In all, we possess about a hundred farces, most
of which are probably the composition of the fifteenth century, though
it is possible that some of them may date from the end of the
fourteenth. The most famous of all early French farces, that of
_Pathelin_, belongs, it is believed, to the middle or earlier part of
the fifteenth, and speaking generally, this century is the most
productive of theatrical work, at least of such as remains to us. The
subjects of these farces are of the widest possible diversity. In their
general character they at once recall the Fabliaux, and no one who reads
many of them can doubt that the one _genre_ is the immediate successor
of the other. The farce, like the Fabliau, deals with an actual or
possible incident of ordinary life to which a comic complexion is given
by the treatment. The length of these compositions is very variable, but
the average is perhaps about five hundred lines. Their versification is
always octosyllabic and regular. But a curious peculiarity is found in
most of them as well as in a few contemporary dramas of the serious
kind. From time to time the speeches of the characters are dovetailed
into one another so as to make up the Triolet (or rondeau of eight lines
with triple repetition of the first and double repetition of the
second), a form which in the fifteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth
centuries has