a mere depression
not more than a foot deep, the pit three feet: but doubtless time has
levelled them up, and there is every reason to suppose that the pit served
to represent Hell (or, in the drama of The Resurrection, the Grave), and
the trench allowed the performers, after being thrust down into perdition,
to regain the green-room unobserved--either actually unobserved, the
trench being covered, or by a polite fiction, the audience pretending not
to see. My private belief is that, the stage being erected above and
along the trench, they were actually hidden while they made their exit.
Where the trench meets the rampart a semi-circular hollow, about ten feet
in diameter, makes a breach in the rows of seats. Here, no doubt, stood
the green-room.

The first notice of the performance of these plays occurs in Carew's
_Survey of Cornwall_, published in 1602:--

"Pastimes to delight the mind, the Cornishmen have guary miracles and
three-men's songs: and for exercise of the body hunting, hawking,
shooting, wrestling, hurling, and such other games.

"The guary miracle, in English a miracle play, is a kind of Interlude
compiled in Cornish out of some scripture history with that grossness
which accompanied the Romans' _vetus comedia_. For representing it
they raise an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the
diameter of this inclosed plain some forty or fifty foot.
The country people flock from all sides, many miles off, to hear and
see it; for they have therein devils and devices to delight as well
the eye as the ear; the players con not their parts without book, but
are prompted by one called the Ordinary, who followeth at their back
with the book in his hand and telleth them softly what they must
pronounce aloud."

Our Round, you observe, greatly exceeds the dimensions given by Carew.
But there were several in the west: one for instance, traceable fifty
years ago, at the northern end of the town of Redruth, which still keeps
the name of Planguary; and another magnificent one, of stone, near the
church-town of St. Just by the Land's End. Carew may have seen only the
smaller specimens.

As for the plays--well, they are by no means masterpieces of literature,
yet they reveal here and there perceptions of beauty such as go with
sincerity even though it be artless. Beautiful for instance is the idea,
if primitive the writing, of a scene in