of Strassburg, even at the time when the unsmiling Calvin was seeking asylum there, that the dramatic life of the German seminaries found a splendid culmination.  Yearly, in the academic theatre, took place a series of representations, by students, of marvellous pomp and elaboration.  The school and college plays were of various characters.  Sometimes they were from Terence, Plautus, or Aristophanes; sometimes modifications of the ancient mysteries, meant to enforce the Evangelical theology; sometimes comedies full of the contemporary life.  There are several men that have earned mention in the history of German literature by writing plays for students.  The representations became a principal means for celebrating great occasions.  If special honour was to be done to a festival, or a princely visit was expected, the market-place, the Rathhaus, or the church was prepared, and it was the professor’s or the schoolmaster’s duty to direct the boys in their performance of a play.  We get glimpses, in the chronicles, of the circumstances under which the representations took place.  The magistrates, even the courts, lent brilliant dresses.  One old writer laments that the ignorant people have so little sense for arts of this kind.  “Often tumult and mocking are heard, for it is the greatest joy to the rabble if the spectators fall down through broken benches.”  The old three-storied stage of the mysteries was often retained, with heaven above, earth in the middle space, and hell below; where, according to the stage direction of the Golden Legend, “the devils walked about and made a great noise.”  Lazarus is described as represented in the sixteenth century before a hotel, before which sat the rich man carousing, while Abraham, in a parson’s coat, looked out of an upper window.  This rudeness, however, belongs rather to the Volks-comoedie than the Schul-comoedie, whose adjuncts were generally far more rational, and sometimes even brilliant, as in the Strassburg representations.  It was only in the seminaries that art was preserved from utter decay.  One may trace the Schul-comoedie until far down in the eighteenth century, and in the last mention of it I find appears an interesting figure.  In 1780, at the military school in Stuttgart the birthday of the Duke of Wuertemberg was celebrated by a performance of Goethe’s Clavigo.  The leading part was taken by a youth of twenty-one, with high cheek-bones, a broad, low, Greek brow above straight eyebrows, a prominent nose, and lips nervous with an extraordinary energy.  The German narrator says he played the part “abominably, shrieking, roaring, unmannerly to a laughable degree.”  It was the young Schiller, wild as a pythoness upon her tripod, with the Robbers, which became famous in the following year.