Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/300

288 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH holding that the miracle cycle as a literary form did grow out of the liturgical drama, I doubt very much whether it is correct to say of any extant miracle play whatever that it had a liturgical play for its source, or was indeed in any individual manner connected with such. 1 All that we need postulate to explain the observed resemblances between different cycles is, as I have said, a certain general tradition. Such a tradition may have arisen, and doubtless did arise, in various ways. The c Cursor Mundi,' a poem whose influence on the drama has been often asserted and never proved, 2 may have had its share ; so may others such as the ' Northern Passion.' 3 The influence of Bonaventura's c Meditationes,' whether direct or through the writings of the Hampole school, is already a suspected though a rather indeterminate fa<5tor. 4 That of Jacobus de Voragine is far more. 1 An exception might be found in the Shrewsbury fragments mentioned above. A liturgical play in the vernacular is, however, in itself such an anomaly, and these particular texts are so late, that a borrowing from and not by the York cycle seems the more probable explanation. 2 See particularly H. Umgemach, ' Die Quellen der funf ersten Chester Plays,' 1890, p. 195, and cf. H. Utesch, 'Die Quellen der Chester-Plays,' 1909, p. 6. 3 See above, p. 283. 4 The < Meditationes Bonaventurae de Vita Christi ' are printed in the collected edition of his works, Rome, 1588-96, vi. 349 (and Paris, 1868, xii.). The translation by Nicholas Love, known as < The Mirror of the blessed Life of Jesu Christ,' was not made till the fifteenth century. But there is an earlier version of the part relating the passion (chapters 73 to 92) which, if not by Richard Rolle of Hampole himself, is certainly the work of an immediate follower. It is printed under the title of ' The Privity of the Passion,' by C. Horstmann, 'Yorkshire Writers,' 1895,