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The Egyptian Mysteries had been dramatic in character; the Eleusinian, which were very likely borrowed or copied or introduced from Egypt, were no doubt dramatic too. Then there had been festivals among the rustics, chiefly in honor of Dionysos not altogether in his higher aspects, with rudimentary plays of a coarse buffoonish character.
In the playful intercourse of society, there is room for the virtue of Wit, a balance or mean between buffoonish excess, and the clownish dulness that can neither make nor enjoy a joke. It is more a feeling than a state, or settled habit. It is the fear of ill-report; and has the physical expression of fear under danger the blushing and the pallor.
It is not a caricatured reproduction of the poems of chivalry sung in the market, for they were probably serious, stately, and bald, with at most an occasional joke; it is the reproduction of the joint impression received from the absurd, harum-scarum, unpractical world of chivalry of the poet, and the real world of prose, of good-humoured buffoonish coarseness with which the itinerant poet was surrounded.
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