This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1875 edition. Excerpt: ... be in labour Meanwhile the shepherds awake, discover the loss of a flieep, and percerring that Mak has disappeared also, they naturally suspect him to be the depredator, and pursue him. They find everything very cunningly prepared in the cottage to deceive them, but, after a large amount of roundabout inquiry and research, and much drollery, they discover that the boy of which Mak's wife pretends to have been just delivered, is nothing ell' but the sheep which had been stolen from their flocks. The wife frill asserts that it is her child, and Mak sets up as his defence that the bab had been ' forfpoken," or enchanted, by an elf at midnight, and that 1' had thus been changed into the appearance of a sheep; but the shepherds refuse to be satisfied with this explanation. The whole of this list's comedy is carried out with great skill, and with infinite drollery. The shepherds, while still wrangling with Mak and his wife, are seized with drowsiness, and lie down to sleep; but they are aroused by the voice of the angel, who proclaims the birth of the Saviour. The next play in which the drollery is introduced, is that of " Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents." Herod's bluster and bombast, and the vulgar abuse which passes between the Hebrew mothers and the soldiers who are murdering their children, are wonderfully laughable. The plays which represented the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus, are all full of drollery, for the grotesque character.which had been given to the demons in the earlier middle ages, appears to have been transferred to the executioners or, as they were called, the " tormentors," and the language and manner in which they executed their duties, must have kept the audience in a continual...