Page:Ludus Coventriae (1841).djvu/8

 attention to these researches, has already been under the consideration of the Council of the Society under whose auspices the present volume is produced.

Mr. Collier, in the second volume of his excellent History of English Dramatic Poetry, has carefully analyzed the Coventry Mysteries, with occasional notices of resemblances or dissimilarities in the method in which the same subjects are treated in the other collections. It will, therefore, be unnecessary for me in this place to enter on the general question of the chain in the evidence of dramatic history which these mysteries afford.

The Coventry Mysteries are contained in a quarto volume, the principal part of which was written in the year 1468, now preserved in the Cottonian collection of manuscripts, under the press-mark Vespas. D. viii. The date of the MS. is ascertained from the verso of fol. 100, a fac-simile of which page will be found at the commencement of this work. The history of the manuscript is unfortunately wrapped in obscurity, and it cannot be distinctly traced back to those who are presumed to have been its former possessors—the Grey Friars of Coventry. The principal authority for its appropriation to this body is contained in the following memorandum on the fly-leaf of the manuscript in the hand-writing of Dr. Richard James, librarian to Sir