not then without attraction. Three centuries of militant and triumphant humanism, of developed art, and of advancing science have rendered allegory irksome to the modern mind. We recognise its essential imperfection, and are hardly able to do justice to such merits as it undoubtedly possessed for people not yet accustomed to distinguish thought from figured modes of presentation. It is our duty, if we care to understand the last phase of medieval culture, to throw ourselves back into the mental condition of men who demanded that abstractions should be clothed for them by art in visible shapes-men penetrated in good earnest with the Realism of the Schools, and to whom the genders of the Latin Grammar suggested sexesmen who delighted in the ingenuity and grotesquery of what to us is little better than a system of illustrated conundrums; for whom a Prudence with two faces or a Charity crowned with flames seemed no less natural than Gabriel kneeling with his lily at the Virgin's footstool-men who naturally thought their deepest thoughts out into tangibilities by means of allegorical mythology.

II.

The Miracles in England had already brought personifications upon the stage. In the Coventry Plays, Justice, Mercy, Truth, and Peace hold conference with the three Persons of the Trinity. Death strikes Herod down among his knights. Contemplation acts the part of hierophant, explaining mysteries of faith. Medieval literature, moreover,

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abounded in debates and dialogues between abstractions. From the Latin poems attributed to Walter Mapes in England, we might quote a Disputatio inter Corpus et Animam,' and a 'Dialogus inter Aquam et Vinum.' The Italian Contrasti, some of which, like the Commedia dell' Anima,' are undoubtedly of great antiquity, bring the scheme of human destiny before us under the form of personified abstractions conversing and disputing. To take a further step; to detach the element of allegory already extant in the Miracles from the framework in which it was embedded, and to combine this dramatic element with the moral disputations of scholastic literature, was both natural and easy. This step was taken at a comparatively early period. Moral plays, extant in MS., have been ascribed to the reign of Henry VI. In the reign of Henry VII. they were both popular and fashionable, and they kept their vogue through that of his successor, increasing in complexity. The artistic type which resulted from this process made no unreasonable demands upon the imagination of a laity imbued with allegorical conceptions, and accustomed by the plastic arts to figurative renderings of abstract notions. Yet the defect adherent to all allegory in poetic art renders these figures ineffective. Intended for the stage, they strike us as being even more ineffective than they might have been in a poem meant to be perused. This defect may be plainly stated. According to the allegorical method, persons are created to stand for qualities, which qualities in all living human beings are blent with other and modifying moral ingredients. Being qualities isolated by a process of abstraction and incarnated by

a process of reflective art, brought into æsthetical existence in order to symbolise and present single facets of character, they cannot delude us into taking them for personalities. They fail to attain concrete reality or to convey forcible lessons in human ethics. How cold and lifeless, for example, are the struggles of Juventus between Pity and Abominable Living, matched with the real conflict of a young man trained in piety, but tempted by a woman!

It was thus that the Morality came into existence : an intermediate form of dramatic art which had less vogue in England than in France, and which preserves at this time only a faint antiquarian interest. To touch lightly upon its main features will serve the purpose of a work which aims at literary criticism rather than at scientific history. The chief point to be insisted on is the emergence through Moralities of true dramatic types of character into distinctness. The Morality must, for our present purpose, be regarded as the schoolmaster which brought our drama to self-consciousness. It has the aridity and mortal dullness proper to merely transitional and abortive products. The growth of a brief moment in the evolution of the modern mind, representing the passage from medievalism to the Renaissance, from Catholic to humanistic art, this species bore within itself the certainty of short duration, and suffered all the disabilities and awkwardnesses of a temporary makeshift. We might compare it to one of those imperfect organisms which have long since perished in the struggle for existence, but which interest the physiologist both as indicating an effort after development upon a line which proved to be the

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weaker, and also as containing within itself evidences of the structure which finally succeeded. This comparison, even though it be not scientifically correct, will serve to explain the nature of the Morality, which can hardly be said to lie in the direct line of evolution between the Miracle and the legitimate Drama, but rather to be an abortive side-effort, which was destined to bear barren fruit.

III.

Let us pass the actors in a prefatory review. From their names we shall learn something of the drama which they constituted. Perseverance, Science, Mundus, Wit, Free-will, the Five Senses reduced to one spokesman, Sensual Appetite, Imagination, a Taverner, Luxuria, Conscience, Innocency, Mischief, Nought, Nowadays, Abominable Living, Ignorance, Irksomeness, Tutivillus, the Seven Vices, Anima, Garçio (figuring Young England), Humanum Genus, Pity, Everyman, Honest Recreation-such are some of the strange actors in these moral shows. Abstract terms are personified and quaintly jumbled up with more familiar characters emergent from the people of the times. An effort is clearly being made to realise dramatic types, which after trial in this shape of metaphysical entities, will take their place as men and women animated by controlling humours, when the stage becomes a mirror of man's actual life. For the present period the stage has ceased to be the mirror of God's dealings with the human race in the scheme of creation, redemption, and judgment. It has not yet accustomed itself to reflect true men and women as they have been, are, and will

be for all time. This intermediate dramatic form is satisfied with bodying forth the figments of the mind. It reflects logical generalities in the mirror of its art, investing these with outward form and allegorical impersonation.

Prominent among this motley company of abstract characters moved the Devil, leaping upon the stage dressed like a bear, and shouting Ho! Ho!' and 'Out Harrow!' His frequent but not inseparable comrade was the Vice-that tricksy incarnation of the wickedness which takes all shapes, and whose fantastic feats secure a kind of sympathy. The Vice was unknown in the English Miracles, and played no marked part in the French Moralities. He appears to have been a native growth, peculiar to the transitional epoch of our moral interludes. By gradual deterioration or amelioration, he passed at length into the Fool or Clown of Shakspere's Comedy. But at the moment of which we are now treating, the Vice was a more considerable personage. He represented that element of evil which is inseparable from human nature. Viewed from one side he was eminently comic; and his pranks cast a gleam of merriment across the dullness of the scenes through which he hovered with the lightness of a Harlequin. Like Harlequin, he wore a vizor and carried a lathe sword. It was part of his business to belabour the Devil with this sword; but when the piece was over, after stirring the laughter of the people by his jests, and heaping mischief upon mischief in the heart of man, nothing was left for the Vice but to dance down to Hell upon the Devil's back. The names of the Vice are as various as the characters