Wakefield cycle as he found it this playwright was brought into touch with the York schools of comic and realistic composition. What he derived from them and what he added may be gathered from a comparative view of the related portions of these cycles. That, however, I must defer until another time. The best of his plays are of course the Noe and the Secunda Pastorum; the latter a product of dramatic genius. It stands out English and alone, with its homespun philosophy and indigenous figures,—Mak and Gyll and the Shepherds,—its comic business, its glow, its sometimes subtle irony, its ludicrous colloquies, its rural life and manners, its naïve and wholesome reverence: with these qualities it stands apart from other plays of cycles foreign or native, and in its dramatic anticipations, postponements, and surprises is our earliest masterpiece of comic drama. A similar dramatic excellence characterizes all this poet's plays, as well as the insertions made by him in other plays. But he is no more remarkable for his dramatic power than for his sensitive observation and his satire.

Of the realism of his art much might be said. To be sure, we cannot accredit to him the grim photography of certain plays—the preparations for the crucifixion, for instance, which are the counterpart of scenes in the York. But the Buffeting proves his power in this direction, and parts of the Scourging—each a genre picture on a background of horrors. Of conversations caught from the lip those in the second and fourth scenes of the Processus Noe are his, and those between the shepherds in Prima and Secunda Pastorum,—all of them unique. So also the description of the dinners in these Shepherds' Plays: the boar's brawn, cow's foot, sow's shank, blood puddings, ox-tail, swine's jaw, the good pie, "all a hare but the loins," goose's leg, pork, partridge, tart for a lord, calf's liver "scored with the verjuice," and good ale of Ely to wash things down. What more seasonable than the afterthought of collecting the broken meats for the poor? what more naïve than the night-spell in the name of the Crucified just preceding the angelic announcement of his birth? what more typical of unquestioning faith than the reverence of these "Sely Shepherds" before the Saviour Child, the simplicity and acceptability of their rustic gifts? This is the fresh and sympathetic handling of a well-worn theme. But the Wakefield poet is no sentimentalist: his anger burns as sudden as his pity. Otherwhere genially ironical, it is in his revision of the Judicium that he displays his full power as a satirist. Here his hatred of oppression, his scorn of vice and self-love, his contempt of sharp and shady practice in kirk or court, upon the bench, behind the counter, or by the hearth are welded into one and brought to edge and point. He strikes hard when he will, but he has the comic sense and spares to slay. We may hear him chuckling, this Chaucerian "professor of holy pageantry," as he pricks the bubble of fashion, lampoons Lollard and "kyrkchaterar" alike, and parodies the latinity of his age. When his demons speak the syllables leap in rhythmic haste, the rhymes beat a tattoo, and the stanzas hurtle by. Manners, morals, folly, and loose living are writ large and pinned to the caitiff. But the poet behind the satire is ever the same, sound in his domestic, social, political philosophy, constant in his sympathy with the poor and in godly fear.

Though there are comic scenes of some excellence in the later Chester and so-called Coventry plays, they add little to the variety of the Wakefield. I would, however, call attention to a few other comparatively modern, but, generally speaking, contemporaneous, characteristics of these and the remaining cycles: the foreshadowing of the chivalrous-romantic in the Joseph and Mary plays of York, Wakefield, and especially Coventry; of the melodramatic in the wonder and mediæval magic of the York and Chester cycles, and again especially in the Coventry; of the allegorical in the Coventry, and of the burlesque in all cycles when Pride rides for a fall or Cunning is caught in his own snare.

In respect of the sensational, the older cycles are surpassed by the surviving plays of Newcastle and Digby; so also in the increasing complexity of motive and interest. These Digby plays were acted, probably one by one in some midland village from year to year during the latter half of the fifteenth century, and maybe somewhat earlier. They are of interest, not only because they emphasize the sensational element, but because they stand half-way, if not in time, at any rate in spirit and method, between the miracles that we have so far discussed and the moral plays of which we shall presently treat. The Digby Killing of the Children of Israel lends a decided impetus to the progress of the comic and secular tendencies of the drama. The Herod brags as usual, but he is artistically surpassed in his metier by a certain miles gloriosus, the descendant of Bumbommachides and Sir Launscler Depe, and himself the forerunner of Thersites and Roister Doister, and countless aspirants for knighthood, whose valour "begynnes to fayle and waxeth feynt" under the distaff of an angry wife. Such is the Watkyn of this Digby play. Both here and in the Conversion of St. Paul, the joyous element has been enhanced, as Dr. Furnivall points out, by the introduction of dancing and music. In the Conversion the charm supplied by the ammoniac Billingsgate of Saul's servant and the ostler adds thrills galore. Saul, "goodly besene in the best wyse, like an aunterous knyth," the thunder and lightning, the persecutor felled to earth, "godhed speking from hevyn," the Holy Ghost, the "dyvel with thunder and fyre" sitting cool upon a "chayre in hell, another devyll with a fyeryng, cryeng and roryng,"—the warning angel, Saul's escape,—there is sign enough of invention here. To be sure, these seductions are counterbalanced by a didactic on the Seven Deadly Sins, worthy of a preceding or contemporary moral drama; but that was part of the bargain. The spectacular plays of this group, especially the Mary Magdalene, comic and didactic by turns, denote a further advance in a still different direction. They portray character in process of formation: the rejection of former habits and motives, and the adoption of new, the resulting change of conduct, and the growth of personality. From this point of view Mary Magdalene is a figure of as rare distinction in the history of romantic comedy as the Virgin Mary,—perhaps even of greater importance. Interesting as the sensational elements of the play may have been, and novel—the vital novelty here is that of character growing from within. Wonderful as the career of the virgin mother was,—an essential propædeutic to that woman worship which characterizes a broad realm of Christian romance,—her career could never have awakened the peculiar interest, dramatic and humane, that was stirred by the legend so often dramatized of the wayward, tempted, falling, but finally redeemed and sainted Mary of Magdala.

With regard to the transitional character of the Digby plays, it has been maintained that this particular play, combining materials of the biblical miracle and the saint's play or marvel, approaches more nearly than any other of the group to the morals and moral interludes, because of the prominence of the Sensual Sins in the dramatic career of the Magdalene. Professor Cushman, in his excellent thesis on The Devil and the Vice, even asserts that the downfall of the heroine, as the result of sensual temptation which is the office of seven personified deadly sins "arayyd lyke vij dylf," is a special 'development' of this play. I can hardly go so far: the church of the Middle Ages, Caxton's Golden Legend of 1483, and Voragine's of 1270-90 had already amalgamated the biblical narratives of the Mary of