In strictness, however, those pieces where allegorical personages make their appearance are not farces but moralities. These compositions were exceedingly popular in the later middle ages, and their popularity was a natural sequence of the rage for allegorising which had made itself evident in very early times, and had in the _Roman de la Rose_ dominated almost all other literary tastes. The taste for personification and abstraction has always lent itself easily enough to satire, and in the fifteenth century pieces under the designation of moralities became very common. We do not possess nearly as many specimens of the morality as of the farce, but, on the other hand, the morality is often, though not always, a much longer composition than the farce. The subjects of moralities include not merely private vices and follies, but almost all actual and possible defects of Church and State, and occasionally the term is applied to pieces, the characters of which are not abstractions, but which tell a story with a more or less moral turn. Sometimes these pieces ran to a very great length, and one is quoted, _L'Homme Juste et l'Homme Mondain_, which contains 36,000 lines, and must, like the longer mysteries, have occupied days or even weeks in acting. A morality however, on the average, consisted of about 2000 lines, and its personages were proportionally more numerous than those of the farce. Thus the _Moralite des Enfans de Maintenant_ contains thirteen characters who are indifferently abstract and concrete; Maintenant, Mignotte, Bon Advis, Instruction, Finet, Malduit, Discipline, Jabien, Luxure, Bonte, Desespoir, Perdition, and the Fool. This list almost sufficiently explains the plot, which simply recounts the persistence of one child in evil and his bad end, with the repentance of the other. The moralities have the widest diversity of subject, but most of them are tolerably clearly explained by their titles. _La Condamnation de Banquet_ is a rather spirited satire on gluttony and open housekeeping. _Marchebeau_ attacks the disbanded soldiery of the middle of the fifteenth century. _Charite_ points out the evils which have come into the world for lack of charity. _La Moralite d'une Femme qui avait voulu trahir la Cite de Romme_ is built on the lines of a miracle-play. _Science et Asnerye_ is a very lively satire representing the superior chances which the followers of _Asnerye_--ignorance--have of obtaining benefices and posts of honour and profit as compared with those of learning. _Mundus, caro, daemonia_, again tells its own tale. _Les Blasphemateurs_, which is very well spoken of, but has not been reprinted, rests on the popular legend upon which _Don Juan_ is also based. In short, unless a complete catalogue were given, there is no means of fully describing the numerous works of this class. [Sidenote: Soties.]