If ever I you beguiled, That I eat this child That lies in this cradle, (the child being the stolen sheep), must have caused towns-folk and country-folk outrageous laughter. Mak's wife is indeed memorable in her way as the Wife of Bath, Dame Quickly, or Mrs. Gamp. There is nothing so boldly drawn in the Coventry _Nativity_. But there you have a startlingly realistic treatment joined to an emotional lyricism of the simplest charm: Neither in halls, nor yet in bowers, Born would he not be Neither in castles, nor yet in towers That seemly were to see. and-- As I outrode this enderes night Of three jolly shepherds, I saw a sight; And all about their fold a star shone bright, They sang "Terli, terlow!" So merrily the shepherds their pipes can blow. In this Coventry play we have nearly all the ingredients--foreign, liturgical, or homely English--of the composite miracle play brought together. It bears traces of many hands; and betrays in the dialogue of the formal characters the rubricated lines of the church play on which it was based. The chief characters live, move and act their recognised parts with the certainty of the folk in a nursery tale. Herod out-Herods himself with a Blunderbore extravagance:-- I am the cause of this great light and thunder; It is through my fury that they such noise do make. My fearful countenance, the clouds so doth incumber That oftentimes for dread thereof, the very earth doth quake. "Fee, fi, fo, fum!" might be the refrain of this giant's litany. The other types are as plainly stamped. The shepherd's are from the life, and contrast well with the stilted and rather tiresome prophets. The scenes at the babe's crib when the offerings are made of the shepherds' pipe, old hat, and mittens, are both droll and tender. The tragic counterparts of these scenes are those where the Three Executioners work their pitiless task to an end at the Crucifixion, or where the Three Maries go to the grave afterwards in the Cornish mystery, or where Isaac bids his father bind his eyes that he shall not see the sword. It was for long the fashion to say, as Sir Walter Scott did, that these plays had little poetic life, or human interest in them. But they are, at their best, truly touched with essential emotions, with humour, terror, sorrow, pity, as the case may be. Dramatically they are far more alive at this moment, than the English drama of the mid-nineteenth century.