The _morality_ was not so much an offshoot as a complement of the _miracle_. They stood to each other, as sermon does to service. To say therefore that the _morality_ secularized the drama is to go too far; as well might we say that Luther secularized Christianity. What it did, however, was important enough; it severed the connexion between drama and ritual. The _miracle_, treating of the history of mankind from the Creation to the days of Christ, unfolded before the eyes of its audience the grand scheme of human salvation; the _morality_ on the other hand was not concerned with historical so much as practical Christianity. Its object was to point a moral: and it did this in two ways; either as an affirmative, constructive inculcator of what life should be,--as the portrayer of the ideal; or as a negative, critical describer of the types of life actually existing,--as the portrayer of the real. It approached more nearly to comedy in its latter function, but in both aspects it really prepared the way for the comic muse. The natural prey of comedy, as our greatest comic writer has taught us, is folly, "known to it in all her transformations, in every disguise; and it is with the springing delight of hawk over heron, hound after fox, that it gives her chase, never fretting, never tiring, sure of having her, allowing her no rest." Thus it is that characters in comedy, symbolizing as they often do some social folly, tend to be rather types than personalities. The _morality_, therefore, in substituting typical figures, however crude, for the mechanical religious characters of the _miracle_, makes an immense advance towards comedy. Moreover, the very selection of types requires an appreciation, if not an analysis, of the differences of human character, an appreciation for which there was no need in the _miracle_. In the _morality_ again the action is no longer determined by tradition, and it becomes incumbent on the playwright to provide motives for the movements of his puppets. It follows naturally from this that situations must be devised to show up the particular quality which each type symbolizes. We need not enter the vexed question of the origin of plot construction; but we may notice in this connexion that the _morality_ certainly gave us that peculiar form of plot-movement which is most suitable to comedy. To quote Mr Gayley's words: "In tragedy, the movement must be economic of its ups and downs; once headed downwards it must plunge, with but one or two vain recovers, to the abyss. In comedy, on the other hand, though the movement is ultimately upward, the crises are more numerous; the oftener the individual stumbles without breaking his neck, and the more varied his discomfitures, so long as they are temporary, the better does he enjoy his ease in the cool of the day.... Now the novelty of the plot in the _moral_ play, lay in the fact that the movement was of this oscillating,