While the dramatic tone of the miracle cycle is determined by the conservative character of Christianity in general, the nature of the several plays is modified by the relation of each to one or other of the supreme crises in the career of our Lord. The plays leading up to, and revolving about, the Nativity, are of happy ending, and were doubtless regarded, by authors and spectators, as we regard comedy. The murder of Abel, at first sombre, gradually passes into the comedy of the grotesque. The massacre of the innocents emphasizes, not the weeping of a Rachel, but the joyous escape of the Virgin and the Child. In all such stories the horrible is kept in the background or used by way of suspense before the happy outcome, or frequently as material for mirth. Upon the sweet and joyous character of the pageants of Joseph and Mary and the Child it is unnecessary to dwell. They are of the very essence of comedy. The plays surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection are, on the other hand, specimens of the serious drama, the tragedy averted. It would hardly be correct to say tragedy; for the drama of the cross is a triumph. In no cycle does the _consummatum est_ close the pageant of the Crucifixion; the actors announce, and the spectators believe, that this is "goddis Sone," whom within three days they shall again behold, though he has been "nayled on a tree unworthilye to die." By this consideration, without doubt, the horror of the buffeting and the scourging, the solemnity of the passion, the inhuman cruelty--but not the awe--of the Crucifixion, were mitigated for the spectators. Otherwise, mediæval as they were, they could have taken but little pleasure in the realism with which their fellows presented the history of the Sacrifice. To indulge in a comprehensive discussion of the beginnings of comedy in England would be pleasant, but I find that I cannot compel the materials into the limits at my command. Accordingly, since the miracle cycles (to which Dodsley, following the French, gave the convenient, but un-English and somewhat misleading, name of 'mysteries') have been more frequently and generously treated by historians than those other miracles, non-scriptural, which I would call 'marvels,' and the no less important popular festival plays and early farces, and 'morals' or moral and 'mery' interludes, it seems that, in favour of the latter, I should defer much that might be said about the cycles until a more spacious occasion.