In approaching the English miracle plays we notice that, as in the Cornish, the earliest secular form of the older cycles was principally, if not entirely, serious. Reasons which I cannot stay to enumerate prove that comic plays in the older cycles are not of the original series, and that humorous passages in plays of the older series are of later interpolation. Now, so far as the direct effect upon the comedy of Heywood, Greene, and Shakespeare is concerned, it may appear to some of no particular importance in what order the cycles in general were composed or the plays within the cycles. But the Tudor dramatists did not make their art, they worked with what they found, and they found a dramatic medium of expression to which centuries and countless influences had contributed. An extended study of the beginnings of English comedy should determine, so far as possible, the relative priority, not only of cycles, but of the comic passages within the cycles: what each composition has contributed to the enfranchisement of the comic spirit and the development of the technical factors of the art; to what extent each has expressed or modified the realistic, satirical, romantic, or humorous view of life, and in what ways each has reflected the temper of its time, the manners and the mind of the people that wrote, acted, and witnessed. If I arrange the plays that bear upon the development of comedy according to my conclusions regarding priority of composition, the order, broadly stated for our present rapid survey, is as follows: first, the Cornish and the Old Testament portions of the Chester and Coventry; then the productions of the second and third periods of the York, and, closely following these, the crowning efforts of the Towneley; then the New Testament plays of the Chester and Coventry; and, finally, the surviving portions of the cycles of Digby and Newcastle. This order, which is roughly historical, has the advantage, as I perceive after testing it, of presenting a not unnatural sequence of the æsthetic values or interests essential to comedy: first, as a full discussion would reveal, the humour of the incidental; then of the essential or real, and, gradually, of the satirical in something like their order of appearance within the cycles; afterwards, the accession of the romantic, the wonderful, the allegorical, the mock-ideal; and, finally, of the scenic and sensational.