Of the significant lack of humour in the Cornish plays I have already spoken. I find, though I may not stay to illustrate, a livelier observation and a superior faculty of characterization and construction in the early comic art of Chester than in that of Coventry, but in both a cruder sense of the humour of incident than in the other English cycles. In the York cycle there are fewer situations that may be called purely comic than in the Chester, and none of these occurs in the oldest plays of the series; but for its other contributions to dramatic art and its relation to the remarkable productions of the Wakefield or Towneley school of comedy it deserves special attention. A comparative study of its versification, phraseology and dramatic technique, leads me to the conclusion that the original didactic kernel of the York cycle was enlarged and enriched during two well-defined periods, which may be termed the middle and the later, and that there was at least one playwright in each of these periods or schools who distinctly made for the development of English comedy. Of the middle period, to which belong _Cain_, _Noah_, and the _Shepherds' Plays_, the playwright or playwrights are characterized by an unsophisticated humour; the distinctive playwright of the later or realistic period is marked by his observation of life, his reproduction of manners, his dialogue, and the plasticity of his technique. That the later school or period, to which belongs a group of half a dozen plays[15] gathering about _The Dream of Pilate's Wife_, and _The Trial before Herod_, was, moreover, influenced by the manner of its predecessor is indicated by the fact that of its two most efficient stanzaic forms one, namely that used in _The Conspiracy_, is anticipated (though in simpler iambic beat) by that of _Noah_, the typical play of the middle, that is the first comic, school,[16] while the other, of which the variants are found in _The Mortificacio_ and _The Second Trial_, has its germ more probably in _The Cayme_ of that same school than in any other of the middle or of the earlier plays.[17] With these two stanzaic forms the later group, so far as we may conclude from the mutilated condition of the surviving plays, seems to experiment; and the second of them, that of the _Mortificacio_, may be regarded as the final and distinctive outcome of York versification. To the leading playwrights of each of these schools,--the former the best humorist, the latter the best realist, of the York drama,--to these anonymous composers of the most facile and vivid portions of the York cycle our comedy owes a still further debt; for from them it would appear that a poet of undoubted genius derived something of his inspiration and much of his method and technique--our first great comic dramatist, the Playwright of Wakefield.