Now, the contiguity of what is undoubtedly borrowed from the York with what is imitated from it and what is elaborated upon it, is strong proof of a conscious relation between these Wakefield productions and those of York; and since the work of the poet, especially the provincial poet, was in those days (though verse forms, like air, are free to all) likely to be cast in a fixed mould--his favourite metrical and strophaic medium, there is at any rate a possibility that the plays and portions of plays in the Wakefield cycle, written in this fully developed and distinctive stanza, were the work of one man. When we examine the contents of the plays and their style, we find that the possibility becomes more than a probability, practically a certainty; and that being so, I can hardly deem it an accident that the most dramatic portions of the Wakefield cycle show so close an external resemblance to the best comic and realistic portions of the York. It is, then, with something of the interest in an individual, not a theory, that one may segregate the plays and bits of plays bearing this metrical stamp, look for the personality behind them, and attempt to discover the relation of the Wakefield group of comedies to its forerunners of York. The Wakefield cycle is still in flux when its distinctive poet-humorist takes it in hand. Insertions in his nine-line stanza are found in one[21] of the five plays derived from the York cycle. Of the two plays which show a general resemblance to a corresponding York, one[22] is in this stanza, and to the other[23] a dozen of the stanzas are prefixed. The _Fflagellacio_ (XXII.), the second half of which is an imitation, sometimes loose, sometimes literal, of York XXXIV. (_Christ Led up to Calvary_), opens with twenty-three of these stanzas,--nearly the whole of the original part. One of them, No. 25, is, by the way, based upon stanza 2 of that part of York XXXIV. which is _not_ taken over by the Wakefield play. In the Wakefield _Ascension_ (XXIX.), which adapts, but in no slavish manner, a few passages from the York (XLIII.), we find two of this playwright's nine-line stanzas;[24] and in the Wakefield _Crucifixion_ (XXIII.), which has some slight reminiscence of York XXXV. and XXXVI., we find one. In that part of the Wakefield less directly, or not at all, connected with the York cycle, four whole plays,[25] the _Processus Noe_, the two _Shepherds' Plays_, and the _Buffeting_, and occasional portions of other plays[26] are written in this stanza. This contribution in the nine-line stanza amounts to approximately one-fourth of the cycle; and, allowing for modifications due to oral and scribal transmission, is of one language and phraseology. Not merely the identity of stanza and diction, however, leads one to suspect an identity of authorship; but the prevalence in all these passages, and not in others, of spiritual characteristics in approximately the same combination,--realistic and humorous qualities