singularly suitable to the development of a vigorous national comedy. "If any one," says Mr. Pollard, "will read these plays together, I think he cannot fail to feel that they are all the work of the same writer, and that this writer deserves to be ranked--if only we knew his name!--at least as high as Langland, and as an exponent of a rather boisterous kind of humour had no equal in his own day." And, speaking of the _Mactacio Abel_, where we lack the evidence of identity of metre, this authority continues, "The extraordinary youthfulness of the play and the character of its humour make it difficult to dissociate it from the work of the author of the _Shepherds' Plays_, and I cannot doubt that this, also, at least in part, must be added to his credit."[27] To this conclusion I had come before reading Mr. Pollard's significant introduction to the _Towneley Plays_; and I may say that I had suspected the Wakefield master in the _Processus Talentorum_ as well; for though, with the exception of some insertions, the stanzaic form of that pageant is not his favourite, the humour, dramatic method, and phraseology of the whole are distinctly reminiscent of him. In the revising and editing of the Wakefield cycle as he found it this playwright was brought into touch with the York schools of comic and realistic composition. What he derived from them and what he added may be gathered from a comparative view of the related portions of these cycles. That, however, I must defer until another time. The best of his plays are of course the _Noe_ and the _Secunda Pastorum_; the latter a product of dramatic genius. It stands out English and alone, with its homespun philosophy and indigenous figures,--Mak and Gyll and the Shepherds,--its comic business, its glow, its sometimes subtle irony, its ludicrous colloquies, its rural life and manners, its naïve and wholesome reverence: with these qualities it stands apart from other plays of cycles foreign or native, and in its dramatic anticipations, postponements, and surprises is our earliest masterpiece of comic drama. A similar dramatic excellence characterizes all this poet's plays, as well as the insertions made by him in other plays. But he is no more remarkable for his dramatic power than for his sensitive observation and his satire.