Rat, bursting with impotent rage at his well-merited discomfiture, is confronted with the calm impartiality of "Master Baily"--the steward of the lord of the manor, apparently, and the representative of temporal authority in the village. The common verdict that _Gammer Gurtons Nedle_ is a work of lower rank than _Ralph Roister Doister_ is perhaps on the whole not unjust; but the later play has some merits of its own, and, as the first known attempt to present a picture of contemporary rustic life in the form of a regular comedy, it may be admitted to represent a distinct advance in the development of English dramatic art. =Dialect.=--The treatment of dialect in the play demands a word of notice. All the characters, except the curate and the baily, who belong to the educated class, and Diccon, who may be presumed to have come down from a better social station than that of the village people, use a kind of speech which is clearly intended to represent the dialect of the southwestern counties. It is not always very correct; the writer, for instance, seems to have thought that _cham_ stood for "am" as well as "I am," so that he makes Hodge say "cham I not." Stevenson, as we have seen, was of northern birth; and, as a line or two in the same dialect is found in _Ralph Roister Doister_, there is some reason for believing that the dialect of the stage rustic was already a matter of established convention.[652] The word _pes_, a hassock, which occurs in the play, is peculiar, so far as is known, to the East Anglian dialect, and may have been picked up by the author in his walks about Cambridge. Whether derived from _Gammer Gurton_ or from plays of earlier date, the conventional dialect of the stage rustic kept its place throughout the Elizabethan period. Shakspere's rustics, as is well known, mostly use the southwestern forms, not those current in the poet's native Warwickshire.