If the reader will cast even a rapid glance by way of comparison over the French _Corpus_ of mysteries and the English, he will observe that the scope of subjects possible to a religious cycle was amenable to widely different conditions of restriction, selection, and enlargement, and that the treatment of the same and similar subjects was infinitely varied. To illustrate at length would be a work of supererogation. Everybody knows that the French cycles have plays upon subjects, the Job, for instance, and Tobias and Esther,[30] not touched by the English,--at any rate when in their prime; and that the same subject or episode is frequently treated in a way dissimilar to the English. When we turn to details we note likewise the independence of the playwright: none of the English plays avails itself, for instance, of Adam's difficulty in swallowing the apple, though the incident figures both in _Le Mistere de la Nativite_ and that of the _Viel Testament_; nor of the attractive possibilities of Reuben and Rachel's maid, Joseph and Potiphar's wife, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and many another conjunction known to all readers of the French religious play. And these discrepancies between national cycles hold true even where, as in the case of the Chester plays, the influence of the French mysteries of the thirteenth century and of the later collections is in other respects evident. Of the four English cycles, moreover, each does not select exactly the same subjects for its pageants as the others,--Balaam and his Ass, for instance, appear only in the Chester,--nor do all introduce the same incidents in the handling of a common subject.