The continuance of the Devil and his relation to the clown in these plays are a subject of historical interest, but it would be a mistake to say, as Halliwell-Phillipps has said of the Beelzebub, that either of them is "a genuine descendant of the Vice." Perhaps I should not have stayed to make these remarks, but they will, I hope, direct attention to a phenomenon unique in the history of English drama. The St. George play is an example of how a legendary miracle, sacred in its origin, may pass into a folk drama of a national hero, and that again degenerate into a mumming or dance; and how this, oblivious of the original plot and finally of all fable, may first transform the saintly hero into a performer in a sword dance, as in the Shetland play, and then, as in the Revesby, eliminate even him and substitute a fool. Both literary career and literary indignity of this kind have been escaped by the other national saint of England, Edward the Confessor. In earlier days he figured in frequent pageants, records of which are preserved, for instance, in the Old Leet Book of Coventry, of the years 1456 and 1471, but he readily gave way to St. George and disappeared from the dramatic horizon. =5. The Devil and the Vice= The nexus between the comic qualities of the miracle plays and those of the morals cannot well be made without some discussion of the rôles of the Devil and the Vice. The treatise which I have before cited,[44] and which appears to me fairly conclusive, shows that the Devil of the English stage is originally a creation, not of folk mythology, but of theology. He is concrete, to be sure, in accordance with scriptural and legendary tradition, but in the 'mysteries' his character is almost entirely serious, not ludicrous, as appears to be vulgarly reported. The association of the genuinely comic or satirical with the conception of the Devil is first evident in later representations of that character, and then only in the case of lesser denizens of the lower world. The humorous scene in the Chester _Harrowing_ between the demons and the alewife abandoned in hell is, for instance, as Dr. Deimling has said, a late interpolation. The Wakefield dramatist's contribution to the _Judicium_, of _Tutivillus_ and his ilk, is about the only diabolic humour in the miracles; and that the satirical speech of the Coventry demon in the _Conspiracy_ was a still later borrowing from _Tutivillus_, I have but little doubt. To credit the Devils of the earliest miracles with a tendency and an ability to criticise manners and morals would be just as wrong as to attribute to them a buffoonery which accrues only at a later date. Of the Mephistophelian style, more serious than Chaucer's and more satirical than Langland's, we have no historical trace before the witty Devil of Wakefield--or his maker. The humour of the miracle Devils shows itself in bombastic, grotesque, or abusive language, rather than in anything of comic utterance or incident.