Concerning the Devil even of this later birth, many false conceptions, due to insufficient research, have obtained currency. It is commonly imagined that he was the mainspring of the play, that he came into close contact with human beings, that he represented phases of human character, that he was a comical figure,--jester, or "roister," or butt,--and that he held some fixed relation to the Vice, who was "his constant attendant," says Malone. But the Devil was the principal personage only in the earliest of the morals that survive, he rarely associated with mankind, and he assumed the human rôle, such as that of judge or sailor, only once or twice.[48] In the moral plays not more than four or five comic Devils are extant--the Titivillus of _Mankynd_, the Beelzebub of the _Nigromansir_, the Lucifer of _Like wil to Like_, and the Devil of _All for Money_; and the last of these is the only roysterer of the lot, one of the very few to serve as butt for the Vice. Such jokes as that of the Devil taking "a shrewd boy with him" from the audience in _Wisdom_ are interpolations, and it is only after the moral has passed its zenith that, as in _Like wil to Like_ and the early comedy _Friar Bacon_, the Devil carries off the Vice-clown. As early as 1486-1500 the moral play, _Nature_,--called, when printed in 1538, a goodly interlude,--dispenses with the Devil altogether, and from that time on the character appears only in some half-dozen extant plays of the kind and its derivatives, and is subordinate. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, however, the Devil is revived, and in comedies of concrete life and character he frequently swaggers as a blusterer or comic personage: in _Grim the Collier_, for instance, in the _Knack to know a Knave_, and _Histrio-Mastix_, as well as seventeenth-century plays like _The Devil is in It_ and _The Devil is an Ass_. I have said that his office in the genuine moral was not comic, neither was it satirical. It consisted largely in directing or commissioning his agents, the Vices. Professor Cushman, who makes this statement, further points out that this conception of the Devil did not develop in any popular sense, nor gain in variety in the English moral plays; but that the case is altogether dissimilar in the German and French drama of the same period, where the devils are not only numerous, but carefully differenced as representatives of the various foibles of mankind,--a rôle which was assumed in England, as we shall presently see, by the Vice.