A general view of his history shows, then, that the Vice is neither an ethical nor dramatic derivative of the Devil; nor is he a pendant to that personage, as foil or ironical decoy, or even antagonist. The Devil of the early drama is a mythical character, a fallen archangel, the anthropomorphic Adversary. The Vice, on the other hand, is allegorical,--typical of the moral frailty of mankind. Proceeding from the concept of the Deadly Sins, ultimately focussing them, he dramatizes the evil that springs from within. Though at first directed by God's Adversary, who assails man with temptations from without, the Vice is the younger contemporary of the Devil rather than his agent. As he acquires personality, he assumes characteristics and functions unknown to the Adversary, scriptural or dramatic. The functions were gradually assimilated with those of mischief-maker, jester, and counterfeit-crank; the characteristics, more and more affected by the Fool-literature of Wireker, Lydgate, Brandt and Barclay, Skelton, and the rest (which included vice in Folly, and by the Fool connoted vicious characters in all variety), were insensibly identified with social rather than abstract ethical qualities, and so came to be distributed as tendencies or "humours" among the persons of the drama,--who themselves are no longer allegorical, but representative of the concrete individuals of everyday life. Though the conduct of the interlude Vice may be anything but dignified, his function was, accordingly, at first serious. It was only gradually, and as the conflict between good and evil was supplanted by less didactic materials,--in other words, as the moral became more of a play,--that the Vice grew to be farcical, a mischief-maker, and ultimately jester. So long as he acts the seducer in disguise, and the marplot, he remains dramatically supreme. When he, however, assumes the rôle of parasite, counterfeit-crank, or simple, he enhances the variety of his fascination at the expense of his distinctive quality; and when he once has identified himself with the Will Summer, the actor, wag, or buffoon by profession, he plays below the function and level of his pristine quality. The Vice proper should, therefore, not be confounded with the Shakespearean fool, nor with the country clown. The country clown or booby he in reality never is; indeed, in some earlier manifestations[54] the clown exists contemporaneously with the Vice, and is his natural though not always complaisant quarry. Though the Vice, however, did not turn clown, the clown imperceptibly usurped qualities of the vanishing Vice.