The dramatic importance of this figure can therefore not be overrated. He forms the _callida junctura_ between religious and secular, didactic and artistic, ideal and tangible, in our early comedy. He found a house of correction and he left a stage. Garcios, Pilates, Doomsday demons, and Maks precede, or flit beside him; but he, with his ancestral Sins, dependent Follies, and succeeding Ironies and Humours, occupies the central and the foremost place. Even while representing the superfluity of naughtiness with an eye to its reprobation, he is the life of the 'moral,'--its apology for artistic existence, its appeal to human interest. But when he steals a further march and rounds up for ridicule the very components of the allegorical drama that are most removed from laughter, and most liable thereto,--the long-faced abstractions that regard the comic spirit as sinful and are impervious to a joke,--he fulfils his destiny. He is the dramatic salt and solvent of the moral play. At first it couldn't thrive without him; at last it couldn't thrive with him. For, what _raison d'être_ could a moral have that no longer regarded the comic as immoral, knew a joke at sight, perhaps adventured one on its own account? Step by step with the development of a popular æsthetic interest in the affairs of common men the playwright asserted his superiority to social and allegorical make-believes, and the Vice proved his utility as a dramatic reagent. Once the Vice had gathered all sins in himself, his career was from 'inclination' to 'humour,' from abstract to concrete, from the moral to the typical, the one to the many, and so from the service of allegory to that of interlude, moral and pithy, but merry, all in preparation for farce, and social and romantic comedy. =6. The Relation between Miracle, Moral, and Interlude=