It is not merely the play after the style of John Heywood. It is long or short; religious, moral, pedagogic, political, or doctrinal; scriptural, allegorical, or profane; classical or native; imaginative or reproductive of the commonplace; stupid or humorous; satirical or purely comic. It seems to me, therefore, unwise to perpetuate a distinction between moral plays and interludes which was not recognized by those who wrote and heard the plays in question. The reduction of the number of actors, the abbreviation of the play, the concentration of the plot, wherever these exist in the later morals or moral interludes, are not evidence of a change of kind, but merely of a natural evolution through a period of some two hundred years. When ten Brink says that the interlude was the species best adapted to further the development of dramatic art, we must understand by interlude the individual, as opposed to the collective drama,--or the occasional performance by professionals for the delectation, and sometimes at the order, of private persons or parties, as opposed to expository or perfunctory plays, plays manipulated by crafts, or associated with times, places, and ends external to art. The improvement in scope and elasticity which marks the individual play is due to various causes: to patronage, which prefers amusement to instruction, and the work of artists to that of journeymen; to the development accordingly of a bread-and-butter profession of acting, with its accompanying _stimuli_ of necessity and opportunity. Poetic invention, dramatic constructiveness and style, are sometimes spurred by hunger; they are always responsive to the appreciation of the cultivated, and maybe to the reward. =7. The Older Morals in their Relation to Comedy=