nursery." Of course, if the ways of man and maid in society ever grew to be exactly alike, comedy would die of inanition. Consequently, though I say that comedy requires for the sexes equality of social privilege, I do not mean identity. The _synalœpha_ of the sexes--such as some extremists, political and pedagogical, project--would just as surely destroy comedy as in former days the inequality of the sexes dwarfed it. The sentimental and romantic give-and-take is as essential to society as the intellectual, and as essential to comedy as to society. =8. The Dramatic Contribution of the Older Morals= Before discussing the period of transition upon which comedy now enters, it will be advantageous to determine, if possible, what contributions to the methods of comedy should be credited distinctively to this moral or moral interlude during the years that preceded the change, that is, from 1380 to 1520. Certainly not the introduction of the separate play, as is frequently supposed, nor the substitution of immediate and familiar interests for those that were remote, nor of the invented plot for the traditional, and the significant for the spectacular. Though some of these features distinguish the evolution of the allegorical play, one and another of them is also to be recognized at as early a period, or earlier, in those forms of the drama, kindred and unrelated, that I have already described,--the miracle, the saint's play, the farce, and the secular festival play. I should say that, so far as the materials of drama are concerned, the advances peculiar to the allegorical play were, from the use of the scriptural _dramatis persona_, frequently instrumental and therefore wooden, to the use of the dynamic; and from the historical or traditional individual to the representative of a type. These are substitutions important to our subject, for, that the individual should come to the front is, as ten Brink has well said, a characteristic of tragedy, whereas in comedy it is the typical that is emphasized, to the end that in an example which is typical the follies of the age may be liberally, and at the same time impersonally, embodied and chastised. By virtue of its didactic purpose and its allegorical form, moreover, the moral play must ascribe to its _dramatis personæ_ adequate motives of action. It therefore must and does make an attempt, even though rude, at the preservation of psychological probability in the analysis and development of these motives. Once the dramatic person has been labelled with the name of a quality, not as appraised from without and denoted by a patronymic common to dozens beside himself, but from within and specified by his ethonymic (if I may coin the word), he is no longer a chance acquaintance of the dramatist or the public, but the representative of an ethical family. In the moral play the characters stand for or against some convention,--educational, ethical, political,