religious,--that is to say, social in the broadest sense. With the advent of such characters, therefore, the social drama receives an impulse. Its hero serves to justify or to satirize an institution; for that end he exists. And therefore in the handling of motives the moral makes a genuine advance in the direction of comedy, both critical and ideal. We notice next that the author of this kind of drama finds it necessary to devise situations for exploiting the idiosyncrasies of his principal characters; and that, even though the characters be disguised as abstractions, the friction of what is dynamic with what is real results in something vivid and concrete. I do not mean to say that the dramatist has learned how to develop character, but how to display or manifest it. Skill in the portrayal of character in process of growth came but slowly, and with the passage of the allegorical play into the drama of real life. As to the portrayal of motives and emotions in their complexity, that is an art much more refined, to which the writers of the moral never attained, even though they enriched their abstractions with borrowings from theologians, philosophers, and poets, for in dealing with abstractions at all they were dealing with life at second hand. Indeed, complex characters can hardly be found in English drama before the various tentative dramatic species had merged themselves in the polytypic plays with which comedy, properly so called, made its appearance. The allegorical dramatists found also, like the writers of the later miracle and farce, that critical situations demanded plain language and unsophisticated manners; and if, in these respects, the realism of the moral excels that of the earlier miracle, it is perhaps because of the superior dynamic quality of the moral _dramatis persona_.