Mr. Courthope and other writers on the drama have conjectured that the improvement characteristic of the allegorical playwright was one to which he was driven of necessity, namely, the introduction, and consequently the invention, of a continuous plot. But there was nothing new in the invention of plot. The novelty, if any, was in the distinctively comic nature of the plot-movement most suitable to the purpose of this kind of drama. In tragedy, the movement must be economic of its ups and downs: once headed downward, it must plunge, with but one or two vain recovers, to the abyss. In comedy, on the other hand, though the movement is ultimately upward, the crises are more numerous; the oftener the individual stumbles without breaking his neck, and the more varied his discomfitures, so long as they are temporary, the better does he enjoy his ease in the cool of the day. Tragic effects may be intense and longer drawn out, but they must be few; in comedy, the effects are many, sudden, fleeting, kaleidoscopic. You can enjoy a long, delicious shudder, but not a long-spun joke, or a joke frequently repeated, or many jokes of the same kind. Hence the peculiar movement of the plot in comedy. Now, the novelty of the plot in the moral play, lay in the fact that the movement was of this oscillating, upward kind,--a kind unknown as a rule to the miracle, whose conditions were less fluid, and to the farce, which was too shallow and superficial. The heart of the 'moral' hero was a battleground; as in comedy, the interest was in the vicissitudes of the conflict and the certainty of peace. Though the purpose of the moral play was didactic and reformatory, its doctrine was optimistic and its end to encourage; and one of the distinctive contributions of the moral play to the English comedy was the movement suitable to these conditions, not the introduction of a continuous or connected plot. When Mr. Courthope further speaks of the moral plays as if they were the sole link of connection between the later miracle plays and the regular drama, and implies that the "morality" was unique in its introduction of a leading personage, who may be called the hero of the play, he is attributing to it qualities that existed in contemporary species of the dramatic kind. As to the statement that the moral play arose, as if a new kind of play, from some modification of the miracle play, on the one hand by secular and comic interests, and on the other by allegorical motives and materials, I think that sufficient has been elsewhere said in this article to show that secular and comic interests existed in the miracle play without altering its essence, both before and after the moral had come into prominence, and that allegorical motives and materials had developed themselves into the moral pageant and play before the miracle was visibly affected by them. =9. The Period of Transition: Farce and Romantic Interlude=