The plays that call for consideration in this section and the next may be classified roughly as farces, romantic interludes, school interludes, and controversial morals. Each of these kinds reaches a culmination conformable to its nature, within the limits that I have chosen for the period; and each has its own place in the history of comedy. For it must not be supposed that, because a pastoral farce like the _Mak_ did not develop into independent existence, or because moral interludes gradually exhausted their career towards the end of the sixteenth century, such species had no influence in maturing English comedy. The peculiar quality and charm of our comedy is that, deriving from sources not only distinct, but remote in literary habitat,--scriptural, allegorical, farcical, pastoral, romantic, classical, historical, or purely native and social,--it has not dissipated itself in a thousand streamlets, but has carried down deposits from each tributary at its best. In _Love's Labor's Lost_, _Two Angry Women_, _As You Like It_, _Old Wives' Tale_, _Every Man in His Humour_, we find, as in a miner's pan, 'colours' from vastly different soils. Of the indebtedness of comedy to the parody of religious festivals I have already spoken, and I have little doubt that at later periods English comedy continued to draw devices, if not inspiration, from performances whose occasion was a revolt against the straitness of religion. One, at least, of the interludes of John Heywood is closely similar to the French _Farce de Pernet_, and that such farces were, in motive, first a gloss upon the lessons of the divine service, then a diversion, and finally a factor in the extra-ecclesiastical Feast of Fools, any reader of Petit de Julleville will readily concede. It is impossible that the comic features and comic characters of the farces acted by the _clercs de la Basoche_, such as that of the immortal _Maître Pathelin_, should not have affected the dramatic invention of contemporary and succeeding Englishmen, conversant as many of them were with the literature and society of France. And a like effect might naturally be expected to have been exercised by the _sotties_ of the contemporary _enfants sans souci_; for, through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, drama of that kind convulsed the sides of merrymakers south of the Channel. Such were the occasion and motive of farces and _sotties_. So far as they employed the plot of domestic intrigue for their purposes of satire, I have little doubt that they drew freely upon the Latin elegiac comedies of which I have already spoken as the favourite dramatic species of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The _Farce de Pernet_ has connection with more than one of those imitations of Terentian intrigue. It has, also, like many of its kind and of elegiac comedies as well, a kinship with one and another popular tale. The church, then, seems to have furnished the opportunity