Neither of these can alone make a comedy, but one of them may sometimes save it. Both should certainly characterize it. But for the former, the drama of appearances might be caricature, abuse, horse-play, or homily; but for the latter, romantic comedy would be bathos. No amount of wit, however, could save a play that did not possess a significant sequence of material and event. Though the booths of Bartholomew Fair agitate the diaphragm, they do not constitute comedy. Without plot the lunges of wit lack point; and as for the plotless play of passion, it ends in Bedlam, whence all the humour in the world cannot redeem it. It was a step forward when allegory made way for concrete characters and manners, and the motives born of social intercourse; a further step when the dramatist ceased instructing and sought to amuse. But the final step implied the still rarer ability to create something integral and critical in one, something that should act what life means, and so unconsciously demonstrate that it is purposive, and more hopeful and amusing than we thought. Naturally enough, our earlier comic plots, when they were escaping from the symbolic, lacked sometimes in significance, and sometimes in sequence. The fables of _Roister Doister_ and _Gammer Gurton_ mark an advance in technical construction; but they do not escape the farcical, for their subjects are trivial. There were likewise many experiments to be made in the materials of intrigue and passion before _Damon and Pithias_ and _The Supposes_ could fulfil, even in part, the requirements of significant romance. And when, at last, the play with a plot had come to its own, it was long before it attained wisdom to suffuse the appearances of life with their illuminating characteristic, and imagination to colour the course of characteristic events. FOOTNOTES: [1] In _The Academy_, January 11, 1890. [2] Manly, _Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama_, vol. I., p. xxvii; for examples of dramatic tropes from the _Regularis Concordia Monachorum_ and the Winchester troper, see pp. xix-xxvi. [3] _Non novo quidem instituto, sed de consuetudine_, etc., says _Bulæus, Hist. Univ., Par._ II., 226 (edit. 1665); Collier, _English Dramatic Poetry, and Annals of the Stage_, I. 14. [4] In his _Lives of the Abbots of St. Albans_. [5] In the _Household Book_, Henry VII.; Collier, _Hist._, vol. I, p. 53 n. [6] _Gesch. des neueren Dramas_, I. 141. [7] See Wright's _Early Mysteries_, etc., Klein's _Geschichte des Dramas_, III. 638 _et seq._, Creizenach, _Gesch. d. n. Dramas_, I. 37 _et seq._ Quadrio speaks in his _Storia_, III. ii. 52, of a Pietro Babyone, an Englishman, who, according to Bale, wrote a Latin comedy in verse, _c._ 1366. [8] Ward, I. 52. [9] Creizenach, I. 101. [10] Historians of the Church of York, Rolls Series, No. 71, i. 328. Quoted by A. F. Leach in _Some English Plays and Players_, Furnivall Miscellany, p. 206.