In its purest form the Morality Play was simply the subject of the Miracle Play writ small, the general theme of the Fall and Redemption of Man applied to the particular case of an individual soul. The central figure was a Human Being; his varying fortunes as he passed from childhood to old age supplied the incidents, and his ultimate destiny crowned the action. Around him were grouped virtues and vices, at his elbows were his good and his bad angel, while at the end of life waited Heaven or Hell to receive him, according to his merits and the mercy of God. The merits were commonly minimized to emphasize the mercy, with happy results for the interest of the play. It is easy to see how all this harmonized with the mediaeval allegorical element in religion and literature. A century earlier Langland had scourged wickedness in high places in his famous allegory, _Piers Plowman_. A century later Spenser was to weave the most exquisite verse round the defeats and triumphs of the spirit of righteousness in man's soul. Nor had allegory yet died when Bunyan wrote, for all time, his story of the battling of Christian against his natural failings. After all, a Morality Play was only a dramatized version of an inferior _Pilgrim's Progress_; and those of us who have not wholly lost the imagination of our childhood still find pleasure in that book. In judging the Moralities, therefore, we must not forget the audience to which they appealed. We shall be the more lenient when we discover how soon they were improved upon.