subject-matter of the plays. I only desire to add here that the instinct which made the miracle-plays a joy to the mediaeval burgher is the same instinct which the more primitive peasant satisfied in a score of modes of rudimentary folk-drama[424]. The popularity and elaboration of the devil scenes in the plays is the most striking manifestation of this identity[425]. For your horned and blackened devil is the same personage, with the same vague tradition of the ancient heathen festival about him, whether he riots it through the cathedral aisles in the Feast of Fools, or hales the Fathers to limbo and harries the forward spectators in the market-place of Beverley or Wakefield. One must not look for absolute breaches of continuity, even in a literary evolution. That the liturgical types of religious drama continued to exist side by side with their popular offshoots, that here the clergy continued to present plays, and in spite of a certain adverse current of ascetic feeling, to assist the lay guilds in divers ways, has already been there shown. It is to be added that the texts of the plays bear traces to the end of their liturgical origin. The music used is reminiscent of church melodies[426]. The dialogue at critical moments follows the traditional lines and occasionally even reverts to the actual Latin of the _repraesentationes_. More than one play—the Towneley _Iuditium_, the Croxton _Sacrament_, the Digby _St. Mary Magdalen_—closes with the _Te Deum_ which habitually ended Matins when the dramatic interpolation of the office was over. And what are the _Expositor_ of the _Ludus Coventriae_, the _Doctor_ of the Brome play, or even _Balaeus Prolocutor_ himself, but the lineal descendants, through the dramatized St. Augustine, of certain German plays and the _appellatores_ or _vocatores_ of the _Prophetae_, of the priest who read the pseudo-Augustinian Christmas _lectio_ from which the _Prophetae_ sprang? Survivals such as these impress upon the student the unity of the whole religious drama of the Middle Ages, from trope to Corpus Christi cycle. CHAPTER XXIII MORALITIES, PUPPET-PLAYS, AND PAGEANTS