Far more important than this slight secular extension of miracle-plays is another development in the direction of allegory, giving rise to the ‘moral plays’ or ‘moralities,’ as they came to be indifferently called[433], in which the characters are no longer scriptural or legendary persons, but wholly, or almost wholly, abstractions, and which, although still religious in intention, aim rather at ethical cultivation than the stablishing of faith. The earliest notices of morals are found about the end of the fourteenth century, at a time when the influence of the _Roman de la Rose_ and other widely popular works was bringing every department of literature under the sway of allegory[434]. That the drama also should be touched with the spirit of the age was so inevitable as hardly to call for comment. But it will be interesting to point out some at least of the special channels through which the new tendency established itself. In the first place there is the twelfth-century Latin play of _Antichristus_. In a sense the whole content of this may be called allegorical, and the allegory becomes formal in such figures as _Heresis_ and _Ypocrisis_, _Iustitia_ and _Misericordia_, and in those of _Ecclesia_, _Synagoga_, and _Gentilitas_, suggested to the clerkly author by a well-known _disputatio_. The same theme recurs in more than one later play[435]. Secondly, there is the theme of the Reconciliation of the Heavenly Virtues, which is suggested by the words of the eighty-fifth Psalm: ‘Mercy and Truth are met together: Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other.’ This is treated in two unprinted and little known French plays, also of the twelfth century, which I have not as yet had occasion to mention and of which I borrow the following analysis from Dr. Ward: ‘These four virtues appear personified as four sisters, who meet together after the Fall of Man before the throne of God to conduct one of those disputations which were so much in accordance with the literary tastes of the age; Truth and Righteousness speak against the guilty Adam, while Mercy and Peace plead in his favour. Concord is restored among the four sisters by the promise of a Saviour, who shall atone to Divine Justice on behalf of man.’ One of these pieces is ascribed to the Anglo-Norman poet, Guillaume Herman (1127-70), the other to Stephen Langton, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury. They are generally spoken of as literary exercises, not intended for representation[436]. But it is obvious that they might very well find their places in miracle-play cycles, as links between the scenes dealing respectively with the Fall and the Redemption. Further, precisely such an episode, in precisely such a position, does occur, three hundred years later, in the English cycle known as the _Ludus Coventriae_. Nor is this the only allegorical element which distinguishes a certain part of this patchwork cycle from nearly all the other English plays[437]. It