is not, perhaps, of great importance that in the Assumption scene the risen Christ receives the name of _Sapientia_, or that _Contemplatio_ is the ‘exposytour in doctorys wede,’ by whom several other scenes are introduced. But there is a striking passage at the end of the Slaughter of the Innocents, where ‘Dethe, Goddys masangere,’ intervenes to make an end of the tyrannic Herod[438], and here, I think, may clearly be traced yet a third stream of allegorical tendency making its way into the drama from that singular _danse macabre_ or ‘Dance of Death,’ which exercised so powerful a fascination on the art of the Middle Ages. Death hobnobbing with pope and king and clown, with lord and lady, with priest and merchant, with beggar and fool, the irony is familiar in many a long series of frescoes and engravings. Nor are cases lacking in which it was directly adapted for scenic representation. An alleged example at Paris in 1424 was probably only a painting. But in 1449 a _certain jeu, histoire et moralité sur le fait de la danse macabre_ was acted before Philip the Good at Bruges, and a similar performance is recorded at Besançon in 1453[439]. The process of introducing abstractions into the miracle-plays themselves does not seem to have been carried very far. On the other hand, the moralities, if God and the Devil may be regarded as abstractions, admit of nothing else. Two at least of the motives just enumerated, the Dance of Death and the Reconciliation of the Heavenly Virtues, recur in them. But both are subordinate to a third, which may be called the Conflict of Vice and Virtue. This _débat_-like theme is of course familiar in every branch of allegorical literature. Prof. Creizenach traces one type of it, in which the conflict is conceived under the symbols of siege or battle, to the _Psychomachia_ of Prudentius[440], and perhaps even further to the passage about the ‘whole armour of God’ in St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians[441]. For the purposes of the stage it is eminently suitable, both because it lends itself to many and various modes of representation, and because conflict is the very stuff out of which drama is wrought.