ional
lyricism of the simplest charm:

Neither in halls, nor yet in bowers,
Born would he not be
Neither in castles, nor yet in towers
That seemly were to see.

and--

As I outrode this enderes night
Of three jolly shepherds, I saw a sight;
And all about their fold a star shone bright,
They sang "Terli, terlow!"
So merrily the shepherds their pipes can blow.

In this Coventry play we have nearly all the ingredients--foreign,
liturgical, or homely English--of the composite miracle play brought
together. It bears traces of many hands; and betrays in the dialogue of
the formal characters the rubricated lines of the church play on which
it was based. The chief characters live, move and act their recognised
parts with the certainty of the folk in a nursery tale. Herod out-Herods
himself with a Blunderbore extravagance:--

I am the cause of this great light and thunder;
It is through my fury that they such noise do make.
My fearful countenance, the clouds so doth incumber
That oftentimes for dread thereof, the very earth doth quake.

"Fee, fi, fo, fum!" might be the refrain of this giant's litany. The
other types are as plainly stamped. The shepherd's are from the life,
and contrast well with the stilted and rather tiresome prophets. The
scenes at the babe's crib when the offerings are made of the shepherds'
pipe, old hat, and mittens, are both droll and tender.

The tragic counterparts of these scenes are those where the Three
Executioners work their pitiless task to an end at the Crucifixion, or
where the Three Maries go to the grave afterwards in the Cornish
mystery, or where Isaac bids his father bind his eyes that he shall not
see the sword. It was for long the fashion to say, as Sir Walter Scott
did, that these plays had little poetic life, or human interest in them.
But they are, at their best, truly touched with essential emotions, with
humour, terror, sorrow, pity, as the case may be. Dramatically they are
far more alive at this moment, than the English drama of the
mid-nineteenth century.

In the Cornish mysteries we lose much by having to use a translation.
But something of the spirit and life survive in spite of it, and one
detached passage from another of the plays, that of the _Crucifixion_,
is printed in the appendix, which loses nothing by being compared with
the treatment in other miracle-plays. Also in the Appendix will be found
an inter