ntles of England. No copy of
this play exists, but of its character we have a pretty sensible idea
from various other plays of the Creation handed down from the
north-country cycles. In the best of them the predestined Adam is
created after a fashion both to suggest his treatment by Giotto in the
medallion at Florence, and his lineaments as an English mediaeval
prototype:--

"But now this man that I have made,
With the ghost of life, I make him glad,
Rise up, Adam, rise up rade,[1]
A man full of soul and life!"

But to surprise the English mediaeval smith or carpenter, cobbler or
bowyer, when he turns playgoer at Whitsuntide, assisting at a play
which expressed himself as well as its scriptural folk, we must go on to
later episodes. The Deluge in the Chester pageant, that opens the
present volume, has among its many Noah's Ark sensations, some of them
difficult enough to mimic on the pageant-wagon, a typical recall of the
shipwright and ark-builder. God says to Noah:--

A ship soon thou shalt make thee of trees, dry and light.
Little chambers therein thou make,
And binding pitch also thou take,
Within and out, thou ne slake
To anoint it thro' all thy might.

In the York Noah's Ark pageant, which seems to be the parent-play in
England of all its kind, we have this craftsman's episode much enlarged.
"Make it of boards," God says, "and wands between!"

Thus thriftily and not over thin,
Look that thy seams be subtly seen
And nailed well, that they not twin:
Thus I devised it should have been;
Therefore do forth, and leave thy din

Then, after further instructions, Noah begins to work before the
spectators, first rough-hewing a plank, then trying it with a line, and
joining it with a gynn or gin. He says:--

More subtilely can no man _sew_;[2]
It shall be clinched each ilk and deal,
With nails that are both noble and new,
Thus shall I fix it to the keel:
Take here a rivet, and there a screw,
With there bow,[3] there now, work I well,
This work, I warrant both good and true.

To complete the pedigree of this scene we must turn to the old poem, the
"Cursor Mundi," which, written in the fourteenth century, the time when
the northern miracle-plays were taking decisive shape, appears to have
served their writers as a stock-book. The following passage is own
brother to that in the York