attire,[19] their endless pranks (not set down in the text), their
reappearance and disappearance at the most unexpected times, their howls
and familiar 'Harrow and owt! owt and alas!' were a constant delight,
and preserved their popularity unexhausted for two hundred years,
securing for them a place in the later forms of drama when the Miracles
were supplanted by Moralities and Interludes. The Devil's near cousin,
Herod, attained to a similar reputation and longevity. Has even modern
melodrama quite lost that immortal type of the ranting, bombastic tyrant
and villain?

The women in the play deserve notice. With the exception of Noah's wife,
who was commonly treated in a broadly humorous vein, the principal
female characters possess that sweet naturalness, depth and constancy
of affection, purity and refinement which an age that had not yet lost
the ideals of chivalry accepted as the normal qualities of a good woman.
The mothers, wives, and daughters of that day would appear to have been
before all things womanly, in an unaffected, instinctive way. Isaac (in
the _Chester Miracle Play_), thinking, in the hour of death, of his
mother's grief at home, says, 'Father, tell my mother for no thinge.'
When Mary is married (_Coventry Play_) and must part from her mother,
they bid farewell in this wise:

_Anna._ I pray the, Mary, my swete chylde,
Be lowe[20] and buxhum[21], meke and mylde,
Sad and sobyr and nothyng wylde,
And Goddys blessynge thou have....

Goddys grace on you sprede,
ffarewel, Mary, my swete fflowre,
ffareweyl, Joseph, and God you rede[22],
ffareweyl my chylde and my tresowre,
ffarewel, my dowtere yyng.[23]

_Maria._ ffarewel, fadyr and modyr dere,
At you I take my leve ryght here,
God that sytt in hevyn so clere,
Have you in his kepyng.

The heartbroken words of Mary at the foot of the Cross have already been
quoted. In the reconciliation between Joseph and Mary (_Scene 12_), in
Mary's patient endurance of Joseph's bad temper on the journey to
Bethlehem (_Scene 15_), in the mother's unrestrained misery at the loss
of the boy Jesus and rapture on finding Him in the Temple (_Scene 20_),
in the two sisters' forced cheerfulness by the bedside of the dying
Lazarus and their sorrow at his death--nor do these by any means exha