t he deserved: it was their notion of
"poetic justice;" while most of them were too childish to be shocked at
the discord thus introduced, and many, we may well hope, too childlike to
lose their reverence for the holy because of the proximity of the
ridiculous.

There seems to me considerably more of poetic worth scattered through
these plays than is generally recognized; and I am glad to be able to do
a little to set forth the fact. I cannot doubt that my readers will be
interested in such fragments as the scope and design of my book will
allow me to offer. Had there been no such passages, I might have regarded
the plays as but remotely connected with my purpose, and mentioned them
merely as a dramatic form of religious versification. I quote from the
_Coventry Miracles_, better known than either of the other two sets in
existence, the Chester Plays and those of Widkirk Abbey. The manuscript
from which they have been edited by Mr. Halliwell, one of those students
of our early literature to whom we are endlessly indebted for putting
valuable things within our reach, is by no means so old as the plays
themselves; it bears date 1468, a hundred and thirty years after they
appeared in their English dress. Their language is considerably
modernized, a process constantly going on where transcription is the
means of transmission--not to mention that the actors would of course
make many changes to the speech of their own time. I shall modernize it a
little further, but only as far as change of spelling will go.

The first of the course is _The Creation_. God, and angels, and Lucifer
appear. That God should here utter, I cannot say announce, the doctrine
of the Trinity, may be defended on the ground that he does so in a
soliloquy; but when we find afterwards that the same doctrine is one of
the subjects upon which the boy Jesus converses with the doctors in the
Temple, we cannot help remarking the strange anachronism. Two remarkable
lines in the said soliloquy are these:

And all that ever shall have being
It is closed in my mind.

The next scene is the _Fall of Man_, which is full of poetic feeling and
expression both. I must content myself with a few passages.

Here is part of Eve's lamentation, when she is conscious of the death
that has laid hold upon her.

Alas that ever that speech was spoken
That the false angel said unto me!
Alas! our Maker's bidding is broken,
For I have touched his own dear tree.