each of these, while lavish in expressions of regard, begins,
when put to the test, to make excuse.
At last Everyman
falls back on Good Deeds, and, by the help of this personage
and the other characters in the drama, is brought to such
a state of grace, that, when Death finally comes for him,
the Doctor, whose speech closes the play, is enabled to
inform the audience of his happy departure. The interest
of the piece lies in the piteous appeals made by Everyman
to his worldly allies, and in their diplomatic answers. The
following extract from the dialogue between Everyman
and Goods will show how dramatic is the style, and at the
same time how appropriate the allegory of this admirable
play:

EVERYMAN. Where art thou, my Goods and Riches?
Goods.

Who calleth me? Everyman? What hast thou haste ?
I lie here in corners trussed and piled so high,

And in chests I am locked so fast,

Also sacked in bags thou mayst see with thine eye,

I cannot stir; in packs lo where I lie.
What would you have? lightly me say.

EVERYMAN. Come hither, Goods, in all the haste thou may,
For of counsel I must desire thee.

Goods.

Sir, and ye in the world have sorrow or adversity,
That can I help you to remedy shortly.

EVERYMAN. It is another disease that greveth me,
In this world it is not I tell thee so,

GOODS.

I am sent for another way to go,

To give a straight account general,
Before the highest Jupiter of all :

And all my life I have had my pleasure in thee,
Therefore I pray thee now go with me;

For, peraventure, thou mayst before God Almighty
My reckoning help to clean and purify ;

For it is said ever emong

That money makyth all right that is wrong.
Nay, nay, Everyman, I sing another song.
I follow no man in such voyages,

For, and I went with thee,

Thou shouldest fare much the worse for me:
For, because on me thou didst set thy mind,
Thy reckoning I have made blotted and blind,
That thine account thou canst not make truly,
And that hast thou for the love of me.

EVERYMAN. Lo, now was I deceived ere I was ware,

GOODS.

And all I may wete mispending of him.
What, wenest thou that I am thine?

EVERYMAN. I had wened so.

GOODS.

Nay, Everyman, I say no.

As for a while I was lent thee;

A season thou hast had me in prosperity,
My condition is man's soul to kill;
If I save one, a thousand do I spill.
Wenest thou that I will follow thee?
Nay, not for the world verily.

EVERYMAN. I had wened otherwise.

Goods.

Therefore to thy soul Goods is a thief,
For when thou art dead this is my guise,
Another to deceive in the same wise

As I have do thee, and all to his soul's reprefe.

EVERYMAN. O false Goods! cursed may thou be,

Goods.

Thou traitor to God, thou hast deceived me,
And caught me in thy snare !

Marry, thou brought thyself in care,
Whereof I am right glad :

I must needs laugh, I cannot be sad.

EVERYMAN. Ah, Goods! thou hast long had my hearty love;

GOODS.

I gave thee that which should have been the Lord's

above;

But wilt thou not go with me indeed?

I pray thee truth to say.

Nay, so God me speed:

Therefore, farewell, and have good day.1

Another very noticeable feature in the Moralities is the tendency of the dramatist to represent real personages under the guise of abstractions. I have already pointed out how Langland was the first to adopt this style of 0 allegory, and we have seen how the author of the Coventry Mystery mixes up real and allegorical personages, in the pageant representing the Trial of Joseph and Mary; even in Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure, the abstraction, False Report, appears with the name of Godfrey Gobilive. Nowhere, however, is the practice carried to such lengths as in the Morality called HickScorner. Here the actors-Pity, Contemplation, Perseverance, Imagination, Free-will, Hick-Scorner himself

1 Everyman. From Dodsley's Old Plays (Hazlitt's edition), vol. i. pp. 117-120. The spelling is of course to some extent modernised in this edition.

are all abstractions, but they speak and behave like
persons in real life. Free-will, Imagination, and Hick-
Scorner may be described as three "idle apprentices";
and it is plain that the purpose of the Morality is mainly
to amuse the spectators with an account of the misdoings
of these rogues.
Hick-Scorner gives an account of his
travels, and gets Pity put into the stocks, but he himself
afterwards appears very little in the play, which is mainly
occupied with the conversation of Free-will and Imagina-
tion. The conventional type of the Morality, of course,
required that the bad character should be reformed;
hence Free-will is in the end converted by Perseverance
and Contemplation, and himself converts Imagination;
but what the audience really enjoyed was no doubt
dialogue like the following:-

IMAGINATION. But, Freewill, my dear brother,
Saw you nought of Hick-Scorner?

FREE-WILL.

He promised me to come hither.
Why, sir, knowest thou him?

IMAGINATION. Yea, yea, man, he is full nigh of my kin,
And in Newgate we dwelled together,

FREE-WILL.

For he and I were both shackled in a fetter. Sir, lay you beneath or on high of the seller? IMAGINATION. Nay, iwis among the thickest of yeomen of the collar. FREE-WILL. By God, then were you in great fear.

IMAGINATION. Sir, had I not been two hundred had been thrust in

FREE-WILL.

an halter.

And what life have they there all that great sort? IMAGINATION. By God, sir, once a year some taw halts of Burford; Yea at Tyburn there standeth the great frame,

FREE-WILL.

And some take a fall that maketh their neck lame.
Yea, but can they go no more?

IMAGINATION. Oh no, man; the wrest is twist so sore,

FREE-WILL.

For as soon as they have In manus tuas once,
By God, their breath is stopped at once.
Why, do they pray in that place there?

IMAGINATION. Yea, sir, they stand in great fear,

And so fast tangled in that snare,

It falleth to their lot to have the same share. FREE-WILL. That is a knavish sight to see them totter on a beam. IMAGINATION. Sir, the whoresons could not convey1 clean, For, and they could have carried by craft as I can,

1 Steal.

In process of years each of them should be a gentleman.

Yet as for me I was never thief;

If my hands were smitten off, I can steal with my teeth;

For ye know well there is craft in daubing.

I can look in a man's face and pick his purse,

And can tell new tidings that was never true, i-wis,
For my hood is all lined with lesing.1

In the curious enigmatical discourse between these two Abstractions on the subject of hanging, we might almost imagine ourselves to be listening to one of those colloquies between persons in low life in which Shakespeare so much delights.

Here I pause in the history of the English drama. We have seen how in the beginning the miracle play was closely connected with the services of the Church, and was developed by the clergy in order to aid the imagination of the worshipper to realise the mysterious truths of the Christian religion; how from the interior of the church the representation passed to the churchyard, and thence to the open spaces near the towns, thus escaping farther and farther from ecclesiastical control; and how at the great feast of Corpus Christi it finally passed into the hands of the trade-gilds, and became the main vehicle of popular urban amusement. Under the new management it naturally took its colour from the taste of the actors and audience, so that its sacred character was curiously blended with imitations of actual nature and with the comedy of low life. On the other hand, on its symbolical side, it gradually allied itself with literature, and modified its form by admitting the action of allegorical personages. From this modification arose a new kind of play, the Morality, in which a symbolical plot was evolved by the action of a number of abstract characters. The transition from the Morality to the later Interlude, and from this to the regular drama, is a subject that must be deferred till the next volume.

1 Hick-Scorner. Dodsley's Old Plays (Hazlitt's edition), vol. i. pp. 157-159.

CHAPTER XI

THE DECAY OF ENGLISH MINSTRELSY

STRICTLY speaking, a history which is mainly intended to trace the development of literary and dramatic poetry in England from the age of Chaucer is not concerned with the history of oral or ballad poetry. But, as the reader will have already seen, Chaucer's art has its roots in the oral poetry of the trouvères and troubadours; and the ballad made so frequent an appearance in the English drama, and so powerfully influenced the course of metrical composition at the close of the eighteenth century, that the subject is one that cannot be neglected at the point of the narrative to which we have now been brought. In order, therefore, to give a comprehensive view of the relations between English Poetry and English Minstrelsy, and of the manner in which each form of art has been affected by the other, I propose in this chapter to deal with the question as it was first raised by Bishop Percy, in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

This famous book, the first edition of which was published in 1765, contained two essays, one on the History of Minstrelsy," the other on the "Origin of the Metrical Romances," which taken together may be said to furnish the first generalised theory of the nature of mediæval poetry. Concisely stated, the following are Percy's main conclusions on the subject of minstrelsy:

I. "The minstrels were an ancient order of men who

sang to the harp their own compositions."

2. "The minstrels seem to have been the genuine