epent it. Such again is the
_Farce des Theologastres_, in which the students of the Paris
theological colleges are ridiculed, the _Farce de la Pippee,_ and many
others.

[Sidenote: Moralities.]

In strictness, however, those pieces where allegorical personages make
their appearance are not farces but moralities. These compositions were
exceedingly popular in the later middle ages, and their popularity was a
natural sequence of the rage for allegorising which had made itself
evident in very early times, and had in the _Roman de la Rose_ dominated
almost all other literary tastes. The taste for personification and
abstraction has always lent itself easily enough to satire, and in the
fifteenth century pieces under the designation of moralities became very
common. We do not possess nearly as many specimens of the morality as of
the farce, but, on the other hand, the morality is often, though not
always, a much longer composition than the farce. The subjects of
moralities include not merely private vices and follies, but almost all
actual and possible defects of Church and State, and occasionally the
term is applied to pieces, the characters of which are not abstractions,
but which tell a story with a more or less moral turn. Sometimes these
pieces ran to a very great length, and one is quoted, _L'Homme Juste et
l'Homme Mondain_, which contains 36,000 lines, and must, like the longer
mysteries, have occupied days or even weeks in acting. A morality
however, on the average, consisted of about 2000 lines, and its
personages were proportionally more numerous than those of the farce.
Thus the _Moralite des Enfans de Maintenant_ contains thirteen
characters who are indifferently abstract and concrete; Maintenant,
Mignotte, Bon Advis, Instruction, Finet, Malduit, Discipline, Jabien,
Luxure, Bonte, Desespoir, Perdition, and the Fool. This list almost
sufficiently explains the plot, which simply recounts the persistence of
one child in evil and his bad end, with the repentance of the other. The
moralities have the widest diversity of subject, but most of them are
tolerably clearly explained by their titles. _La Condamnation de
Banquet_ is a rather spirited satire on gluttony and open housekeeping.
_Marchebeau_ attacks the disbanded soldiery of the middle of the
fifteenth century. _Charite_ points out the evils which have come into
the world for lack of charity. _La Moralite d'une Femme qui avait voulu
trahir la Cite de Romme_ is