ion of
Man applied to the particular case of an individual soul. The central
figure was a Human Being; his varying fortunes as he passed from
childhood to old age supplied the incidents, and his ultimate destiny
crowned the action. Around him were grouped virtues and vices, at his
elbows were his good and his bad angel, while at the end of life waited
Heaven or Hell to receive him, according to his merits and the mercy of
God. The merits were commonly minimized to emphasize the mercy, with
happy results for the interest of the play.

It is easy to see how all this harmonized with the mediaeval allegorical
element in religion and literature. A century earlier Langland had
scourged wickedness in high places in his famous allegory, _Piers
Plowman_. A century later Spenser was to weave the most exquisite verse
round the defeats and triumphs of the spirit of righteousness in man's
soul. Nor had allegory yet died when Bunyan wrote, for all time, his
story of the battling of Christian against his natural failings. After
all, a Morality Play was only a dramatized version of an inferior
_Pilgrim's Progress_; and those of us who have not wholly lost the
imagination of our childhood still find pleasure in that book. In
judging the Moralities, therefore, we must not forget the audience to
which they appealed. We shall be the more lenient when we discover how
soon they were improved upon.

Influenced at first by the comprehensiveness of the plot in the Miracle
Play, the writers of the early Moralities were satisfied with the
compression of action effected by the change from the general to the
particular theme. This had brought about a reduction in the time
required for the acting; and along with these gains had come the further
advantages of novelty and originality. Accordingly the author of _The
Castell of Perseverance_ (almost the only true Morality handed down to
us) was quite content to let his play run to well over three thousand
lines, seeing that within this space he set forth the whole life of a
man from the cradle to the grave and even beyond. But later writers were
quick to see that this so-called particular theme was still a great deal
too general, leaving only the broadest outlines available for characters
and incidents. By omitting the stages of childhood and early manhood
they could plunge at once into the last stage, where, beneath the shadow
of imminent destiny, every action had an intensified interest. Moreover,
w