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THE CHESTER MYSTERIES. 191 
was gone, the second came, and so the third, and so orderly till the last was 
done, all inorder, without any staying in any place, for worde being brought 
how every place was near done, they came, and made no place to tarry till the 
last was played. . . . .” 
In the opening play, which is always the Fall of the Angels, 
we find ourselves at the very outset, brought in contact with 
that immense mass of legendary matter which, in the Middle 
Ages, was received with so much undoubting simplicity as an 
integral portion of the truth itself. The Fall of the Angels 
was, for some reason or other, a very favorite subject in Eng- 
land. The Anglo-Saxon poems, handed down to us as 
Caedmon’s, dwell upon it at considerable length, and the 
curious 14th-century poem, known as the Cursor Mundi, which 
is supposed to give an account of the world from the Creation 
to the Day of Doom, begins with a long history of the Creation 
of the Angels, and declares how “ the Angel that He wrought 
foremost . . . . and set him highest in the hall, as prince 
and sire over all, and for that he was fair and bright, Lucifer 
toname he hight” . . . rebelled against his Maker, and 
was “cast out of that high court.” ‘‘ From full high he fell full 
low,” and can never obtain mercy, because he will never stoop 
to ask for it. And with him fell all his followers, though 
those that were less in guilt fell not so far as the others, but 
“¢ Some in the lift, some in the air,” 
they dree their weird till the Day of Judgment; and these are 
the fays and fairies, the elves and gnomes, and water sprites, 
elemental spirits of medieval superstition. It is strange to 
realize, as we must do as soon as we begin to consider the 
matter, that Milton’s ‘“‘ Paradise Lost’”’ is something very like the 
old Mystery of the Fall of the Angels translated into poetry ; 
and, in this connection, it is interesting to remember how pos- 
sible it is that Milton, in his youth, may have been present at 
perhaps more than one performance of the Whitsun plays at 
Chester, so that it may actually have been Here that the never- 
to-be-forgotten impressions were received, which, in his days of 
blindness, came forth in such a glorious shape. For it is certain 
that Milton was on terms of intimate friendship with Henry 
Lawes, who set the songs in Comus to music, and himself acted 
the part of Thyrsis. Indeed, Comus was first printed because 
the pen of*Henry Lawes was tired out with repeated copyings 
of that “lovely and much desired” poem. Now, Comus was 
acted at Ludlow in 1634, and Ludlow brings us very near to 
Chester. Not only that, but the Lawes family were directly 
connected with Chester, and William Lawes, the brother of 
Henry, was one of the victims of the siege in 1645. 
But if Milton did indeed ‘‘ found some of his most magnifi- 
cent pictures on the rude groundwork of the mysteries,” the 
poetry is all his own. All through these ancient plays there is 
scarcely a line which fixes itself in the memory as deserving to 
be retained. What we do retain is the impression of a remark- 
