The English Moral Plays 305 
the greater ones as well, to the same course. The telling of these 
stories with brevity and point practically necessitated dialogue, as 
one can see by examining the exempla of the Speculum Ecclesiae, 
in which the collection’s most conspicuous instances of direct quo- 
tation are found. MHonorius tells the story, later incorporated into 
the Alphabet of Tales, of the miserly tax-gatherer who was saved 
from hell by his one act of unmeaning charity, and who lived to 
see Christ in heaven wearing the cloak he had given an unworthy 
beggar.! He cites the familiar examples, also, of the harlot con- 
verted by a priest, and of the dead man who returned to divide 
his property wisely and to tell what he had seen in the other 
world.2 These stories are very unobtrusively introduced by Honorius 
for the exemplum had not then attained its full popularity; yet he 
allows the characters to speak for themselves. In another twelfth- 
century compilation, the story that Jacques de Vitry told of the 
devil’s giving eight of his daughters in marriage to representatives 
of eight different classes of society, but leaving the ninth, Lust, to 
enjoy the freedom she desired, was more fully developed.*? So it 
was, as one would expect, that these illustrative narratives proved 
readily adaptable to dramatic rendering in the pulpit. 
Not, however, in these anecdotal excrescences, but rather in 
sermons on the most serious and exalted themes, did dialogue find 
its fullest opportunity. After learning to rehearse the simple dialogue 
contained in the Scriptural lesson of the day, preachers took soon 
the next obvious step, and simulated as real a more extended 
dialogue that might plausibly have been carried on by Bible char- 
acters. To add to the reality of the words, some brief description 
of the scene could be added, or more effectively developed, and 
the preacher would then be virtually reciting, as men were supposed 
during the Middle Ages to have read in public the comedies of 
Plautus and Terence, a religious play. Professor Cook has called 
attention to three homilies of Grecian churchmen composed in this 
dramatic form, and to a fourth attributed to Augustine—all on the 
Annunciation and Incarnation.£ So great was the dramatic impulse of 
the age that preachers of the Latin Church, as early even as the 

1 Nos. 316, 297. 
2 Jacques de Vitry, No. 257; Alphabet of Tales; Patr, Lat., 172. 889, 
892-94, 897-98, 881-82. 
8 Printed by Bourgain, 220-23. The same story is in Jubinal, Nouveax 
Recueil, 1. 283. 
4 Journal of Germanic Philology, 4. 421—51. 
