The English Moral Plays 353 
First Fellowship he said he would with me gone; 
His words were very pleasant and gay, 
But afterward he left me alone. 
Then spake I to my kinsmen all in despair, 
And also they gave me words fair, 
They lacked no fair speaking ; 
But all forsake me in the ending. 
Then went I to my Goods that I loved best, 
In hope to have found comfort; but there had least: 
For my Goods sharply did me tell, 
That he bringeth many in hell. (107—8) 
It is his fortune, at this crisis, to meet Knowledge, Confession, and 
other virtues who prepare him for his end. As he dies, an ‘“‘ Angel 
is heard speaking”: 
Now thy soul is taken thy body fro, 
Thy reckoning is crystal clear; 
Now shalt thou into the heavenly sphere. (421) 
Yet even Everyman, confined as it is to this one situation, is not 
without dependence on the theme of conflict. To depict the sequel 
of a misspent life, a losing struggle with the vices, the author has 
selected from a variety of possible characters, good and bad, that 
this allegory usually embraced, the wild gallant whose career best 
served as warning. Turn from virtue to vice, as Everyman did, and 
only a repentance like his, a turning again to the virtues as in the 
typical combat-play, can save you, is the moral of the piece. 
I would not press too insistently for this play the dependence on 
the Psychomachia that is more evident in the earliest English 
morality of which any part remains. In The Pride of Life it is the 
King who is seized by Death after a life of wilful disregard of God’s 
law. Conscious of his power, and trusting in his two knights, Might 
and Health, he has disregarded Death. When the queen has re- 
minded him that all men must die, and that every one, therefore, 
should 
loue god & holy chirche 
& haue of him som eye [reverence], (187—88) 
the King but boasts more proudly of his power. At the request of 
the queen, the bishop then reproaches him, warning him that the 
world has turned to evil, and that the fear of God has been lost 
in falsehood, treachery, and oppression. But hell awaits the wrong- 
doers, he adds, where, without any chance for bail or a stay of pro- 
ceedings, as in earthly courts, unending woe is prepared for kings 
