ee SS 
The Englhsh Moral Plays 383 
there are a number of truly humorous character-sketches—the loutish 
countryman, Codrus, Madge Mumblecrust, who stutters, and the fool, 
Cacurgus. To these essays in real comedy the author adds an episode 
from the portfolio of romance. A nurse reveals to the heart-broken 
father the whereabouts of his eldest son, who was hidden away 
in infancy by his over jealous mother, and the youth is brought back 
to the home and the inheritance that await him. Naturally, Misogonus, 
thus disappointed in his expectations, finds it expedient to reform. 
The moral ending, however, does not obscure the fact that this 
incident of the finding of a lost son, which the author doubtless 
derived from the Menaechmi or the Captivt, makes the Misogonus 
‘the prototype of those many Elizabethan romantic comedies which 
end with such a surprise. 
Besides giving to the morality a new variety of matter borrowed 
from classical sources, as well as more homebred incidents such as 
the humorous spelling-lesson, the garbling of Latin sentences, and 
the trial scene in local courts, which was so popular in German 
dialogue,’ the humanistic impulse offered to the dramatists a broader 
range of allusion and even a new type of character which hastened 
the inevitable secularization of the stage. The author of The Trial 
of Treasure introduces his thesis, that the pleasures of the world 
are transitory, on the twofold authority of James and Diogenes, and 
throughout the play the testimony of the ancient philosophers is 
freely adduced. At the end, Time, after introducing himself as 
Cronos, the god of the Greeks, plays a more important part in 
enforcing the moral than does God’s Visitation. The similar ex- 
altation of Reason over the ordinary Christian virtues, which dis- 
tinguishes ature and The Four Elements, betokens the influence 
of Aristotle upon medieval thought. This is still more conspicuous 
in Magnificence. From the Ethics Skelton derived his conception 
of magnificence as a compound of munificence and liberality, and 
his belief that felicity and liberty are not inimical one to the other 
provided reason be kept in its rightful supremacy. From the same 
source the English poet borrowed his characters, Measure and Cir- 
cumspection, to represent regulative faculties of the soul.2 Schoolmen 
like Thomas Aquinas had always recognized a Christian value in 

1 See the long spelling-exercise in Wit and Scrence, 152—56 and in The 
Four Elements, 32. In Mfisogonus, 59, is an instance of the garbling of 
Latin phrases. The trial is found in Zeerakity and Prodigality and in other 
plays. These incidents were popularized, if not inaugurated, by the 
humanists. 
2 Magnificence, XXXii—XxXXxvViii. 
