94 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 
often, using this text as a sermon, ending the poem by calling upon us 
to amend our lives and repent while there is yet time. The best-known 
and in a literary way the most effective form of this lyric is the Ubi 
Sunt, immortalized by Villon and Thomas de Hales, in which the writer 
inquires where the great and famous of the world are all gone. With 
this lyric we are not concerned here; its influence on the Corpus Christi 
play is hardly to be detected, though it later makes its appearance in 
Skelton’s Magnyjycence, later still at the end of The Disobedient Child, 
and finally in Shakespeare’s Richard III.‘ Other types of the Life of 
Man lyric have, however, exercised an influence upon these plays which, 
though slight, is marked and striking. In the Towneley Shepherd 
Plays? appears the form which emphasizes the variableness of life 
in the conventional phrases, “Now in, now out;’3 in the Towneley 
Shepherd’s Play, II,4 the briefness of life is especially emphasized.5 
In the Towneley Judgmeni® there is a suggestion of the Ubi Sunt which 
calls to mind rather the Anglo-Saxon’ form than the the highly conven- 
tionalized and fixed form of Middle English. In the Towneley Lazarus® 
there is a lyrical passage which reminds one of the Ubi Sunt in theme, 
but differs from it very considerably in its type—a type which is about 
as common in Middle English as the better-known Ubi Sunt.° There 
is, moreover, a longer lyric in the Lazarus which is marked by the refrain 
t Act IV, sc. iv, ll. ox ff. 
2J, ll. x ff., and II, ll. 60 ff. 
3 The Sayings of St. Bernard (Minor Poems of Vernon MS, Vol. II), pp. 513, 692, and elsewhere in The 
Sayings of Bernard; Béddeker, Alteng. Dicht., p. 195; Eng. Stud., Vol. IX, p. 441; Herrigs Archiv, Vol. 
CIX, p. 42; Pricke of Conscience, pp. 40 ff.; The Poems of Dunbar (STS), Vol. II, p. 244. See Appendix, 
Pp. 29, for parallel passages. 
4 LI. 120 ff.; see also Chester, Vol. II, p. 165. 
s Minor Poems of V. MS, Vol. Il, p. 692; Wyt and Science and Early Poetical Miscellanies (Shaks. Soc., 
Vol. II), pp. 110 ff.; Anglia, Vol. XXVI, pp. 102 ff.; Rich. Rolle of Hampole, Vol. Il, p. 457; Pricke of Cons., 
Pp. 20 ff. 
6 LI. 550, ss. 
1 The Wanderer (Bibl. der angelsichs. Poesie, Wiilcker, 1]. 92 ff.); see also a somewhat similar form in 
Body and Soul poems. 
8 Ll. x11 ff. 
9 Bann. MS, Vol. I, p. 154; Spec. of L. P. (Percy Soc., Vol. IV), p. 87; Religious Songs (P. Soc., Vol. 
XI), p. 63; for Old French forms see Satirical Songs and Poems on Costume (P. Soc., Vol. XXVII), p. 33; 
Eng. Stud., Vol. XIV, p. 186; Relig. Pieces (EETS), p. 81; An Old Eng. Misc. (EETS), pp. 91, 04, 1573 
Minor Poems of V. MS, Vol. II, pp. 676, 678. Compare Hymni Latini (Mone), Vol. I, p. 398. For parallels 
see Appendix, p. 30. 
