There seems to me considerably more of poetic worth scattered through these plays than is generally recognized; and I am glad to be able to do a little to set forth the fact.  I cannot doubt that my readers will be interested in such fragments as the scope and design of my book will allow me to offer.  Had there been no such passages, I might have regarded the plays as but remotely connected with my purpose, and mentioned them merely as a dramatic form of religious versification.  I quote from the Coventry Miracles, better known than either of the other two sets in existence, the Chester Plays and those of Widkirk Abbey.  The manuscript from which they have been edited by Mr. Halliwell, one of those students of our early literature to whom we are endlessly indebted for putting valuable things within our reach, is by no means so old as the plays themselves; it bears date 1468, a hundred and thirty years after they appeared in their English dress.  Their language is considerably modernized, a process constantly going on where transcription is the means of transmission—­not to mention that the actors would of course make many changes to the speech of their own time.  I shall modernize it a little further, but only as far as change of spelling will go.

The first of the course is The Creation.  God, and angels, and Lucifer appear.  That God should here utter, I cannot say announce, the doctrine of the Trinity, may be defended on the ground that he does so in a soliloquy; but when we find afterwards that the same doctrine is one of the subjects upon which the boy Jesus converses with the doctors in the Temple, we cannot help remarking the strange anachronism.  Two remarkable lines in the said soliloquy are these: 

  And all that ever shall have being
  It is closed in my mind.

The next scene is the Fall of Man, which is full of poetic feeling and expression both.  I must content myself with a few passages.

Here is part of Eve’s lamentation, when she is conscious of the death that has laid hold upon her.

  Alas that ever that speech was spoken
    That the false angel said unto me! 
  Alas! our Maker’s bidding is broken,
    For I have touched his own dear tree. 
  Our fleshly eyes are all unlokyn, unlocked.
    Naked for sin ourself we see;
  That sorry apple that we have sokyn sucked.
    To death hath brought my spouse and me.

When the voice of God is heard, saying,

  Adam, that with my hands I made,
    Where art thou now? what hast thou wrought?

Adam replies, in two lines, containing the whole truth of man’s spiritual condition ever since: 

  Ah, Lord! for sin our flowers do fade: 
  I hear thy voice, but I see thee nought.

The vision had vanished, but the voice remained; for they that hear shall live, and to the pure in heart one day the vision shall be restored, for “they shall see God.”  There is something wonderfully touching in the quaint simplicity of the following words of God to the woman: