By degrees, allegorical personages came, as we have seen, to be more or less mixed up with Scripture characters and events; the aim being to illustrate and enforce the virtues that refer directly to the practical conduct of life.  The new-comers kept encroaching more and more:  invited in as auxiliaries, they remained as principals; and at last quite superseded and replaced the original tenants.  Hence there grew into use a different style or order of workmanship, a distinct class of symbolical or allegorical dramas; that is, dramas made up entirely of abstract ideas personified.  These, from their structure and purpose, are properly termed MORAL-PLAYS.  We shall see hereafter that much the same process of transition was repeated in the gradual rising of genuine Comedy and Tragedy out of the allegorical dramas.

In Miracle-Plays the Devil of course made a legitimate part of the representation.  He was endowed in large measure with a biting, caustic humour, and with a coarse, scoffing, profane wit; therewithal he had an exaggerated grotesqueness of look and manner, such as to awaken mixed emotions of fear, mirth, and disgust.  In these qualities of mind and person, together with the essential malignity of which they are the proper surface and outside, we have the germs of both Comedy and Tragedy.  For the horrible and the ridiculous easily pass into each other, they being indeed different phases of the same thing.  Accordingly, the Devil, under one name or another, continued to propagate himself on the stage long after his original co-actors, had withdrawn.

On the other hand, a personage called Iniquity, Vice, or some such name, was among the first characters to take stand in Moral-Plays, as a personification of the evil tendencies in man.  And the Vice thus originating from the moral view of things was a sort of natural counterpart to that more ancient impersonation of evil which took its origin from the theological sphere.  The Devil, being the stronger principle, naturally had use for the Vice as his agent or factor.  Hence we may discover in these two personages points of mutual sympathy and attraction; and, in fact, it was in and through them that the two species of drama met and coalesced.

In Moral-Plays the Devil and the Vice, or at least one of them, almost always bore a leading part, though not always under those names.  Most commonly the two were retained together; there are cases however of each figuring apart from the other.  And no pains were spared to give the Devil as hideous an aspect as possible:  he was made an out-and-out monster in appearance, all hairy and shaggy, with a “bottle nose” and an “evil face,” having horns, hoofs, and a long tail; so that the sight had been at once loathsome and ludicrous, but for the great strength and quickness of wit, and the fiendish, yet merry and waggish malignity, which usually marked his conversation.  Sometimes, however, he was endowed with a most protean versatility of mind and person, so that he could walk abroad as “plain devil,” scaring all he met, or steal into society as a prudent counsellor, a dashing gallant, or whatever else would best work out his ends.