_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