Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/387

MIRACLE CYCLES. 373 of dialed, and in any case, as we shall see later on, the extremely complex origin of the cycle must necessarily detraft from the value of any evidence that diale<5tal peculiarities might afford. There is, however, one striking characteristic that must force itself upon the attention of anyone who studies the play in the original manuscript, though it is completely obscured in the printed edition. I allude to the metrical form which is peculiar in the extreme. The play is written in thirteeners and oftaves of rather long and clumsy lines, but these stanzas are linked together by means of inter- calary lines usually repeating the first rime of the following stanza. The rubricator thoroughly understood the metrical strudture intended, for he prefixed a large paragraph to the first line of each stanza, and a small one to the first line of each intercalary group. I may be exposing my ignor- ance, but I do not remember to have met with this device elsewhere. Nothing at all similar occurs in the rest of the cycle. It suggests that the play was written in imitation of the stanzaic forms found elsewhere in the cycle by one whose powers of composition were inadequate to the task of forcing his matter into so exacting a metre. The instances of dislocation I have detailed will give some idea of the nature if not of the extent of the bibliographical puzzles that anyone who wishes to make a serious study of the N-town cycle will have to face. Over and above the combination of different sources and the repeated revision of the text before it came into the hands of our scribe at all, we have complications introduced by the fa<5l