Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/295

 MIRACLE CYCLES. 283 contains lines from the early fourteenth-century ' debat ' of the ' Harrowing of Hell/ namely, the well-known passage beginning : Harde gates have I gone. 1 The most recently discovered are some very inter- esting and important parallels between certain plays of the Wakefield cycle and the poem known as the c Northern Passion/ 2 It is as yet too early to say with confidence what the significance of these may be, but those at present published suggest a bearing upon the development of the cycle which has apparently escaped their discoverer. 3 For when we have eliminated a number of alleged parallels which are not really parallel at all, what remain fall into two quite distinct groups. There is- one pas- sage of several lines which is almost word for word the same in the two works, and there are a number of scattered phrases which have the appearance cycle, for he believes the earliest plays to have been composed before 1330 (p. 133), whereas Craigie appears to hint that a dependence on the * Gospel * would imply a date not much before 1350. I very much doubt whether any relevant dates can be established sufficiently precisely to justify our saying either that the plays must be earlier than 1350 or that they cannot be as early as 1330. 1 'Ludus Coventriae,' ed. Halliwell, Shakespeare Soc., 1841, p. 346 ; ' Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus,' ed. W. H. Hulme, E.E.T.S., 1907, pp. 4 and 5. 2 Miss F. A. Foster, in 'Modern Language Notes,' June 1911, xxvi. 169. The text of the 'Passion' has since been printed by Miss Foster (E.E.T.S., 145, 1913), but her introduction has not yet appeared. 3 F. W. Cady has a footnote on the subject in his article on 'The Passion Group in Towneley,' in 'Modern Philology,' April x - 594-