they have enclosed amongst them save only the fox. And then they shall chase him and pursue him so strait till that he come to the same place that he came from. And then they shall dig and mine so strongly, till that they find the gates that King Alexander let make of great stones, and paving huge, well cemented and strong for the mastery. And those gates they shall break, and so go out by finding that issue. This is substantially the adventure in the Arabian Nights of Sindbad's deliverance from the charnel-house by following a fox or jackal. seen. MANDEVILLE'S APOLOGY FOR RELATING NO MORE MARVELS. There be many other divers countries and many other marvels beyond, that I have not Wherefore of them I cannot speak properly to tell you the manner of them. And also in the countries where I have been be many more diversities of many wonderful things than I make mention of; for it were too long thing to devise you the manner. And therefore that that I have devised you of certain countries, that I have spoken of before, I beseech your worthy and excellent noblesse, that it suffice to you at this time. For if that I devised you all that is beyond the sea, another man, peradventure, that would pain him and travail his body for to go into those marches for to ensearch these countries, might be blamed by my words in rehearsing many strange things; for he might not say nothing of new, in the which the hearer might have either solace or disport, or lust, or liking in the hearing. For men say always that new things and new tidings be always pleasant to hear. Wherefore I will hold me still without any more rehearsing of diversities or of marvels that be beyond, to that intent and end that whoso will go into those countries he shall find enough to speak of that I have not touched of in no wise. Mandeville's conduct in leaving a crop of marvels for his successors to gather after him is indeed most considerate and Christian! In the English version this passage is followed by the statement that he had submitted his narrative to the Pope at Rome, and, more successful than Foote when he sought to beguile Archbishop Secker into revising his farce, obtained his Holiness's authentication of its contents all and sundry. "And so my book (albeit that many men ne list to give credence to nothing but to that that they see with their eye, ne be the author ne the person never so true) is affirmed and proved by our Holy Father in manner and form as I have said." This assertion is not in the original, and proves that the English version could not have been made before 1377, when the Pope returned to Rome from "the Babylonish captivity" at Avignon. No existing manuscript of this transcript is older than the fifteenth century, but it is not certain that those now extant were the earliest. Mandeville's style The above extracts will convey an idea of Mandeville's habitual style, and Merits of of the charm of his marvellous tales and quaint reflections, not unmingled with information of real value, generally derived from more serious travellers than himself, respecting the condition of the Oriental world. As Mr. Pollard observes, his pre-eminence among the prose writers of his day arises not so much from actual superiority of talent as from the application of his talent to themes of more human and practical interest than prose had hitherto essayed, and admitting of treatment in a more agreeable style. It may be added that if he had really been an English writer his prose would probably not have been so decidedly in advance of his contemporaries, but that his translators were able to progress by emulating a degree of refinement not ipcheth the blood of the beelt that he lle eth and rentythe baleth the other deas le lême meele:and deuourpth and (wo lowych it. De Leopezdo. Lapim And whan the leopende knowyth thats lyon is lo lette and holde in the liepghc place:he goth out of the denne forwar de: and compch ayen in to the denne in the other lyde behynde the lyon :and res leth on hymn behyndeforth wyth bytyng Eoperous is moolt cruel beet/ee with clawes:And lo che leoperde bath s gendered iy (powlebreche of a ofte in that wyle the mayatzy of the ly perde of a Lyennelle as lp on by crafte and not by thengthe/ Ano derlapth.libro.xn:/Cfor as Plinius la to the lelle beelt hath ofte the maytay of pth the lyon genorych wyth che perdus the fronge beelt by dylcepte e gyle in s other the petde wyth the ipennelle, of lu denne:and dare not rele on hymy openly the gendrynge compth vnkynde Pezdes in the felde as Homerus lapth in li: /de as of an hole of a the alle/ other of a pugnis & haltucijs beltian/ C Libra C maare & a male alle is genoryò a mule bin Arutocle (pekpth of a beeli bygh CAs Juder lapch.che leoperous is a ful te ferculio/And Auicen callych that be relynge beelt & beeditzonge: and thurls te feopezous/Abeelt lapch Aristotle tyth blood/And the female is moze cruel that hyghte ferculio etych lomtyme de than the male as Ariftotle lapth/and ha nemous chynge and lebeth thenne man the dyue's colours as the parde hath: @nys dyrte and eteth ic/And theifoze hū? purlewyth his prope fezclynge & leppn ters hangyth luche dyrte in lome vessels ge and not rennpnge/And pf hecakich on a tree/And whan ý leoperde cometh not his prope in the thyrde lepe other in to that tree and lepyth up to take ý dýrt the fourth chenne he pntyth for Indig thenne the hunters fleeth hym in the me nacpon and gooth bakwarde as though ane tyme whyle he is there abowte/and he were ouezcome:And is lyke to a lpon the panteradooth the lame the perd9 un body:taplle & fete:but in Chape of the allo as it is lapd there. Allo plini heed he is iphe to the parde/ And he is us (pebyth of the leopezde @Capth/ that lelle in body than the Ipon/and therfore fomtyme the leoperde is leke and dryn? be dreapth the lyon:and makech a caue hpth wylde gotys blood and (cappth by under eiche wyth double entiynge & ou it the sphnelle in that wyle. tegopnge:and compth out at a nother/ De Lepore.Lapl'm And that caue is ful wyde & large in ep ther entiynge and moze narough @Azer ighte in the mydyll:And lo whan the ly op compch he fleech & fallith lodenly in to the caue: and the Ipon purfewyth be wyth a guete tele and ettech allo in p ca ue and wenech ther to haue the mayatzy of the leopezde/But for gretnelle of hps body he mape not palle freely by ý mys dyll of the denne whyche is ful repght E He Hare hyght Lepus as it wez From Trevisa's translation of Bartholomæus' "De Proprietatibus Rerum." 1 writers yet attained by their own language. The translators of the Bible, of Plutarch, of Camden's History of Elizabeth, of many other books that might be named, were to find themselves similarly braced and stimulated. A great translation may sometimes effect more for the language than a great original work. Another translator of a celebrated book of English origin has not left us Minor prose in ignorance of his name. We are indebted to JOHN DE TREVISA (1326–1412) for a translation of Higden's Polychronicon, printed in the fifteenth century by Caxton, and reprinted along with the original in the "Rolls Series." Trevisa also made a version of Bartholomew de Glanville's De Proprietatibus Rerum, of which the first printed edition was one of the earliest and finest books from the press of Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde. He is credited also with several other translations which have remained in manuscript. All his work was performed for Thomas, Baron Berkeley, whose chaplain he was. The only original prose treatise of the age deserving of any notice is The Testament of Love, by THOMAS USK, and this not on account of its own merits, but from the singular fortunes of the author, and the circumstance of its having been ascribed to Chaucer. He had turned in 1384 evidence against John de Northampton, the seditious Mayor of London, whose instrument he had been, and composed this treatise to justify himself. He thus regained the favour of King Richard, only to incur the animosity of the party headed by the Duke of Gloucester, who compassed his execution in 1388. The book was composed somewhere between these dates. It is in form an imitation of the Consolation of Boethius, translated by Chaucer, and, the writer's name being for centuries disguised under an unsuspected anagram, it was attributed to Chaucer himself by his early uncritical editors (mainly because in Gower's Confessio Amantis Venus bids Chaucer make his Testament of Love in quite a different sense), and has actually been used as an authority for his life. It was not until our days that Professors Skeat and Bradley between them discovered and deciphered the anagram, and proved the author to be Usk. The book has been thought to evince symptoms of a desire to gain Chaucer's intercession; if so, it must have been written before December 1386, when Chaucer himself fell into disgrace. A more interesting book is "The Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love," and mystical meditations of the hermitess Juliana of Norwich, composed early in the fifteenth century. They are full of tender feeling, and have been four times printed. CHAPTER VII THE ENGLISH BIBLE-THE MIRACLE PLAY The Bible and English Literature THERE is no literature, at least no important literature, so largely indebted The majestic stream that flowed Yet, on the other hand, if the literature of Britain is to some extent a derivative literature, there is no such other example of a literature having assimilated a foreign element so completely to itself. Latin literature owes everything to Greece, but Greek literature was by no means so thoroughly appropriated by it as the Scriptures have been appropriated by the Englishspeaking peoples. Reversing what has just been said, it may be asserted with equal truth that, could the Bible be erased from the consciousness of those peoples, it would forfeit well-nigh half of its influence over the world. If it is still a mighty power, it owes this, humanly speaking, to the reverence, and hardly less to the free handling, of England and the nations most closely allied to her in blood. The obligation thus conferred has been repaid by an elevation. a picturesqueness, and an affluence of beautiful sentiment which confers on the literatures of these peoples a great advantage over those which, whether from national incompatibility, or the impediments created by sinister interests, have been more or less debarred from this treasury of grandeur. All modern nations, indeed, have borrowed more or less from the Scriptures, and been more or less influenced by them as literature; but the Northern nations. ASSIMILATION OF THE BIBLE 205 alone, and more particularly the British, have so thoroughly assimilated them that they seem to have naturalised patriarchs and prophets as their own countrymen. tures on This complete naturalisation of the Scriptures in Britain is, of course, Vast influence mainly to be accounted for by religious considerations, and may be paralleled of the Scripin some measure by the corresponding phenomena of the influence of the England Buddhist sacred writings, works of Indian origin, in China, Tartary, and Japan; and of the Arabic Koran in Turkey and Persia. It is, indeed, an astonishing circumstance that the Turanian Turks and the Aryan Persians should have consented to receive not only their religion, but their law from the Semites; yet there is every reason to believe that the national thought and life in those countries have been far less permeated by the foreign element than the national life and thought of Protestant Europe have been by the Bible. For this there is an obvious reason: the Bible, in admirable vernacular renderings, has passed into European literature, while the Koran, for all practical purposes, may be said to have never been translated at all. It is even asserted that the Koran cannot be translated, that its beauties are incapable of transfusion into any foreign idiom. How differently the case stands with Britain and the Bible is known to every person competent to read English, and this very familiarity blinds us to the extraordinary and unique position of our literature in claiming as one of its two supreme glories translations of books which were ancient before it had itself so much as an existence. It would have been nearly a parallel case if Virgil, instead of composing an original epic, had translated Homer; if his version had become as thoroughly national a poem as his Eneid has; and if Cicero could have occupied the place in the literature of Rome which Shakespeare fills in the literature of England. English Bible The history of the English Bible from Caedmon to the Authorised Version History of the of 1611 is full of literary and personal interest. It is divided into two clearly distinguished periods by the Reformation. Before this great epoch translations were made from the Latin Vulgate, which in the general ignorance of Greek and Hebrew was invested with the respect due to the original. After the Reformation, versions were made from the languages of the writers. No longer proscribed, but encouraged by authority; no longer confined to manuscript, but disseminated by the printing-press; the Bible took a position and exerted an influence which had until then been unattainable. There is, notwithstanding, sufficient evidence that throughout the Middle Ages the national life had been largely leavened by the knowledge of the Scriptures which indirectly reached the people through liturgical services, ecclesiastical legends, dramatic perNot, howformances, and the vernacular homilies of priests and friars. ever, until the time of Wycliffe do they become ostensibly an important factor in the mind of England, or assume a position in great English literature. The literary history of the English Bible practically begins with him; before, however, entering upon his relation to it, which is itself only a section of a wider sphere of activity, it will be desirable to trace |