Notes
265
Page
Then followed the demand for "largesse."
And he their courtesy to requite
Gave them a chain of twelve marks weight
All as he lighted down.
26. 25. "Sacred": consecrated French sacré.
28.
6. "perdurable." Caxton is curiously fond of employing this rather pretty adjective. It died out of English use (in prose at all events) for two or three centuries, but was revived by Southey and other nineteenth-century writers.
29.
8–10. "Cunning," etc.: Caxton here gives us nonsense. It should run somewhat thus (following both French and Latin): "Cunning [L. ingenium, F. engin] is that thou shouldst find what thou hast not learned. Memory is that thou shouldst not forget what thou hast learned."
32.
32. 11. "sourded": sprang up. Fr. sourdre; Lat. surgere.
33.
12. "quick": alive; qualifies "bishop," not "people."
19. Isidore: a Father of the Church, bishop of Seville in the seventh century.
22. "miscreants": unbelievers. Fr. mécreants, from Lat. minus and credentes.
26. "demened his predication unto the title of his passion": carried on his preaching until the conclusion of his martyrdom. From meaning an inscription, the Latin titulus (which "title" here represents) came to mean "boundary-mark" then "limit" "conclusion."
28. Chrysostom: S. John, greatest of the Greek fathers, Patriarch of Constantinople, a.d. 397, a man of singular and varied gifts, notably eloquence.
S. MARTHA
34.
26. "a great dragon." This monster, traditionally called in the S. of France the "Tarasque," resembles others which have been created by the popular imagination in days when and in places where the wilder recesses of nature are hardly, if at all, explored. Such are the three different monsters who figure in the Old English poem Beowulf. These mythical beings seem sometimes simply personifications of the darkness and mystery of nature's un-
