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xiv
Preface
into English, and printed at his press in Westminster Abbey, 1485.[1] It must be mentioned also that the learning of this age has left permanent traces of its influence on these fables,[2] by causing the interpolation with them (as a κτῆμα εἰς ἰει) of some of those amusing stories which were so frequently introduced into the public discourses of the great preachers of those days, and of which specimens are yet to be found in the extant sermons of Jean Raulin, Meffreth, and Gabriel Barlette.[3] The publication of this era which most pro-
- ↑ Both these publications are in the British Museum, and are placed in the library in cases under glass, for the inspection of the curious.
- ↑ Fables may possibly have been not entirely unknown to the mediæval scholars. There are two celebrated works which might by some be classed amongst works of this description. The one is the "Speculum Sapientiæ," attributed to St. Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem, but of a considerably later origin, and existing only in Latin. It is divided into four books, and consists of long conversations conducted by fictitious characters under the figures of the beasts of the field and forest, and aimed at the rebuke of particular classes of men, the boastful, the proud, the luxurious, the wrathful, &c. None of the stories are precisely those of Æsop, and none have the concinnity, terseness, and unmistakable deduction of the lesson intended to be taught by the fable, so conspicuous in the great Greek fabulist. The exact title of the book is this: "Speculum Sapientiæ, B. Cyrilli Episcopi: alias quadripartitus apologeticus vocatus, in cujus quidem proverbiis omnis et totius sapientiæ speculum claret et feliciter incipit." The other is a larger work in two volumes, published in the fourteenth century by Cæsar Heisterbach, a Cistercian monk, under the title of "Dialogus Miraculorum," reprinted in 1851. This work consists of conversations in which many stories are interwoven on all kinds of subjects. It has no correspondence with the pure Æsopian fable.
- ↑ Post-mediaeval Preachers, by S. Baring-Gould. Rivingtons, 1865.
