Middle Ages are more commonly to be found in the ranks of those who are pledged to the forward movement of modern life; while those who are vainly striving to stem the progress of the world are as careless of the past as they are fearful of the future. In short, history, the new sense of modern times, the great compensation for the losses of the centuries, is now teaching us worthily, and making us feel that the past is not dead, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

To my mind, therefore, no excuse is needful for the attempt made in the following pages to familiarize the reading public with what was once a famous knowledgebook of the Middle Ages. But the reader, before he can enjoy it, must cast away the exploded theory of the invincible and wilful ignorance of the days when it was written; the people of that time were eagerly desirous for knowledge, and their teachers were mostly singlehearted and intelligent men, of a diligence and laboriousness almost past belief. This Properties of Things' of Bartholomew the Englishman is but one of the huge encyclopedias written in the carly Middle Age for the instruction of those who wished to learn, and the reputation of it and its fellows shows how much the science of the day was appreciated by the public at large, how many there were who wished to learn. Even apart from its interest as showing the tendency of men's minds in days when Science did actually tell them 'fairy tales,' the book is a delightful one in its English garb; ! for the language is as simple as if the author were speaking by word of mouth, and at the same time is pleasant, and not lacking a certain quaint floweriness, which makes it all the easier to retain the subject-matter of the book.

Altogether, this introduction to the study of the Medieval Encyclopedia, and the insight which such

works give us into the thought of the past and its desire for knowledge, make a book at once agreeable and useful; and I repeat that it is a hopeful sign of the times when students of science find themselves drawn towards the historical aspect of the world of men, and show that their minds have been enlarged, and not narrowed, by their special studies, a defect which was too apt to mar the qualities of the seekers into natural facts in what must now, I would hope, be called the just-passed epoch of intelligence, dominated by Whig politics, and the self-sufficiency of empirical science.

WILLIAM MORRIS.

ERRATA.

Page 15, line 3 from bottom, for Esttil' read 'Est til.'

Page 31, line 22, the word 'air' at end of line comes at beginning.

Page 34, line 3, for 'eclypse' read' eclipse.'

Page 34, line 19, for 'needfull' read 'needful.'

Page 38, last line, formovable' read 'moveable.'

Page 48, line 2 from bottom, for noyfull' read 'noyful.'

Page 56, line 9, for 'p. 21' read ‘p. 27.'

Page 70, line 8, for 'he' read ‘it.'

Page 142, line 10, after Misalath Astrologus' insert probably Messahala

an Arab astrologer of the eleventh century.'

MEDIEVAL LORE.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

THE book which we offer to the public of to-day was one of the THE BOOK most widely read books of medieval times. Written by an AND ITS English Franciscan, Bartholomew, in the middle of the thirteenth OBJECT. century, probably before 1260, it speedily travelled over Europe. It was translated into French by order of Charles V. (1364-81) in 1372, into Spanish, into Dutch, and into English in 1397Its popularity, almost unexampled, is explained by the scope of the work, as stated in the translator's prologue. It was written to explain the allusions to natural objects met with in the Scrip tures or in the Gloss. It was, in fact, an account of the propertics of things in general; an encyclopedia of similes for the benefit of: the village preaching friar, written for men without deep-almost without any--learning. Assuming no previous information, and giving a fairly clear statement of the state of the knowledge of the time, the book was readily welcomed by the class for which it was designed, and by the small nucleus of an educated class which was slowly forming. Its popularity remained in full vigour after the invention of printing, no less than ten editions being published in the fifteenth century of the Latin copy alone, with four French translations, a Dutch, a Spanish, and an English one.

The first years of the modern commercial system gave its death