Several of the critics of Fielding have felt strongly in Jonathan Wild an under-significance, chiefly political. None of them, however, has uttered more than a few lines about it; none, apparently, has been able to mark it out satisfactorily even to himself; and none has attempted to prove that the political significance was actually intended or does exist.

The only one who has attempted any very complete classification of the mss. of Godefroi de Bouillon is Pigeonneau, in his work mentioned above, Le Cycle de la Croisade, where are summed up also most of the earlier studies in this field. He has considered all the important mss. and versions that I have given above, except the Bern ms. No. 627, marked S. However, the classification of Pigeonneau is far from sufficient for our purposes. Pigeonneau's purpose was to point out the various versions contained in these mss., rather than to determine their exact relationship to each other, and the proper measure of authority due to each in a critical edition of the text or in the settlement of disputed readings. In general, then, his classification is based on the contents of the mss., the various additions and omissions of each, and not usually, it would seem, on a close line for line comparison. It is, moreover, made for the entire cycle, and the relationship of the various mss. in each of the separate branches is not always specified. This relationship may vary from branch to branch. However, the chief insufficiency, for our use, of Pigeonneau's classification, in addition to that coming necessarily from his different purpose, is his very slight treatment of the Spanish version, and the fact that he did not treat at all ms. S. Both of these are of prime importance in any exact classification of the mss.; and to determine our passages particularly, it is absolutely necessary to know their relationship to the others. Nevertheless, Pigeonneau's classification has been of use as far as it has extended. I shall, then, summarize his results, to show what had been done already, and to bring out as well what remained to be done.

Lydgate's St. Edmund was written between 1434 and 1439, probably nearer the former than the latter date. Within a few years after 1439 we meet with the writings of Osbern Bokenham, a member of the house of Austin friars at Stoke Glare in the southwestern corner of Suffolk. Altho the two poets were attached by their sympathies to opposite political parties, Lydgate being a staunch Lancastrian and Bokenham an ardent Yorkist, the monk of Bury had no warmer admirer than the friar of Stoke Clare. We cannot be sure that they knew each other personally, but since they lived within less than twenty miles of each other and were both fond of society, if appears very probable. Not only does Bokenham allude again and again to Lydgate (usually coupling his name with those of Chaucer and Gower), but on one occasion he mentions a particular work of Lydgate's, the Life of Our Lady.

Readers of Paradise Lost have always been interested by Voltaire's comment in the Essai sur la Poésie Épique, that French people are inclined to laugh when they are told that England has an epic in which Satan struggles against God and a serpent persuades a woman to eat an apple. Such matter, Voltaire explains, seems in France suitable only for farce. More careful readers, however, may remember that in Paradise Lost only Satan, in the moment immediately preceding his degradation, regards the eating of the forbidden fruit as a subject for mirth. All else abhor the crime; angels flee back to heaven in terror, the guilty pair cower before even their own reproaches, and the very face of nature changes. Clearly, the eating of the apple possesses some deep significance and must be interpreted as a symbol of some important truth. In Christian Doctrine Milton persuades himself that God purposely made an insignificant matter the sole test of man's obedience, since an apparently useless prohibition would offer the surest proof of man's obedience. But in Paradise Lost, and indeed also in Christian Doctrine, the symbolical interpretation is insisted on.