The nearer the knights of Arthur's Court approach the Grail, the more illusive and intangible the holy vessel appears. In Sir Percivale's own words:

“Lo, if I find the Holy Grail itself
And touch it, it will crumble into dust.“

Thus one might say the Grail symbolizes in its evasiveness the problem of its own origin. For if its source is still to be sought, this is largely because the problem involved so easily eludes one's grasp. The difficulty is to fix the eye on the main issue, to the exclusion of secondary considerations. The Grail stories have been classed as Perceval and Galaad forms, as those in which a quest is the burden of the tale, as those in which it is the history of the sacred vessel itself.

The Towneley Mysteries have two remarkable characteristics which have attracted the attention of scholars: they contain a number of plays borrowed directly from the York cycle and they also contain a number of other plays so conspicuous for their highly dramatic form that the cycle may be said to have reached in them the highest point in the dramatic development of the English Mystery. Various theories have been advanced to account for the presence of these two sets of plays in Towneley and especially for the relationship, and its extent, of Towneley and York. The two theories of greatest interest are those of Professor Davidson and Professor Hohlfeld. A third, advanced by Mr. Pollard, is practically the same as Professor Hohlfeld's, with one or two slight modifications, which hardly concern us here.

One of the earliest members of the important Scève family at Lyons was Henri Scève, great-grandfather of Maurice Scève, the leading poet of the Lyonnese renaissance. Henri, who was still living in 1471, seems to have had two sons, François and Léonard. Of François, the younger of these sons, we learn that about 1480 he suffered considerable damage à la barre du pont du Rosne tant pour la mortalité, gens d'armes, que pour les grans eaues.

In 1493, he possessed des prés et des terres labourables in the parish of Vaise. Ten years later (1503), he and his son were proprietors of the inn Ste-Catherine, which, however, was maloustru et mal prouffitant.

The normal sign for ń in Old French is ign. The consonantal portion of this trigraph represents the value of Latin gn as felt or pronounced in the Merovingian period in such words as magnus, agnellus, the sequence of development probably being gn > > > ń thru the fronting influence of n upon the preceding . That the vowel i should have been added to gn with this new palatal value will not appear strange to anyone familiar with the history of palatalized consonants in Old French. It represents the vowel glide which is potentially present whenever a palatalized consonant follows after a vowel. Its appearance in writing must therefore be due to a definite consciousness of its presence as a phonic element in the spoken syllable. In other words, the scribes who invented the trigraph ign must have heard and felt the vowel. And as a matter of fact, the modern pronunciation of this sound in final position and before consonant shows that this assumption is accurate; for gain, coin, juin presuppose an earlier pronunciation gãiń, kõiń, džỹiń, and plaindre and joindre must have passed thru plãindre, džõindre. However, if this evidence may be accepted as conclusive for the presence of the i under these conditions, there is equally strong evidence in the modern language that in medial position (montagne, gagner, besogne) the palatal glide did not develop into a full vowel.

Amongst the many collections of fables which have come down to us from the middle ages none appears to have enjoyed greater popularity or to have been more widely translated than that in Latin elegiac verse nowadays entitled the Walter of England Collection. In addition to an unusually large number of extant manuscript versions of this collection in its original form, more than one hundred being actually listed, there is a host of printed editions, while translations and adaptations are to be found in French, Italian, Provençal, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Hebrew. Among so many reworkings but a single one occurs in French prose, and it is this collection, not hitherto printed, which forms the subject of the present article.

During the eighteenth century several attempts were made to translate the whole or parts of Butler's Hudibras into German. Josua Eiselein, who published a translation of Hudibras in 1845, gave in his introduction the only account of these translations yet written, but his record is brief and inaccurate. Hence it may not be without value to re-examine Butler's work in its German forms, and, in addition, to investigate the position of Hudibras among those works which German admiration for English literature sought to introduce into Germany.