With the lofe, thys pore man."

He stooped down to seek a stone,
But, as chance was, then found he none.
For the stone he took a loaf,
And at the poor man it drove.
The poor man caught it up quickly,
And was thereof full strangely glad,
To his fellows fast he ran
With the loaf this poor man.

Oliphant says: "Strange it is that Dante should have been compiling
his _Inferno_, which settled the course of Italian literature forever,
in the selfsame years that Robert of Brunne was compiling the earliest
pattern of well-formed New English... Almost every one of the Teutonic
changes in idiom, distinguishing the New English from the Old, the
speech of Queen Victoria from the speech of Hengist, is to be found in
Manning's work."

Mandeville's Travels.--Sir John Mandeville, who is popularly
considered the author of a very entertaining work of travels, states
that he was born in St. Albans in 1300, that he left England in 1322,
and traveled in the East for thirty-four years. His _Travels_ relates
what he saw and heard in his wanderings through Ethiopia, Persia,
Tartary, India, and Cathay. What he tells on his own authority, he
vouches for as true, but what he relates as hearsay, he leaves to the
reader's judgment for belief.

[Illustration: WHAT MADEVILLE SAW. _Old print from Edition of
1725._]