reading-matter is so generally preferable to mere intelligence; and
meanwhile to preserve as much of the quaint style of the gestes as is
consistent with clearness. Then, too, in the original mediaeval
romances, both in their prose and metrical form, there are occasional
allusions to natural processes which make these stories unfit to be
placed in the hands of American readers, who, as a body, attest their
respectability by insisting that their parents were guilty of
unmentionable conduct; and such passages of course necessitate
considerable editing.


II


No schoolboy (and far less the scholastic chronicler of those last final
upshots for whose furtherance "Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote
in Oxford cloisters") needs nowadays to be told that the Manuel of these
legends is to all intents a fictitious person. That in the earlier half
of the thirteenth century there was ruling over the Poictoumois a
powerful chieftain named Manuel, nobody has of late disputed seriously.
But the events of the actual human existence of this Lord of
Poictesme--very much as the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa has been
identified with the wood-demon Barbatos, and the prophet Elijah, "caught
up into the chariot of the Vedic Vayu," has become one with the Slavonic
Perun,--have been inextricably blended with the legends of the Dirghic
Manu-Elul, Lord of August.

Thus, even the irregularity in Manuel's eyes is taken by Vanderhoffen,
in his _Tudor Tales_, to be a myth connecting Manuel with the Vedic
Rudra and the Russian Magarko and the Servian Vii,--"and every