from various writings for public worship; these selections were called
_legends_. The history of the word makes clear, therefore, the
origin and early history of the class of stories which we call legends.

The use of the stories at church services led to the collection, orderly
arrangement and reshaping of a great mass of material which grew rapidly
because so many people were interested in these semi-religious tales. In
the beginning the stories had, as a rule, some basis in fact, though it
was often very slight. As time went on the element of fact grew smaller
and the element of fiction larger; stories which were originally very
short were expanded into long tales and became highly imaginative. In
the Thirteenth Century the _Legenda Aurea_, or Golden Legend, which
became one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages, appeared. In
time, as the taste for this kind of writing grew, the word legend came
to include any story which, under a historical form, gave an account of
an historical or imaginary person.

During the Middle Ages verse-making was very popular and very widely
practised; for versification is very easy when people are in the habit
of using it freely, and a verse is much more easily remembered than a
line of prose. For many generations legends were versified. It must be
remembered that verse and poetry are often very far apart; and poetry is
as difficult to compose as verse is easy. The versified legends were
very rarely poetic; they were simply narratives in verse. Occasionally
men of poetic genius took hold of these old stories and gave them
beautiful forms as did the German poet Hartmann von Aue in "Der Arme
Heinrich." With the tremendous agitation which found expression in the
Reformation, interest in legends died out, and was not renewed until the
Eighteenth Century, when men and women, grown weary of artificial and
mechanical forms of literature, turned again to the old stories and