Literature 79 



carefully and completely records the relatively small number of changes in pagi- 

 nation. The text is supplemented by the variant of La Belle Dame sans Merci 

 from Lord Houghton's Life and Letters of Keats. 



No. 262. BERGEN, HENRY. The Fall of Princes, by John Lydgate. Edited from th 

 best Manuscripts, with Bibliographical Introduction, Notes, and Glos- 

 sary. Octavo. In press. 



The Fall of Princes, Lydgate's longest and best-known work, is a translation 

 in decasyllabic verse, arranged in upwards of 5,000 seven and eight line stanzas, 

 of the prose Latin "De Casibus Virorum et Feminarum Illustrium libri IX," writ- 

 ten by Giovanni Boccaccio in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. The 

 English poem was not done directly out of the original Latin, but is an expanded 

 rendering of Laurence de Premierfait's second prose French version (completed 

 in 1409), which was in turn a greatly amplified revision of an earlier and more 

 literal translation by the same writer. 



The work, like Chaucer's "Monk's Tale," consists of a series of tragedies told 

 in the words of the chief actors, who appeared one after another before the author, 

 "beginning at Adam" and "ending at King John" of France, who was taken pris- 

 oner by the Black Prince at Poitiers in 1356. Boccaccio's object was to exhibit to 

 his crowned contemporaries and their successors the evil results of vicious living 

 and misrule, by examples chosen from the Old Testament and the popular his- 

 torical compilations of his time, as an incentive for them to mend their ways; and 

 the work became one of the most popular books of the fifteenth and sixteenth 

 centuries. By reason of its large vocabulary, which is especially rich in words 

 borrowed from the French, it holds an important position in the history of the 

 English language. 



Some twenty-nine more or less complete manuscripts of the Fall of Princes 

 have been preserved, and there are four printed editions (Richard Pynson, 1494 

 and 1527, Richard Tottel, 1554, and John Wayland, about 1558). The present edi- 

 tion is based on the Oxford manuscript Bodley 263, collated in full with the British 

 Museum manuscripts Royal 18 Div. and Harley 1245. Other manuscripts and the 

 printed edition of 1554 have been consulted in regard to doubtful points. 



