2"« S. VIL Jak. 8. '59.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



21 



LONDON, SATURDAY. JANUARYS. 1869. 



LITEBART INTERCOtlRSE BETWEEN ENGLAND AND 

 THE CONTINENT : DID WE IMPORT OUR OLD 

 WOOD BLOCKS? 



There is a subject which I have long wished 

 to see " tapped " (to use a favourite expression of 

 Horace W^lpole) in the columns of " N. & Q." — 

 I mean the literary intercourse which ibrmerly 

 existed between England and the Continent. I 

 know but one gentleman competent to do it jus- 

 tice, — from his familiarity with the literature 

 not only of his own country and that of the other 

 states of the Continent, but from his knowledge 

 of that of England, which his long residence 

 among us has almost made his own, — I mean the 

 distinguished ambassador from Belgium, Monsieur 

 Van de Weyer. As, however, there seems at pre- 

 sent little prospect of our obtaining from that gen- 

 tleman the fruits of his researches upon this point, 

 I venture to cal} attention to some facts con- 

 nected with it which I have met with, in the hope 

 that others better qualified to pursue the inquiry 

 will follow my lead. 



At the close of the last and the commencement 

 of the present century, the writings of the Abbe 

 de la Rue and others contributed very largely to 

 show the obligations which English Literature 

 owed to that of France : and what the Abbe de la 

 Rue so well commenced has since been completed 

 by the labours of many other distinguished French 

 antiquaries. 



What we owe to Italian Literature has as 

 yet been but imperfectly developed. Chaucer's 

 KnigMs Tale is supposed to have been originally 

 a mere translation of the Theseida of Boccaccio. 

 This is, I believe, an error, but one which I will 

 not now stop to discuss. Chaucer himself tells 

 us of his Clerke's Tale that he obtained it from 

 Petrarch : — 



" I wol you tell a tale,, which that I 

 Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk." 



And we know that he translated one, at least, of 

 Petrarch's sonnets into English. But had Chaucer 

 any obligations to the literature of Germany or 

 the Low Countries ? One of his lost works is the 

 Book of the Lion. Was this a translation of 

 Hartman von Aue's Bitter mit der Lowe ? for we 

 know that Hartman, who was a contemporary of 

 Chaucer, visited England. Whether Peter Such- 

 enwirt, the German Herald of the fourteenth 

 century, whose Poems were edited by Primissier 

 at Vienna in 1827, did the same, we know not; 

 but among those poems is one respecting Hans 

 von Traun, who was in the service of Edward III.* 

 at the battle of Crecy. 



* There is a chronicle of the transactions of Edward 

 III. during ' his Sojourn iii Flanders in the year 1340, 



Of the literary intercourse between England 

 and Germany a curious instance is that which, I 

 believe, I first brought under the notice of the 

 English public in my Letter to the late Thomas 

 Amyot, Esq., on the Connexion between the Early 

 English and Early German Drama, — a paper 

 written for the Society of Antiquaries on the oc- 

 casion of Prince Albert's being admitted a mem- 

 ber, and printed, not in the Archceologia, but in 

 the New Monthly Magazine for January, 1841, at 

 the special request of its then editor, — the wittiest 

 F.S.A. the world ever saw, — the late Theodore 

 Hook. 



Other instnnces of such literary intercourse are 

 no doubt to be found. But it is not very easy to 

 distinguish that for which we are indebted to 

 Germany, from what we owe to the Low Coun- 

 tries. Reynard the Fox clearly came to us from 

 the latter. The Merry Jest of a Man that was 

 called Hawleglas, probably through the same me- 

 dium. But Doctor Faustus immigrated from Ger- 

 many, and the Priest of Kalenberg, that curious 

 companion to Etdenspiegel, from the same coun- 

 try. 



Caxton's residence in the Netherlands, and 

 the enormous influence which his introduction of 

 the art .of printing exercised over our national 

 literature, combined with the intimate commercial 

 relations which existed between the two countries, 

 to say nothing of community of religious feeling *, 

 may well account for the literary interchange 

 which was carried on for so long a period between 

 us. For that the influence was not always on one 

 side there is evidence in the translation into 

 Dutch of works which were popular in England. 

 For instance, I have in my possession, though I 

 cannot lay my hand upon it at this moment for 

 the purpose of giving its exact title, a Dutch ver- 

 sion of Joseph Swetman's Arraignment of Lewd, 

 Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, which was 

 published at London in 1620. 



These few hints may draw the attention of some 

 readers of " N. & Q.," possessed of more know- 

 ledge and more leisure than I have, to a rich field 

 of literary history, which well deserves cultiva- 

 tion ; and I only hope that they will not be de- 

 terred by thinking that, from the small gleanings 

 which I have made, the harvest which would be 

 the result of all their labour would be a poor one. 



written at the time, and first printed from the original 

 manuscript at Gent in 1840. The title is " Van den 

 derden Edewart Conine van Engelant Eymfcronyk ge- 

 schryven omtrent het jaer 1347, door Jan de Kleerk van 

 Antwerpen en uitgegeven met aentakinengen door J. F. 

 Willems." At the end are several original charters of 

 Edward, said to be first printed from the originals. 



* I have for obvious reasons not alluded to the early 

 versions of the Scriptures printed in the Low Countries, or 

 to the English political and theological Tracts which are 

 known to have been furtively printed there for distribntioii 

 in England. ' 



