232 R. Schcvill, 



definite relations are manifest. As a full discusion of all the material 

 is beyond the space allotted to this article, the character and re- 

 lation of these stories can be merely indicated. 



One of the earliest yarns told in many places ages ago, even in 

 primitive forms of society, is one whose fundamental idea is mysti- 

 fication or deception of some kind ; the specific class of these in- 

 numerable tales which concerns us here, turns on the deception of 

 a man who is made to doubt his own identity. Now the step 

 from the trick which persuades a man that he is some one else 

 to that which convinces him that he is dead was a simple one. 

 Stories of these jests, especially the latter, are very common indeed, 

 as the appended incomplete references will show. ^ The}' must 

 have been current all over Europe, and were no doubt stock 

 anecdotes of every wandering minstrel or friar, merchant or cru- 

 sader, from the earliest days of the middle ages, until the printing 

 presses preserved them for later epochs. Bedier seems to believe 

 that wherever this specific story of a duped husband occurs in an 

 isolated form, it has fallen ovit of a frame which originall}' held it, 

 a frame which accounted for and held together related hoaxes. 

 It must have been rather the reverse. These stories of deception 

 existed independently, though j^erhaps in a crude popular form at 

 a very youthful stage of fiction, and were then absorbed into a 

 complex literary frame at a much later date. When some writer 

 had conceived the idea of a tale accoi'ding to which a prize is to 

 be given to that one of three women who deceives her husband 

 in the cleverest way, he could easily draw upon the enormovis 

 fvind of folklore for stories of deception. A little embroidery of 

 one of the many anecdotes circulating about could then make it 

 suitable for his purpose. Be this as it may, the thing of importance 

 is the widespread existence of the hoax, according to which a man 

 is persuaded that he is ill and about to die. Every age and every 

 nation have examples of it. 



4. 



In view of these facts, how probal^le is it that Swift was acquainted 

 with this jest in fiction, especially with the version most like his 

 joke on Partridge, namely the Spanish tale by Tirso de Molina? 

 Anyone who hastily considers the character of Swift's age might 

 be inclined to suppose that imaginative or romantic literature could 



^ Cf. Appendix II. 



