Crane.) 50 [March 16, 
were swallowed up in the vast legendary cycles of the Churen.* This 
slender stream, was, however, about the time of the Crusades, swollen by 
a torrent of Oriental fables and stories, which maintained their supremacy 
in the learned world until the Revival of Letters, and then became the 
cherished patrimony of the illiterate classes, and still delight the people of 
all Europe.} The influence of this Oriental element upon the literature of 
the West was profound, affecting its form, and contributing a mass of en- 
tertaining tales which owe their diffusion and popularity largely to their 
absorption into the various later Occidental story-books. The literature of 
which we are speaking would have remained unknown to the people, had 
they been compelled to make its acquaintance by reading, Fortunately, 
there existed an ecclesiastical channel by which some scanty rills of a 
literature not exclusively ecclesiastical trickled among the people, and this 
channel, curiously enough, was the pulpit. The origin, mode, and matter 
of this oral diffusion will constitute the subject of the present article, 
after the ground has been cleared by a rapid survey of three characteristic 
works which form a group by themselves. : 
The method of instruction by figures, parables, apologues and the like, is 
too old to be referred to Christian symbolization of classic mythological 
elements.{ This undoubtedly gave a specific development to the existing 
tendency, and resulted in the mediwval bestiaires and lapidatres. ‘The em- 
ployment of fables for serious didactic purposes is also Oriental, and all 
students of later medieval literature know the vast influence of the Pant- 
schatantra in its various versions. The earliest one which could have any 
influence on the Orient was the Latin translation by Johannes de Capua, 
Directorium humane vite, made between 1268-78, and based on the Hebrew 
version of Rabbi Joel (1250). The so-called Egsopian fables were preserved 
in the paraphrase of Romulus, the existence of which as early as the tenth 
century has been clearly proved by Oesterley.§ It is all the stranger, then, 
that the earliest distinctively medieval collection of fables shows no traces 
of a specific Oriental or classic influence—we refer to the Speculum Sapien- 
* For the popularity of Valerius Maximus, to which we shall later recur, see 
Kempf’s edition, Berlin, 1854, pp. 47 et seq., and for mythological reminiscences 
in the poems of the Troubadours, see Diez, Die Poesie der Troubadours, Zwickau, 
1826, pp. 127, 140, and Birch-Hirschfeld, Veber die den provenzalischen Tr oubadours 
des XIT. und XTIT. Jahrhunderts bekannten Hpischen Stoffe, Walle, 1878, ad init. 
+It is not true that Oriental fiction was introduced into Europe by the Cru- 
sades; not only had the transmission been going on at a much earlier date (see 
Benfey’s Pantschatantra, Leipzig, 1859, Vol. i, p. xxii), bub the earliest Oriental 
collection, the Disciplina Clericatis of Petrus Alfonsi,was probably written before 
the first Crusade, quite certainly before 1106, the date of the Jewish author’s con- 
version to Christianity. 
{ See Bartoli, Storia della letteratura italiana, Florence, 1878, Vol. i, p. 83, who 
attributes the above origin to the medizval moralizations, We are more in- 
clined to trace it to the influence of the Orient, 
Romulus: Die Paraphrasen des Phedrus und die Aisopische Fabel im Mit- 
telalter, von H. Oesterley, Berlin, 1870, 
