The eye and the heart / [ed. Eleanor Prescott Hammond].

The shortcomings of this text are many. The attempt of the translator to say in eight lines of ten syllables what the French had said in eight of eight syllables must of course result in padding; and the effect of the poem is weakened in consequence. But in addition to this come the sins of the copyist; lines above and below the proper length are frequent, while others move with a clumsiness which defies scansion. Some of this may be due to the translator, but a moiety at least is probably the fault of the immediate scribe of the Longleat, whose percentage of error is regularly higher than that of other copyists in poems where his text is comparable

with nearly related manuscripts. And although most of the poems in the volume are closely allied to the valuable "Oxford Group" of Fairfax, Bodley, and Tanner, three of the longer texts bring Longleat into kinship with the late and inferior copies of the manuscript Trinity College Cambridge R 3, 19. Its position in the genealogy of medieval common∣place-books is thus doubly assailable. In this one case its record is noteworthy, as preserving to us a "strife" not elsewhere found in manuscript, but even here its late date and its corrupt text deprive the copy of a large part of its value.

ELEANOR PRESCOTT HAMMOND.