A Greek acrostic, which in the fourth and fifth centuries was embodied by Lactantius in his Divina Institutio and translated by Augustine into Latin hexameters, [Civitate Dei, lib. 18, cap. 22.] seems to be the original source of the narration of fifteen definite signs of doom predicted by one of the Sibyls, which, perhaps mainly through this translation of Augustine's, became widely spread in the works of Bede, Adso, Comestor, Aquinas, and others, during the middle ages. Poems, on varying versions of the subject taken from these writers, are found in nearly every country of Christendom, from the twelfth century onwards,—French, Provençal, Italian, Spanish, German, Old Friesic, Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, English, Old Irish, and Icelandic. [It would be impossible to give here full details. Those who wish to go further into the subject are referred to Dr. Nölle's useful and suggestive essay, Die Legende von den Fünfzehn Zeichen vor dem jüngsten Gerichte, in Paul and Braune's Beiträge, Halle, 1879, vol. vi. p. 412, and to the references in it; to an article by E. Sommer, in the Zeitschrift für Deutsches Alterthum, vol. iii. p. 523; and especially to that by Caroline Michaëlis in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, &c., 1870, vol. xlvi. p. 33; to references in Mätzner's Altenglische Sprachproben, i. 120, and in Furnivall's Adam Davy's Five Dreams, &c., E. E. T. Soc., 1878; for French version to the Bulletin des Anc. Textes Francais, 1879, pp. 74, 79—83, and to the drama of Adam, ed. V. Luzarche, Tours, 1854, p. 71; as to Provençal, see Daurel et Beton, ed. P. Meyer, Soc. des Anc. Textes Fr. 1880, p. xcvii. The Northmen of the tenth century, or thereabouts, put the story into the Wolospa (see Vigfusson and Powell's Corp. Poet. Boreale, i. lxvii. ii. 625, 637, 650; in Old Irish about the twelfth century, Dr. Whitley Stokes tells me, it is found in a collection of poems on the histories of the Bible, Saltair na Rann (Anecdota Oxon. Oxford, 1883, ed. Whitley Stokes), Nos. cliii.—clix. The old Friesian version is printed in Max Rieger's Lesebuch, p. 213.]
A great many of these poems and writers, the earliest of whom appears to be Bede, [Collectanea et Flores, Works, Cologne, 1612, iii. p. 494.] attribute the legend to Jerome; nothing of the kind is, however, to be found in his works printed by the Benedictines, though it may have been in some writing of his now lost.
There are many middle English poems on the Signs of Doom. It is found sometimes included as part of a long collective poem, as in the Cursor Mundi, ll. 22428—22710, in part iv.; Hampole's Prick of Conscience, ll. 4738—4817; and Sir David Lyndesay's Monarche, book iv. ll. 5450—5509. The legend is embodied in a shorter poem
