Page:Disciplina Clericalis (English translation) from the fifteenth century Worcester Cathedral Manuscript F. 172.djvu/17

   Magni Regis Macedonum ad Magistrum suum Aristotilem'. There are forty lines to a page and the writing tho' rather small is easy to read.

The Worcester version omits eight of the tales found in the complete Mss. of the original Latin Disciplina (cf. Hilka & Söderhjelm op. cit.), but as noted above, there are three tales added at the end.

The Middle English translation was carelessly made; there are numerous instances in which the translator seems to have been in a hurry, or ignorant of the Latin text he was following. Many of these crudities are pointed out in the footnotes of this edition. The stories, moreover, do not always follow the order they occupied in the original, and occasionally a passage has been taken out of its natural setting and connection in the Latin version by the translator (or perhaps by the copyist of the Worc. Cath. Ms.) and shifted to a different part of the collection. Indeed, the confusion about the meaning of the Latin and the arrangement of the materials often suggest the probability that we have to do with a careless copy of an earlier original. One might, to be sure, discover that many of these peculiarities have their basis in the Cambr. Univ. Libr. Ms. (li, vi, ii, ff. 95-116) of the Latin version, which, as we have already seen, is the source of the final three tales of our collection. Hilka and Söderhjelm, however, have not recorded many notable textual differences between this and the other complete manuscript versions—except the three spurious tales—either in their introductory discussions or their foot notes.