Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/204

 194 he seeks Paradise; his efforts will be perfectly fruitless, for the way of Paradise is the way of humility, a way of which he knows nothing. Take this stone and give it to Alexander and say to him, "From this stone learn what you must think of yourself."' Now this stone was of great value and excessively heavy, outweighing and excelling in value all other gems, but when reduced to powder it was as light as a tuft of hay, and as worthless. By which token the mysterious old man meant, that Alexander dead would be a thing of nought."

Mr. Baring-Gould has not attempted to trace the "incontrovertible authority" on which Paludanus related this curious story. Let us endeavour to do so here.

In the Middle Ages there were two Alexanders, the Alexander of history and the Alexander of legend. Needless to say, the latter was far better known and appreciated than the former, and almost every literature possesses its version or versions of the Alexander-Romance. The most widely diffused of these versions were naturally the Latin ones, which with very few exceptions can be ultimately traced to a Greek original dating back to the third century. It is in one of these exceptions of non-Greek origin that we find the theme of the story told by Paludanus. This is the little tract usually known as the Iter ad Paradisum, an edition of which was published by the present writer some few years ago. Its contents may be summarized thus: