Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Hooper.djvu/14

vi was an unnecessary departure from the text. On the other hand, Mr. Swan had occasionally omitted sentences of importance; these have been restored to the text in the present edition. Mistakes in translation, of which there are more than might have been expected, have, of course, been corrected.

Mr. Swan's notes are sometimes erroneous and occasionally pointless. With regard to the former class, I have generally allowed them to stand, and added a correction of the mistakes. Notes of the latter class I have sometimes omitted, and those so treated will not, I think, be missed by the reader. The most valuable part of Mr. Swan's notes are his quotations from other authors illustrative of the text, in selecting which he showed more judgment than in the actual work of translation; but it is throughout evident that his knowledge of English literature, or, at all events, of writers about English literature, was greater than his acquaintance with either Latin or Greek.

A great deal has been done, since Mr. Swan wrote, towards settling the vexed questions relative to the genesis of the Gesta. Sir Frederick Madden, in his work on the old English versions of the Gesta, did a good deal towards solving the problem. But the book which has dealt with the subject in the most thorough and satisfactory manner is the work of a painstaking German, Herr Hermann Oesterley. It is little known in England. The British Museum only possesses the first part; the authorities apparently not thinking it worth while to obtain the remainder, when it was not spontaneously offered them by the bookseller, perhaps because no one ever asked for the work. The leaves of the first part were not even cut till recently. Considering the value of Herr Oesterley's book, its absence, except in an incomplete state, from the shelves