Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Hooper.djvu/21

Rh necessarily only conjectures, but as such they are of considerable value. He thinks that at some early period there were collections of stories taken from Roman history in actual use as texts for sermons; and that these stories were then put together for the express purpose of being moralized, and finally appeared under the title of Gesta Romanorum Moralizata, or something similar. Whether this first compilation was entirely composed of classical stories, or contained some of more modern date as well, it is impossible to say. What we now know as the Gesta Romanorum arose from the moralizing of this, or some similar work, after it had been enlarged by the addition of a considerable number of stories relating to later times. It would be easy to circulate a collection of stories under the name of the "Gests of the Romans" among a people whose ideas of history were as limited as those of our forefathers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even though it had not contained a single word about Rome. The intention of the original authors of the Gesta was to provide texts for moralizations. The stories themselves were of secondary importance. Very often in the MSS. the first words of some well-known story appear at the commencement of a chapter, and then the moralization follows immediately. In many of the older copies some of the stories have spaces left after them for the moralization, the writer presumably intending to add it subsequently. It is not till a very late period that the stories become the more important part, and the moralization recedes into the background. Herr Oesterley is very severe on Grässe's rash statement that the English MSS., which are mostly early ones, have, as a rule, no moralizations.

At the risk of being accused of undue repetition, I shall