Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 1.djvu/26

xxii make this curious book better known, and to render it more popular, by giving to the public a new translation into modern English. This was the Rev. Charles Swan, whose translation, now reprinted, appeared in two volumes in the year just mentioned, and it is through this modern translation that the celebrated tales of the Gesta Romanorum are now best known to English readers. Charles Swan was evidently impressed deeply with the general interest of the subject he had taken up, and had entered upon the study of it with great zeal, and his translation is a very sufficient representation of the substance and spirit of the original.

And this original is full of interest for us. It not only breathes poetry in most of its stories, but it presents pictures of mediæval life, public and domestic, which we should seek in vain elsewhere. Some of these are naive in the extreme, and throw curious light upon the