Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/232

ÆT. 36] been one of his particular favourites at Oxford. It occurs there under the title of "The Beautiful Palace East of the Sun," with references given to original sources (principally the Volunda Saga), and to variant versions. The latter part of the story in "The Earthly Paradise," however, diverges entirely from the story in Thorpe, and is founded partly on a French romance and partly on the Arabian Nights; and the remarkable framework of the story, an involution of dream within dream through shadowy transmigrations of personality, is wholly the poet's own. The two stories of "The Lady of the Land" and "The Watching of the Falcon" are both from Mandeville's "Voiage and Travell," chapters iv. and xiii. The name of the former story Morris took without change; the latter comes in Mandeville under the title of "The Castle of the Sperhauk.""The Proud King" is from the "Gesta Romanorum," c. 57 of the French, and c. 23 of the English version: and "The Man Born to be King" mainly from the same (c. 20 of the French, and c. 48 of the English), supplemented from the more elaborate version of the same story in the thirteenth-century French romance of the Emperor Coustans (Nouvelles Françoises en prose du XIIIme Siecle, 1856), and with some further details from the story of St. Pelagius in Caxton's "Golden Legend." The edition of the French version of the "Gesta" used by Morris was Brunet's of 1858, and that of the English Madden's of 1838. The stories of "The Writing on the Image" and "The Ring given to Venus" are both from William of Malmesbury, in the second book of the "De Gestis Regum Anglorum": the former is there related of the celebrated scholar, theologian, and mathematician, Gerbert of Aurillac, afterwards Pope Silvester II., known to the mediæval imagination as