If folk would but stop
attributing
to God, motives, opinions, arrangements and likings, which they'd con|sider an insult to set down to any wise and good friend of their own, how much useless bother would come to an end!
Adam Davy's Five Dreams about Edward II - 1389
Page 18
[THE first following version of the Life of St Alexius, from Laud 622, is the longest--and latest, no doubt*. [There is a MS. of the Life in the Durham Cathedral Library, but my enquiries about it have not yet elicited any answer. ],--of the English forms of the story. It was unknown to Dr Horstmann when he edited his Altenglische Legenden; and he having calld my attention to the other three versions of the Alexius legend, I have, for completeness' sake, added them here. I have also printed the Laud 108 opposite the Vernon text, from which it differs slightly sometimes in words, and in more distinctly Midland forms (waster, was there, l. 10; hauest tou, l. 490; and tou, l. 496; and te, l. 547; some a forms, like gan, l. 168), for convenience of comparison of two later repre|sentatives of one unknown original. I should perhaps apologize for wasting so much space on a mere legend of a so-calld saint's life. But the present story is the same pathetic one as Guy of Warwick's; it is prettily versified; and the comparing of the four ways in which the same incidents are told, has a certain interest: one likes to see how the religious-story writers of old spun out or shortend their material*. [Note how the shorter versions lengthen the end of the story. ]: and the oddness of their notions as to the line of his images' life that pleasd the God and Father of men, is always in|structive, specially when set beside many of the popular ideas on this and like subjects now.
If folk would but stop attributing to God, motives, opinions, arrangements and likings, which they'd con|sider an insult to set down to any wise and good friend of their own, how much useless bother would come to an end!
Dr Horstmann,--who edited the Laud 108 Life in Herrig's Archiv, vol. iii. p. 102-10, 1873*. [I believe that he has since edited the Vernon, Trinity and Laud-463 texts. ]--says that the sources of the Alexius legend are the 'Vita metrica, auctore Marbodo, primum archidiacono Andegavensi, deinde Redonensi episcopo (? 1123)', printed in the Acta Sanctorum, Boll. 17. Juli, p. 254-256; and another 'Vita, auctore anonymo', ib. p. 251-254. To the last, the Laud 108 version is nearly related, often even in words. Eight Middle High German versions of this Legend were edited by Mass|mann, Quedlinburg, 1843. The following Early English lives do not belong to the great Collection of long-line "Saints' Lives" in the Harleian, Vernon, and other MSS, from which I printed a selec|tion*.
