m, it
belonged, in those days, to the "literature of power," and had great
influence. The form is one which lent itself readily to poetic and
historic illustration, and indeed demanded such treatment. The authors
and translators were chiefly learned and distinguifhed ecclesiastics.
Caxton, the representative of the new time when literature was to be the
common heritage, was filled to overflowing with the best literature then
accessible. A writer of the present century, probably borrowing his
sentiment, has defined originality to be undetected imitation. Such
refinements were unknown to Cessoles and his contemporaries. A writer
took whatever suited his purpose from any and every source that was open
to him. A quotation was always as good as an original sentiment, and
sometimes much better. Why should a man take the trouble of laboriously
inventing fresh phrases about usury or uncleanness when there were the
very words of St. Augustine or St. Basil ready to hand? Why seek modern
instances when the great storehouse of anecdotes of Valerius Maximus was
ready to be rifled? Very frequently the author is given, mostly it may
be imagined from a sense of the value of the authority of the names thus
cited. Whatever the intention of the writer, the effect is to show us
what were the authors known, studied, and quoted in the middle ages.

The authors named are:--Saint Ambrose (2 references), Anastasius (1),
Avicenna (2), Saint Augustine (9), Saint Basil (1), Saint Bernard (2),
Boethius (3), Cassiodorus (1), Cato (5), Cicero (6), Claudian (2),
"Crete" (1), Diomedes (1), Florus (1), Galen (1), Helinand (4),
Hippocrates (4), Homer (1), Saint Jerome (3), John the Monk (1),
Josephus (4), Livy (2), Lucan (1), Macrobius (1), Martial (1), Ovid (6),
Paulus Diaconus (1), Petrus Alphonsus (2), Plato (4), Quintilian (3),
Sallust (1), Seneca (15), Sidrac (1), Solinus (1), Symmachus (1),
Theophrastus (1), "Truphes of the Philosophers" (2), Turgeius Pompeius
(1), Valerius Maximus (23), Valerian (7), Varro (1), Virgil (2), "Vitas
Patrum" (2).

It will be seen that the great classical writers are but poorly
represented, and the main dependence has been upon the later essayists,
and chiefly upon Valerius Maximus, who has pointed many of the morals
enforced in this book. It may, perhaps, be doubted if the writer had
more to work from than Valerius, Seneca, and St. Augustine, with
occasional quotations such as memory would supply from other sources.