cribing to him these poems at least. To these some of the RIDDLES,
if not all, are usually added, but this is now contested. Other poems,
as the GUTHLAC, PHOENIX, CHRIST'S DESCENT INTO HELL, ANDREAS, DREAM OF
THE ROOD, and several other shorter poems, have been ascribed to him
with more or less probability, and very recently Sarrazin (in _Anglia_,
IX. 515 ff.) would credit him with the authorship of even the
BEOWULF(!). We might as well assign to him, as has been suggested, all
the poems in the two great manuscripts, the Exeter Book and the Vercelli
Book, and be done with it. It is desirable that his authorship of the
DREAM OF THE ROOD, which ten Brink and Sweet assign to him, but Wuelker
rejects, should be proved or disproved; for with this is connected the
question of his Northumbrian origin, and some lines from this poem have
been inscribed in the Northumbrian dialect on the Ruthwell Cross in
Dumfriesshire.

However it may be, a poet named Cynewulf wrote the ELENE, and thereby
left us one of the finest Old English poems that time has preserved, on
a subject that was of great interest to Christian Europe. A collection
of "Legends of the Holy Rood" has been issued by the Early English Text
Society (ed. Morris, 1871), from the Anglo-Saxon period to Caxton's
translation of the _Legenda Aurea_; but they are arranged without
system, and no study has been made of the date and relation of the
several forms of the story. If Cynewulf made use of the Latin Life of
Cyriacus in the _Acta Sanctorum_, he expanded his source considerably
and showed great skill and originality in his treatment of the subject,
as may be seen by comparing the translation with the Latin text in
Zupitza's third edition of the ELENE (1888), or in Professor Kent's
forthcoming American edition, after Zupitza. The Old English text was
discovered by a German scholar, Dr. F. Blume, at Vercelli, Italy, in
1822, and the manuscript has since become well known as the Vercelli
Book (cf. Wuelker's _Grundriss_, p. 237 ff.). A reasonable conjecture as
to how this MS. reached Vercelli may be found in Professor Cook's
pamphlet, "Cardinal Guala and the Vercelli Book." A Bibliography of the
ELENE will be found in Wuelker, Zupitza, and Kent. English translations
have been made by Kemble, in his edition of the Codex Vercellensis
(1856), and very recently by Dr. R.F. Weymouth, Acton, England, after
Zupitza's text (privately printed, 1888). A German translation will be
found