passages which we find cited
by Ubertini di Casali and by Angelo Clareno as being by Brother Leo, and
an attentive comparison of the text shows that these authors can neither
have drawn them from the Speculum nor the Speculum from them.

There is, besides, one phrase which, apart from the inspiration and
style, will suffice at the first glance to mark the common origin of
most of these pieces.[49] _Nos qui cum ipso fuimus_. "We who have been
with him." These words, which recur in almost every incident,[49] are
in many cases only a grateful tribute to their spiritual father, but
sometimes, too, they have a touch of bitterness. These hermits of
Greccio suddenly recall to mind their rights. Are we not the only, the
true interpreters of the Saint's instructions--we who lived continually
with him; we who, hour after hour, have meditated upon his words, his
sighs, and his hymns?

We can understand that such pretensions were not to the taste of the
Common Observance, and that Crescentius, with an incontestable
authority, has suppressed nearly all this legend.[51]

As for the fragments that have been preserved to us, though they furnish
many details about the last years of St. Francis's life, they still are
not those whose loss is so much to be regretted. The authors who
reproduce them were defending a cause. We owe them little more than the
incidents which in one way or another concern the question of poverty.
They had nothing to do with the other accounts, as they were not writing
a biography. But even within these narrow limits these fragments are in
the first order of importance; and I have not hesitated to use them
largely. It is needless to say that while ascribing their origin to the
Three Companions, and in particular to Brother Leo, we must not suppose
that we have the very letter in the texts which have come down to us.
The pieces given by Ubertini di Casali and Angelo Clareno are actual
citations, and deserve full confidence as such. As for those which are
preserved to us in the Speculum, they may often have been abridged,
explanatory notes may have slipped into the text, but nowhere do we find
interpolations in the bad sense of the word.[52]

Finally, if we compare the fragments with the corresponding accounts in
the Second Life of Celano, we see that the latter has often borrowed
verbatim from Brother Leo, but generally he has considerably abridged
the passages, adding reflections here and there, especially ret