ly into St. Francis's heart, no one was
more worthy to take up and continue his work.

He soon asked Celano to resume his work.[62] The latter was perhaps
alone at first, but little by little a group of collaborators formed
itself anew about him.[63] Thenceforth nothing prevented his doing with
that portion of the work of the Three Companions which Crescentius had
suppressed what he had already done with the part he had approved.

The Legend of Brother Leo has thus come down to us, entirely worked over
by Thomas of Celano, abridged and with all its freshness gone, but still
of capital importance in the absence of the major part of the original.

The events of which we possess two accounts permit us to measure the
extent of our loss. We find, in fact, in Celano's compilation all that
we expected to find in the Three Companions: the incidents belong
especially to the last two years of Francis's life, and the scene of
many of them is either Greccio or one of the hermitages of the vale of
Rieti;[64] according to tradition, Brother Leo was the hero of a great
number of the incidents here related[65] and all the citations that
Ubertini di Casali makes from Brother Leo's book find their
correspondents here.[66]

This second part of the Second Life perfectly reflects the new
circumstances to which it owes its existence. The question of Poverty
dominates everything;[67] the struggle between the two parties in the
Order reveals itself on every page; the collaborators are determined
that each event narrated shall be an indirect lesson to the Liberals, to
whom they oppose the Spirituals; the popes had commented on the Rule in
the large sense; they, on their side, undertook to comment on it in a
sense at once literal and spiritual, by the actions and words of its
author himself.

History has hardly any part here except as the vehicle of a thesis, a
fact which diminishes nothing of the historic value of the information
given in the course of these pages. But while in Celano's First Life and
in the Legend of the Three Companions the facts succeed one another
organically, here they are placed side by side. Therefore when we come
to read this work we are sensible of a fall; even from the literary
point of view the inferiority makes itself cruelly felt. Instead of a
poem we have before us a catalogue, very cleverly made, it is true, but
with no power to move us.

VIII. NOTES ON A FEW SECONDARY DOCUMENTS

a. _Celano's Life of St