which Father Suysken did not even deign to read![26]

Yet that which gives these stories an inestimable worth is what for want
of a better term we may call their atmosphere. They are legendary,
worked over, exaggerated, false even, if you please, but they give us
with a vivacity and intensity of coloring something that we shall search
for in vain elsewhere--the surroundings in which St. Francis lived. More
than any other biography the Fioretti transport us to Umbria, to the
mountains of the March of Ancona; they make us visit the hermitages, and
mingle with the life, half childish, half angelic, which was that of
their inhabitants.

It is difficult to pronounce upon the name of the author. His work was
only that of gathering the flowers of his bouquet from written and oral
tradition. The question whether he wrote in Latin or Italian has been
much discussed and appears to be not yet settled; what is certain is
that though this work may be anterior to the Conformities,[27] it is a
little later than the Chronicle of the Tribulations, for it would be
strange that it made no mention of Angelo Clareno, if it was written
after his death.

This book is in fact an essentially local[28] chronicle; the author has
in mind to erect a monument to the glory of the Brothers Minor of the
March of Ancona. This province, which is evidently his own, "does it
not resemble the sky blazing with stars? The holy Brothers who dwelt in
it, like the stars in the sky, have illuminated and adorned the Order of
St. Francis, filling the world with their examples and teaching." He is
acquainted with the smallest villages,[29] each having at a short
distance its monastery, well apart, usually near a torrent, in the edge
of a wood, and above, near the hilltop, a few almost inaccessible cells,
the asylums of Brothers even more than the others in love with
contemplation and retirement.[30]

The chapters that concern St. Francis and the Umbrian Brothers are only
a sort of introduction; Egidio, Masseo, Leo on one side, St. Clara on
the other, are witnesses that the ideal at Portiuncula and St. Damian
was indeed the same to which in later days Giachimo di Massa, Pietro di
Monticulo, Conrad di Offida, Giovanni di Penna, and Giovanni della Verna
endeavored to attain.

While most of the other legends give us the Franciscan tradition of the
great convents, the Fioretti are almost the only document which shows it
as it was perpetuated in the hermitages and am