y others, was
privileged to see a vision of Purgatory and of the Earthly Paradise, on
the first Friday after the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in the
year 1409. Accounts of such experiences, it may be remarked here, were
popular from the tenth century onwards amongst the Anglo-Saxons and
English, especially after the middle of the twelfth century, when the
story of the famous 'St. Patrick's Purgatory' was first published.
William Staunton relates (Royal MS. 17 B. xliii. in the British Museum)
that in one part of Purgatory, as he went along the side of a 'water,
the which was blak and fowle to sight,' he saw on the further side a
tower, with a fair woman standing thereon, and a ladder against the
tower: but 'hit was so litille, as me thowght that it wold onnethe
[scarcely] bere ony thing; and the first rong of the ladder was so that
onnethe might my fynger reche therto, and that rong was sharper than ony
rasor.' Hearing a 'grisly noyse' coming towards him, William 'markid'
himself with a prayer, and the noise vanished, and he saw a rope let
down over the ladder from the top of the tower. And when the woman had
drawn him safely to the top, she told him that the cord was one that he
had once given to a chapman who had been robbed.

The whole subject of St. Patrick's Purgatory is extremely interesting;
but it is outside our present scope, and can best be studied in
connection with the mythology of the _Lyke-wake Dirge_ in Thomas
Wright's _St. Patrick's Purgatory_ (1844). The popularity of the story
is attested by accounts extant in some thirty-five Latin and English
MSS. in the British Museum, in the Bodleian, at Cambridge, and at
Edinburgh. Calderon wrote a drama round the myth, _El Purgatorio de San
Patricio_; Robert Southey a ballad; and an early poem of George
Wither's, lost in MS., treated of the same subject. Recently the tale
has received attention in G. P. Krapp's _Legend of St. Patrick's
Purgatory_, Baltimore, 1900.

A correspondent in _Notes and Queries_, 9th Ser., xii. 475 (December 12,
1903), remarks that the 'liche-wake' is still spoken of in the Peak
district of Derbyshire.

INDEX OF TITLES
Page

Adam 123
Allison Gross 9
A Noble Riddle Wisely Expounded 159

Baffled Knight, The 212