to proclaim a fourth "matter" (even if anybody had been likely to take
the view that it was so), these classifications are, like most of their
kind, more specious than satisfactory.

[Sidenote: The power and influence of the "Saint's Life."]

Any person--though indeed it is to be feared that the number of such
persons is not very large--who has some knowledge of hagiology _and_
some of literature will admit at once that the popular notion of a
Saint's Life being necessarily a dull and "goody" thing is one of the
foolishest pieces of presumptuous ignorance, and one of the most
ignorant pieces of foolish presumption. Not only have modern novelists
sometimes been better informed and better inspired--as in the case of
more than one version of the Legends of St. Mary of Egypt, of St.
Julian, of Saint Christopher, and others--but there remain scores if not
hundreds of beautiful things that have been wholly or all but wholly
neglected. It is impossible to imagine a better romance, either in verse
or in prose, than might have been made by William Morris if he had kept
his earliest loves and faiths and had taken the _variorum_ Legend of St.
Mary Magdalene, as we have it in divers forms from quite early French
and English to the fifteenth-century English Miracle Play on the
subject. That of St. Eustace ("Sir Isumbras"), though old letters and
modern art have made something of it, has also never been fully
developed in the directions which it opens up; and one could name many
others. But it has to be admitted that the French (whether, as some
would say, naturally enough or not) never gave the Saint's Life pure and
simple the development which it received in English. It started them--I
at least believe this--in the story-telling way; but cross-roads, to
them more attractive, soon presented themselves.

[Sidenote: The Legend of St. Eulalia.]

Still, it started them. I hope it is neither intolerably fanciful nor
the mere device of a compiler anxious to make his arrows of all wood, to
suggest that there is something noteworthy in the nature of the very
first piece of actual French which we possess. The Legend of St. Eulalia
can be tried pretty high; for we have[8] the third hymn of the
_Peristephanon_ of Prudentius to compare it with. The metre of this

Germine nobilis Eulalia

is not one of the best, and contrasts ill with the stately
decasyllables--perhaps the very earliest examples of that mighty metre
that we have--which