ess of the Fioretti. The people
fell in love with these stories, in which St. Francis and his companions
appear both more human and more divine than in the other legends; and
they began very soon to feel the need of so completing them as to form a
veritable biography.[32]

The second, entitled Life of Brother Ginepro, is only indirectly
connected with St. Francis; yet it deserves to be studied, for it offers
the same kind of interest as the principal collection, to which it is
doubtless posterior. In these fourteen chapters we find the principal
features of the life of this Brother, whose mad and saintly freaks still
furnish material for conversation in Umbrian monasteries. These
unpretending pages discover to us one aspect of the Franciscan heart.
The official historians have thought it their duty to keep silence upon
this Brother, who to them appeared to be a supremely indiscreet
personage, very much in the way of the good name of the Order in the
eyes of the laics. They were right from their point of view, but we owe
a debt of gratitude to the Fioretti for having preserved for us this
personality, so blithe, so modest, and with so arch a good nature.
Certainly St. Francis was more like Ginepro than like Brother Elias or
St. Bonaventura.[33]

The third, Life of Brother Egidio, appears to be on the whole the most
ancient document on the life of the famous Ecstatic that we possess. It
is very possible that these stories might be traced to Brother Giovanni,
to whom the Three Companions appeal in their prologue.

In the defective texts given us in the existing editions we perceive the
hand of an annotator whose notes have slipped into the text,[34] but in
spite of that this life is one of the most important of the secondary
texts. This always itinerant brother, one of whose principal
preoccupations is to live by his labor, is one of the most original and
agreeable figures in Francis's surroundings, and it is in lives of this
sort that we must seek the true meaning of some of the passages of the
Rule, and precisely in those that have had the most to suffer from the
enterprise of exegetes.

The fourth includes the favorite maxims of Brother Egidio; they have no
other importance than to show the tendencies of the primitive Franciscan
teaching. They are short, precise, practical counsels, saturated with
mysticism, and yet in them good sense never loses its rights. The
collection, just as it is in the Fioretti, is no doubt