ione in the
fifth act of "A Winter's Tale": I resolve that whenever I mention the
names of Louis Untermeyer and H.L. Mencken it shall be in some
connection more pleasant, and that here I will not mention them at all.

Meanwhile the fifteen or so experiments in contrapuntal prose were, in
particular, uncharted passages from which I stayed unique in deriving
pleasure where others found bewilderment and no tongue-tied irritation:
but, in general, and above every misdemeanor else, the book exasperated
everybody by not being a more successfully managed re-hashing of the
then notorious "Jurgen."

Since 1921, and since the rehabilitation of "Jurgen," the notion has
uprisen, gradually, among the more bold and speculative thinkers, that
perhaps I was not, after all, in this "Figures of Earth" attempting to
rewrite "Jurgen": and Manuel has made his own friend.

James Branch Cabell

Richmond-in-Virginia

30 April 1927

A FOREWORD

"Amoto quoeramus seria ludo"

To

SINCLAIR LEWIS

MY DEAR LEWIS:

To you (whom I take to be as familiar with the Manuelian cycle of
romance as is any person now alive) it has for some while appeared, I
know, a not uncurious circumstance that in the _Key to the Popular Tales
of Poictesme_ there should have been included so little directly
relative to Manuel himself. No reader of the _Popular Tales_ (as I
recall your saying at the Alum when we talked over, among so many other
matters, this monumental book) can fail to note that always Dom Manuel
looms obscurely in the background, somewhat as do King Arthur and
white-bearded Charlemagne in their several cycles, dispensing justice
and bestowing rewards, and generally arranging the future, for the
survivors of the outcome of stories which more intimately concern
themselves with Anavalt and Coth and Holden, and with Kerin and Ninzian
and Gonfal and Donander, and with Miramon (in his role of Manuel's
seneschal), or even with Sclaug and Thragnar, than with the liege-lord
of Poictesme. Except in the old sixteenth-century chapbook (unknown to
you, I believe, and never reprinted since 1822, and not ever modernized
into any cognizable spelling), there seems to have been nowhere an
English rendering of the legends in which Dom Manuel is really the main
figure.

Well, this book attempts to supply that desideratum, and is, so far as
the writer is aware, the one fairly complete epitome in modern English
of the Manuelian historiography n