"'TIE VIRGIN'S CRADLE-SONG."
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR."]
Sin,—In your notice of Fraser's 32agazine, you seem to give a qualified acceptance to the assertion, in an article on " Folk Lullabies," that " good authorities " pronounce the pretty hymn or carol " Dormi, fili, dormil" to: be " ono of the earliest poems extant of the Christian era." Let me Isay, as one who has given twenty years of study to Latin hymnology, that no good authority could possibly say anything of the kind, for these simple reasons :-1. The structure of the verse is one of which there is no example or likeness at all till the twelfth century ; no exact parallel, I think, till the sixteenth. 2. No ancient printed copy or MS. of it is known to exist, nor any citation of it in any old writer. 3. H. A. Daniel, perhaps the most learned hymnologist of this century, declares that he could never come on any old traces of it, and that, in his belief, it was composed by some of the Jesuits, with whose style of hymnody
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