TWO MEDI/EVIL BOOKS.
Marie de France, done into English by Edith Rickert ; and Morien, rendered into English prose from the Medireval Dutch by Jessie L. Weston. Both with Designs by Caroline Watts. (David Nutt. 3s. and 2s.)—We are very glad to have two more volumes of a series which is pretty to look at as well as interesting t read. These two medireval writers, Marie de France and an unnamed Dutchman, look at things from very different points of view. To the woman, the whole duty of the knight was to be a true lover of ladies. She touches but lightly on the rough, warlike side of life, but describes the joy and the pain, the strength and the weakness, of love with insight and quaint charm. Little is known of Marie herself; but that she was a Court lady, and passed some period of her life in England, can be gathered from the internal evidence of her books. Miss Weston has translated the twelfth-century French into pleasant, readable English, and has added notes on the sources of the "Lays." The Romance of Morien forms part of a fourteenth-century Dutch MS. which "appears to represent -a compilation similar to that with which Sir Thomas Malory has made us familiar." Very little is known about it, but M. Gaston Paris thinks it may be of French origin. It tells of the adventures of a brave and chivalrous young Moor, whose appearance was so black and terrifying that he was constantly mistaken for the Devil. When on a quest for his father, Sir Agloval, he fell in with Sir Lancelot and Sir Gawain, and their adventures make a worthy addition to the Arthurian legend.
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