The book enables us to gauge the literary culture of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.  Poor as it may now seem, it belonged, in those days, to the “literature of power,” and had great influence.  The form is one which lent itself readily to poetic and historic illustration, and indeed demanded such treatment.  The authors and translators were chiefly learned and distinguifhed ecclesiastics.  Caxton, the representative of the new time when literature was to be the common heritage, was filled to overflowing with the best literature then accessible.  A writer of the present century, probably borrowing his sentiment, has defined originality to be undetected imitation.  Such refinements were unknown to Cessoles and his contemporaries.  A writer took whatever suited his purpose from any and every source that was open to him.  A quotation was always as good as an original sentiment, and sometimes much better.  Why should a man take the trouble of laboriously inventing fresh phrases about usury or uncleanness when there were the very words of St. Augustine or St. Basil ready to hand?  Why seek modern instances when the great storehouse of anecdotes of Valerius Maximus was ready to be rifled?  Very frequently the author is given, mostly it may be imagined from a sense of the value of the authority of the names thus cited.  Whatever the intention of the writer, the effect is to show us what were the authors known, studied, and quoted in the middle ages.

The authors named are:—­Saint Ambrose (2 references), Anastasius (1), Avicenna (2), Saint Augustine (9), Saint Basil (1), Saint Bernard (2), Boethius (3), Cassiodorus (1), Cato (5), Cicero (6), Claudian (2), “Crete” (1), Diomedes (1), Florus (1), Galen (1), Helinand (4), Hippocrates (4), Homer (1), Saint Jerome (3), John the Monk (1), Josephus (4), Livy (2), Lucan (1), Macrobius (1), Martial (1), Ovid (6), Paulus Diaconus (1), Petrus Alphonsus (2), Plato (4), Quintilian (3), Sallust (1), Seneca (15), Sidrac (1), Solinus (1), Symmachus (1), Theophrastus (1), “Truphes of the Philosophers” (2), Turgeius Pompeius (1), Valerius Maximus (23), Valerian (7), Varro (1), Virgil (2), “Vitas Patrum” (2).

It will be seen that the great classical writers are but poorly represented, and the main dependence has been upon the later essayists, and chiefly upon Valerius Maximus, who has pointed many of the morals enforced in this book.  It may, perhaps, be doubted if the writer had more to work from than Valerius, Seneca, and St. Augustine, with occasional quotations such as memory would supply from other sources.  The verification of all these quotations would not repay the labour it would involve; but in most cases where the experiment has been tried, the result has been fairly creditable to the old author.