The novelty of the style and matter will, I hope, excuse its prolixity with most readers.  If not, I have still my reasons for inserting the greater part of this chapter.

P. 145. ’ I demand it.’  How far I am justified in putting such fears into her mouth the reader may judge.  Cf.  Lib.  VIII. section 5.  ’The devotion of the people demanding it, her body was left unburied till the fourth day in the midst of a multitude.’ . . .

‘The flesh,’ says Dietrich, ’had the tenderness of a living body, and was easily moved hither and thither at the will of those who handled it . . . .  And many, sublime in the valour of their faith, tore off the hair of her head and the nails of her fingers ("even the tips of her ears, et mamillarum papillas,” says untranslatably Montanus of Spire), and kept them as relics.’  The reference relating to the pictures of her disciplines and the effect which they produced on the crowd I have unfortunately lost.

P. 146.  ‘And yet no pain.’  Cf.  Lib.  VIII section 4.  ’She said, “Though I am weak I feel no disease or pain,” and so through that whole day and night, as hath been said, having been elevated with most holy affections of mind towards God, and inflamed in spirit with most divine utterances and conversations, at length she rested from jubilating, and inclining her head as if falling into a sweet sleep, expired.’

P. 147.  ‘Canonisation.’  Cf.  Lib.  VIII. section 10.  If I have in the last scene been guilty of a small anachronism, I have in this been guilty of a great one.  Conrad was of course a prime means of Elizabeth’s canonisation, and, as Dietrich and his own ’Letter to Pope Gregory the Ninth’ show, collected, and pressed on the notice of the Archbishop of Maintz, the miraculous statements necessary for that honour.  But he died two years before the actual publication of her canonisation.  It appeared to me that by following the exact facts I must either lose sight of the final triumph, which connects my heroine for ever with Germany and all Romish Christendom, and is the very culmination of the whole story, or relinquish my only opportunity of doing Conrad justice, by exhibiting the remaining side of his character.

I am afraid that I have erred, and that the most strict historic truth would have coincided, as usual, with the highest artistic effect, while it would only have corroborated the moral of my poem, supposing that there is one.  But I was fettered by the poverty of my own imagination, and ‘do manus lectoribus.’

Ibid.  ‘Third Minors.’  The order of the Third Minors of St. Francis of Assisi was in invention of the comprehensive mind of that truly great man, by which ‘worldlings’ were enabled to participate in the spiritual advantages of the Franciscan rule and discipline without neglect or suspension of their civic and family duties.  But it was an institution too enlightened for its age; and family and civic ties were destined for a far nobler consecration.  The order was persecuted and all but exterminated by the jealousy of the Regular Monks, not, it seems, without papal connivance.  Within a few years after its foundation it numbered amongst its members the noblest knights and ladies of Christendom, St. Louis of France among the number.