their allegiance. He sends for his three favorite knights, and the chief men of the surrounding towns also come in and make him ruler over the land. Meriadoc, however, explains that he has been waging war on the emperor's account and in order to rescue the princess who has been promised him in marriage consequently, that all his conquests must be transferred to the emperor. The chief men object to this, [p. 390.] but finally consent to accept the authority of the emperor, if he fulfills his promise of giving his daughter to Meriadoc in marriage. Meriadoc then returns to the princess who receives him in triumph.

In the meanwhile, however, a great war has broken out between the emperor and the king of Gaul. The emperor finds himself hard pressed and is forced to conclude peace with his enemy on the condition that he would give him the hand of his daughter already promised to Meriadoc. This arrangement he keeps concealed from Meriadoc-[p. 391.Jon the other hand, he sends him messages, commending his valor and promising him rewards, and also orders him to bring to court his daughter and all the nobles of the land he has conquered. Meriadoc, unsuspecting, calls together a council of the chief men and they agree to go. He sets out with the princess and a great host of men [p. 392.] and they are met by the emperor who receives him together with the nobles in his palace, but disperses the rest in places round about, in order to cut them off from their leader. The emperor himself had taken the precaution of bringing together a large body of men on his own side. He at once puts his daughter in a tower and surrounds her with guards, but he allows Meriadoc to visit her freely, in order that he may find an opportunity of bringing accusations against him. Spies soon report that Meriadoc has been seen indulging in undue familiarities with the princess, and accordingly the emperor, without announcing his object, calls together a council to which Meriadoc also is summoned, and after first discoursing on the liberality which he had always displayed towards

his men [p. 393.] and recounting his past favors to Meriadoc especially, he accuses the latter of having rewarded his benefits by [p. 394. seducing his daughter and ends by asking the judgment of the nobles. Meriadoc springs forth to defend himself from these charges, but armed men whom the emperor has kept in concealment near at hand rush out and arrest Meriadoc and his companions. At the same time four legions are despatched through the villages round about to quell any possible uprising of Meriadoc's men. Taken by surprise they surrender in large numbers without opposition. When the princess hears of these events she is profoundly afflicted, but is confident that Meriadoc, if he once escapes, will take full vengeance on his enemies.

On the twentieth day after this the king of Gaul comes to marry the princess, but discovering that she is pregnant he renounces the marriage [P. 395.] and renews his war on the emperor. A day is appointed for a battle which is to settle the question of superiority between them.

In the meanwhile, partly on account of the war and partly on account of the emperor's remorse, Meriadoc is more laxly guarded. One evening accordingly he tears up his clothes and makes a line by which he lets himself down from a window to the ground, crawls along the ground to escape the notice of the watch-dog, climbs the wall and escapes to the house of a friend nearby. After resting there three days [p. 396.] he goes off to the place where the battle is impending. He ranges himself in the front rank of the forces of Gaul and slays so many of the emperor's chief men that the emperor himself in desperation attacks him, but suffers the same fate. [p. 397.] The king of Gaul observes the valor of this knight and has him summoned before him. When he learns that it is Meriadoc, he promises to reward him with the hand of the princess.

On the emperor's death his army is put to flight and afterwards surrenders to the king of Gaul. The king now redeems his promise and gives the princess to Meriadoc in

marriage. He also restores to Meriadoc every thing that the latter had gained by conquest and adds other great possessions besides. Finally he makes him second to him in authority over all his dominions. A son is born to Meriadoc, from whom many kings and princes are descended. Meriadoc himself lived to enjoy an honorable old age.

J. DOUGLAS BRUCE.

XV. THE FRIAR'S LANTERN AND FRIAR RUSH.

Friar Rush appears in all the versions of his printed history (Danish, Swedish, German, English)1 as a malignant

1See the bibliography in Bruun's edition of the Danish Broder Russes Historie (1555), Copenhagen, 1868, pp. 18 ff. Since 1868, the Low German poem has been edited (after Schade) by Bobertag, Narrenbuch, [1885,] pp. 363 ff., and the English tale (from Thoms, with omissions) by H. Morley, Early Prose Romances, Carisbrooke Library, 1889, pp. 409 ff. See also Furnivall, Captain Cox, 1871, p. xlvii; Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century, 1886, pp. 293–322; Arber, Stationers' Registers, 1, 389.

In 1882, Gering published, from two fourteenth-century manuscripts, an Icelandic tale, "Frá því er púkinn gjörðiz ábóti” (Íslendzk Æventýri, No. 26, 1, 104-7; cf. translation and note, II, 83-85), which bears a striking resemblance to the legend of Friar Rush, and which, if it is really the same story, is the earliest version yet discovered. Here the devil, whose name is not given, actually becomes abbot. (Compare the cobold "Bôppole," said to be the ghost of a Jew who in his lifetime had managed to become an abbot, though he had never been baptized: Birlinger, Volksthümliches aus Schwaben, 1, 50.) The narrative is serious throughout, embodying none of the tricks that mark Rush as a goblin or cobold. It is quite possible that the story of Rush, as we know it, is a combination of a simple legend like the Icelandic text with some such tale of a housecobold, serviceable in a monastery, as that told of Hödeken (Hutgin, Hütchen) of Hildesheim by Trithemius, Chronicon Hirsaugiense ad ann. 1132, and after him by Weier, De Praestigiis Daemonum, ed. of 1583, i, 22, cols. 114 ff. (not in ed. of 1568); see also Paullini, Zeit-kürtzender Erbaulichen

fiend who, under the disguise of a friar, brought a religious house to dire confusion. Yet it seems to be the received opinion that he was also known to the English (either under his full name or simply as "the Friar") in quite another character,—that of harmless and serviceable house-spirit. In this role he was, it is held, to all intents and purposes identical with the domestic manifestation of Robin Goodfellow :

Lust Dritter Theil, 1725, ch. 169, pp. 1058-60; Grimms, Deutsche Sagen, I, 97 ff. The remarkable correspondence between Hödeken and Rush was observed by Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, Discourse upon Divels, ch. 21, 1584, p. 522, Nicholson's reprint, 1886, p. 438 (see particularly Wolf u. Endlicher, Von Bruoder Rauschen, 1835, pp. xxix, xxx, and notes 21 and 29, pp. xliii, xlvi; reprint in Scheible, Kloster, XI, 1087, 1097, 1099). The services of Rush in guarding a man's wife for him, related in the English version, but in no other (reprint of 1810, pp. 26 ff.; Thoms, Early Prose Romances, 1, 32 ff., 2d. ed., 1858, 1, 292 ff.; cf. Bolte's note in his edition of Valentin Schumann's Nachtbüchlein, p. 386) are curiously paralleled by one of Hödeken's adventures, though the point of the two stories is different. Scot does not mention the similarity. Perhaps the chapters in question were not in the English version which he knew. The extant English text dates from 1620 and contains a good deal of extraneous matter from Eulenspiegel and elsewhere. One of the chapters describing Rush's guardianship of the farmer's wife, "How Rush came home and found the Priest in the Cheese-basket" (reprint of 1810, pp. 32 ff.; Thoms, as above, 1, 38 ff., 2d. ed., 1858, 1, 298 ff.) is nearly related (as Bolte has observed) to the twentieth tale in Valentin Schumann's Nachtbüchlein, 1559 (ed. Bolte, 1893, pp. 63 ff., cf. note, pp. 395-6), which is the source of Ayrer's drama Der Münch im Kesskorb (Dramen, ed. Keller, v, 3093 ff.). Cf. also the fifteenth-century Swiss poem printed by Bächtold, Germania, XXXIII, 271 (see Bolte, as above, pp. 396, 416; Fränkel, Vierteljahrschrift f. Litteraturgeschichte, v, 471; Pistl, the same, vi, 430). A remarkable parallel to the English chapters is a Calabrian-Greek popular tale published in Pitre's Archivio, VI, 368 ff. The resemblance to Hödeken's exploits in disturbing the intrigues of the noble lady is general rather than particular. The Hödeken episode is identical with the plot of Hans Sachs's humorous poem, Der Teuffel hütt einer Bulerin, 1558 (ed. Keller, IX, 371 ff.). Stiefel, Hans Sachs-Forschungen, p. 142, has overlooked this. He cites, as a possible source for the schwank, Burkard Waldis, Esopus, ii, 88 (from Abstemius, No. 62, see Kurz's Waldis, Anm., p. 108: this is No. 312 in Sir Roger L'Estrange's Fables of Æsop and other Eminent Mythologists, 1692, p. 274), but the Hödeken story is much closer, for in Waldis and Abstemius it is a friend, and not a devil, that watches the wife. In a later article