As the English Gesta was intended as an imitation of the Continental collection, many of its stories have, of course, been retained; but these have undergone such alterations in language, and sometimes in incident, together with new moralizations, and new names, as to give it, with the addition of forty tales not found in its prototype, the air of an original work.[535:A] It is not, however, so extensive
as the foreign compilation, the most complete manuscripts containing only one hundred and two stories; yet as the sources from which it has drawn its materials are, with a few exceptions, correspondent, in respect to their oriental origin, with the continental copy, the character which Mr. Warton has given of the primary, will apply to the secondary, series.
"This work," he observes, "is compiled from the obsolete Latin chronicles of the later Roman or rather German story, heightened by romantic inventions, from Legends of the Saints, oriental apologues, and many of the shorter fictitious narratives which came into Europe with the Arabian literature, and were familiar in the ages of ignorance and imagination. The classics are sometimes cited for authorities; but these are of the lower order, such as Valerius Maximus, Macrobius, Aulus Gellius, Seneca, Pliny, and Boethius. To every tale a Moralization is subjoined, reducing it into a christian or moral lesson.
"Most of the oriental apologues are taken from the Clericalis Disciplina, or a Latin Dialogue between an Arabian Philosopher and Edric[536:A] his son, never printed[536:B], written by Peter Alphonsus, a baptized Jew, at the beginning of the twelfth century, and collected from Arabian fables, apothegms, and examples.[536:C] Some are also borrowed from an old Latin translation of the Calilah u Damnah, a celebrated set of eastern fables, to which Alphonsus was indebted.
"On the whole, this is the collection in which a curious enquirer might expect to find the original of Chaucer's Cambuscan:—
"Or,——if aught else great bards beside
In sage and solemn tunes have sung,
Of turneys and of trophies hung,
Of forests and inchantments drear,