[244] From Vulpius's Curiositäten, II, 463, in Erlach, I, 132, after a printed copy of the beginning of the 16th century: Wolff, Halle der Völker, II, 243, from a Fliegendes Blatt of the 16th century. Two copies are cited by title in Mone's Anzeiger, VIII, 354 b, No 1; 378, No 165. Wolff prints Asion.
[245] A man must be "clear as beryl." One of the knights is tumbled into the water for having kissed a lady; but this is according to the code, for he had done it without leave. We learn from Perceval that kissing is permissible; marry, not without the lady be willing. 'Die bruck zu Karidol' is alluded to in 'Der Spiegel,' Meister Alswert, ed. Holland u. Keller, p. 179, vv 10-13. (Goedeke.) A man who has transferred his devotion from an earlier love to the image of a lady shown him in a mirror says the bridge would have thrown him over.
[246] Florimel's girdle is a poor contrivance every way, and most of all for practical purposes; for we are told in stanza 3 that it gives the virtue of chaste love to all who wear it, and then that whosoever contrary doth prove cannot keep it on. But what could one expect from a cast-off girdle of Venus?
[247] Nightingales in Grundtvig, No 274, A, B: see p. 64. See, also, Uhland, Zur Geschichte der Dichtung, III, 121 f.
[248] Neither the Sanskrit Shukasaptati nor Nakshabi's Persian version, made early in the fourteenth century, has been published. The Turkish version is said to have been made in the second half of the next century, for Bajazet II. Kadiri's is probably of the seventeenth century. An English and Persian version (Kadiri's), 1801, has the tale at p. 43; Small's English, from a Hindustani version of Kadiri, 1875, at p. 40.
[249] In the Contes à rire, p. 89, a sylph who loves a prince gives him a flower and a vase which will blacken upon his wife's proving unfaithful: Legrand, 1779, I, 78. I have not seen this edition of the book, but presume that this tale is entirely akin with the above.
[250] Cf. the King of Spain, at pp. 261, 263. The agreement may, or may not, be accidental.
[251] All these examples of the probation by flowers, shirt, or picture are noticed in Loiseleur Deslongchamps, Essai sur les Fables Indiennes, p. 107 ff; or in Von der Hagen's Gesammtabenteuer, III, lxxxiv ff; or in an article by Reinhold Köhler, of his usual excellence, in Jahrbuch für romanische und englische Literatur, VIII, 44 ff.
[252] Köhler, as above, p. 60 f.
[253] There is a stone in the Danish Vigoleis with the Gold Wheel which no one could approach "who was not as clean as when he came from his mother's body." Gawain could touch it with his hand, Arthur often sat upon it, and Vigoleis was found sitting on it. Nyerup, Almindelig Morskabslæsning i Danmark og Norge, p. 129, a chap-book of 1732. The stone is not quite so strict in the German Volksbuch, Marbach, No 18, p. 13 f, Simrock, III, 432 f. In the German romance no man less than immaculate in all respects can touch it: Wigalois, ed. Benecke, p. 57, vv 1485-88.