So Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell, vv 474 f, and our ballad, stanzas 29, 30.
[291] This was a melodrama by Favart, in four acts: reduced in 1821 to one act, at the Gymnase.
[292] Chaucer's tale is commonly said to be derived from Gower's, but without sufficient reason. Vv 6507-14, ed. Tyrwhitt, are close to Dame Ragnell, 409-420. Gower may have got his from some Example-book. I have not seen it remarked, and therefore will note, that Example-books may have been known in England as early as 1000, for Aelfric seems to speak slightingly of them in his treatise on the Old Testament. The Proverbs, he says, is a "bigspellbóc, ná swilce gé secgað, ac wísdómes bigspell and warnung wið dysig," etc.
[32]
KING HENRY
'King Henry.' a. The Jamieson-Brown MS., fol. 31. b. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802, II, 132.
Scott describes his copy of 'King Henry' as "edited from the MS. of Mrs Brown, corrected by a recited fragment." This MS. of Mrs Brown was William Tytler's, in which, as we learn from Anderson's communication to Percy (see p. 62, above), this ballad was No 11. Anderson notes that it extended to twenty-two stanzas, the number in Scott's copy. No account is given of the recited fragment. As published by Jamieson, II, 194, the ballad is increased by interpolation to thirty-four stanzas. "The interpolations will be found inclosed in brackets," but a painful contrast of style of itself distinguishes them. They were entered by Jamieson in his manuscript as well.
The fourteenth stanza, as now printed, the eighteenth in Jamieson's copy, is not there bracketed as an interpolation, and yet it is not in the manuscript. This stanza, however, with some verbal variation, is found in Scott's version, and as it may have been obtained by Jamieson in one of his visits to Mrs Brown, it has been allowed to stand.
Lewis rewrote the William Tytler version for his Tales of Wonder, 'Courteous King Jamie,' II, 453, No 57, and it was in this shape that the ballad first came out, 1801.
The story is a variety of that which is found in '[The Marriage of Sir Gawain],' and has its parallel, as Scott observed, in an episode in Hrólfr Kraki's saga; A, Torfæus, Historia Hrolfi Krakii, c. vii, Havniæ, 1705; B, Fornaldar Sögur, Rafn, I, 30 f, c. 15.