Facendomi profitto l' altrui male
In consolar i casi e dolor miei."
Petrarca, Trionfo della Castità.
"Ben' è felice quel, donne mie care,
Ch' essere accorto all' altrui spese impare."
Ariosto, Orl. Fur., canto X.
S. W. SINGER.
The Saint Graal (Vol. iii., p. 413.).
—I see that MR. G. STEPHENS states, that Mons. Roquefort's nine columns are decisive of Saint Graal being derived from Sancta Cratera. I am unacquainted with the word cratera, unless in Ducange, as meaning a basket. But crater, a goblet, is the word meant by Roquefort.
How should graal or greal come from crater? I cannot see common sense in it. Surely that ancient writer, nearly, or quite, contemporary with the publication of the romance, Helinandus Frigidimontanus, may be trusted for the fact that graal was French for "gradalis or gradale," which meant "scutella lata et aliquantulum profunda in quâ preciosæ dapes cum suo jure divitibus solent apponi." (Vide Helinand. ap. Vincentium Bellovacensem, Speculum Historiale, lib. 43. cap. 147.) Can there be a more apparent and palpable etymology of any word, than that graal is gradale? See Ducange in Gradale, No. 3, and in Gradalis, and the three authorities (of which Helinand is not one) cited by him.