Some conceptions held by Herbert and his predecessors of the relations between sacred and profane love poetry are the matter at issue in this essay—yet it is particularly directed to the attention of two kinds of special students not likely to be especially interested in that issue. I wish it might be read by those who know unpublished Renaissance music, and those who work with semantics and early dictionaries in various European languages. It is written with the hope that some one else may run across an unfound musical setting, and that some one else may adduce earlier uses of a puzzling word. Its main concern, however, is to present certain materials and ideas of rather broader interest to students of Renaissance poetry.

The “Anonymous Riming Chronicle” has long been known through the text printed by Ritson from B.M. MS. Royal 12. C. xii. The first serious attempt to study the sources of this poem and establish the relationships of the several MSS. was made by R. Sternberg, in two papers in Englische Studien XVIII, 1 ff. and 356 ff. In the first of these papers, Sternberg presents a scheme of MS. relations based upon the first and last fifty lines of the text as contained in five MSS. In the second paper he examines the sources of the Chronicle and shows that it depended upon Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle with supplementary use of William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum.

Three times in Canto X of the First Book of the Faerie Queene the ‘godly aged Sire’ impresses upon Red Crosse the fact of his earthly, rather than elfin, lineage.