We are accustomed to associate with the names of the great men of all times and in all lines of activity, certain dominant characteristics and traits of personality, which, though usually merely coincident and contributing factors, serve none the less as the tangible facts whereby the mind is enabled to grasp and gauge their power. It is a criterion whose insufficiency becomes evident only in the isolated instances wherein such natural indices of character are made conspicuous chiefly by their absence. There are characters in history upon which the test of time has set its seal of greatness, but which, considered abstractly and apart from their achievements, seem merely negative and colorless. Their work remains as the tangible evidence of their genius, yet any effort to establish the relation of cause and effect between that work and the intrinsic personality of its author is uniformly unsatisfactory in its results.

This article is merely a contribution toward a record of popular New-Mexican Spanish. It is incomplete and fragmentary; and, doubtless, it has many errors, since most of the words and expressions it contains were received through the ear. By New-Mexican Spanish is here meant the popular Spanish speech of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. This region is only a small part of the southwestern States and Territories where Spanish is spoken, and yet it is as large as Italy. Its population may be roughly estimated at 125,000 Spanish-speaking persons, of whom some 40,000 or 50,000 are in Colorado and the remainder in northern New Mexico.

It is now thirty years ago that three stories, more or less closely related to the Prioresses Tale, were printed in the Chaucer Society's Originals and Analogues. Since that time but little new light has been thrown on the source used by Chaucer for this Tale. The general opinion has been that Chaucer followed some version of the legend not now known, though Professor Skeat in his most recent discussion of the subject takes the view that the Prioresses Tale is the result of a combination, probably by Chaucer himself, of two miracles of Our Lady related by Gautier de Coincy: that of the boy killed by the Jew, and that of the wicked cleric in whose mouth after death a miraculous flower was found.

Before the revival of Greek learning in the fifteenth century, the Æsopic fables of classical antiquity were known in Europe through Latin collections derived from Phædrus. Two of these collections were particularly well known; one which goes under the name of Romulus, written in prose in the tenth century; and a metrical version of the larger part of Romulus, written in the twelfth century. This metrical collection, called in the Middle Ages Esopus, is now ascribed to Walter of England, but is often called Anonymus Neveleti. Another metrical version of Romulus was made a little later by Alexander Neckam, and the fables of Avianus, also, were known to some extent. These collections, with numerous recensions and derivatives in Latin, and translations into many different languages, form a body of written fable-literature whose development can for the most part be clearly traced. At the same time, beast-fables were extensively employed in school and pulpit, and were continually repeated for entertainment as well as for instruction. Thus there was current all over Europe a great mass of fable-literature in oral tradition. The oral versions came in part from the written fable-books; others originated as folk-tales in medieval Europe; others had descended orally from ancient Greece, or had been brought from the Orient. Many are still current among the people in all parts of Europe, and beyond. From this mass of traditional material, heterogeneous collections of popular stories, including beast-fables, were reduced to writing in Latin and in other languages. An example of this process is found in the Esope of Marie de France, the earliest known fable-book in a modern vernacular, which was translated into French in the twelfth century from an English work which is now lost. Forty of Marie's fables, less than two-fifths of the whole number, came from a recension of the original Romulus called Romulus Nilantii; the others from popular stories of various kinds. Similarly, the important Æsop of Heinrich Steinhöwel contains the Romulus fables in four books, followed by seventeen fables called Extravagantes, others from the recently published Latin version of the Greek fables, from Avianus, from the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus, and from Poggio,—in all, nine books, printed in Latin with a German translation about 1480, and speedily translated into many languages (including English, by Caxton in 1484, from the French version). The Extravagantes, like other collections, and like the episodes of the beast-epic (little known in Italy), came from popular tradition. Many writers show by incidental references that they were familiar with fables, although they may not have regarded them as worthy of serious attention,—writers like Dante, and his commentator Benvenuto da Imola. Moreover, the animal-lore of the bestiaries and of works like the Fiore di Virtù is closely akin to that of the fables. It is evident, then, that the collections descended from Phædrus, important though they were, represented but a fraction of the fable-literature that was current in the Middle Ages.