This curious product of mediaevalism, translated from some Latin treatise by an unknown hand in the latter half of the fifteenth century, carries symbolism to its last stage. It is interesting as showing how the preachers in the abbeys and cathedrals of England found, on occasion, "sermons in stones." It would seem as if Longfellow must have read this poem; for a part of his Golden Legend, the close of Friar Cuthbert's sermon, is an accu∣rate reproduction of the spirit of this piece.

The Trinity College MS. R. 3. 21, from which the poem is taken, is fully described in the second volume of Pre∣vost James's Catalogue of the Western MSS. in Trinity College. It dates from the reign of Edward IV. Among its earliest owners was Roger Thorney, a mercer of London and friend of Wynkyn de Worde. It may be surmised that the poem was written not far from the vicinity of the Westminster printing shop. John Stow, who owned the MS. in 1598, ascribed the poem to Lydgate in his last of the Monk's writings, printed on the last leaf of Stow's Chaucer. He was followed in this error by Joseph Ritson, in his Bibliographia Literaria (1802). There is no evi∣dence whatever for this theory, and the poem is far too uncouth and irregular ever to have been penned by Lydgate. See The Lydgate Canon, p. xxxvi (Philological Soc. Transactions, March, 1908), for rhyme-tests.

The poem, miserably deficient in a literary sense, is yet of value in letting us look for a moment at a fifteenth-century church through a fifteenth-century lens.