The text here printed, is, so far as I know, unique in manuscript. It exists in the volume Longleat 258, of the collection belonging to the Marquess of Bath. The present Lord Bath most kindly allowed me, some years since, the privilege of examining and copying from this and another manuscript of his library. In Modern Language Notes for 1905, pages 77 ff., I printed a description of Longleat 258, which I now briefly summarize.

The book is a small square modern-bound volume, of 147 leaves about 8⅝ by 5½ inches, gathered in eights of which the outer sheet is vellum, the three inner paper. The fifth gathering has been lost, dropping from the book the entire poem of The Flower and the Leaf and the first six stanzas of Chaucer's Mars. That the former poem was once in the volume we know from the contemporary table of contents, which includes "De folio et flore"; and this table of contents also includes two poems now lost from the beginning of the book. The script is almost entirely one and the same, small, legible, and current, but not at all elegant; each leaf carries six stanzas, evenly spaced and written; the pages have no ornament and the poems no headings, though running titles have frequently been supplied by a slovenly later hand, which has also occasionally made corrections. At the top of the first page is written "Constat John Thynne", and according to Schick the three stanzas inserted on folio 32 a are in Thynne's hand; Sir John Thynne, the builder of Longleat, died in 1580, and the hand of the scribe may well be of a period but little anterior to this. The volume has the look of a private collection made by an unprofessional and in∣accurate but not untidy copyist; certain tricks of dialect and spelling,—dud, theim—persist throughout, and omission is exceedingly common. The contents were all verse, of an allegorical or rhetorical nature, viz.:—The Letter of Cupid (now lost from the MS.), "Unum Carmen" (also lost), Lydgate's Temple of Glass, the stanzas inserted by Thynne, The Flower and the Leaf (now lost), Chaucer's Mars and Pity, The Assembly of Ladies, Chaucer's Anelida and Parlement of Foules, The Eye and the Heart (now here printed), La Belle Dame sans Mercy, and Lydgate's Churl and Bird.

These poems are either complaints or debates, the latter inconclusive as medieval debates often were, and burdened with the detailed description of court, costume, and tourney∣field which Chaucer's Knight's Tale had helped to make popular. Only in the case of the poem now printed are other copies unknown; but of this poem the French original exists, and was published by Wright in his Camden Society edition (1841) of the Latin poems attributed to Walter Mapes, pp. 310 ff. Wright used a manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, then marked Bibl. du Roi 7388, and it is to be noted by the student who may make a comparison of the French and the English that the French text was disordered in leaf∣arrangement. It was written in sixes, six stanzas to the leaf, but in the first two gatherings the second and third sheets were transposed by the binder. The French stanzas should be numbered 1-6, 13-18, 7-12, 25-30, 19-24, 31-42, 49-54, 43-48, 61-66, 55-60, 67 etc. A copy of the French text correctly arranged may be found in Le Jardin de Plaisance, printed about 1501 and just reproduced in facsimile by the Société des anciens textes français.

A print of the Eye and the Heart was made by Wynken de Worde, and is described in Dibdin's Typographical Anti∣quities II: 331, with citation of the first stanza; its colophon terms the poem "a lytell treatyse called the dysputacyon or the complaynte of the herte through perced with the lokynge of the eye." No date. See Warton-Hazlitt III: 167.

The dependence of the heart upon the eye, and the per∣sonification of one or both, were fairly frequent devices of medieval allegory; Neilson in his monograph on the Court of Love mentions several examples. Thus in the Roman de la Rose the God of Love sends his arrows through the heart and also through the eye; in Huon de Mery's thirteenth century Tornoiement d'Antéchrist the poet is wounded by Venus and demands justice, but the blame is laid on his eyes, the warders of his soul; in Froissart's Paradys d'Amour Cupid is said to shoot his arrows through the eyes into the heart; René d'Anjou, in his Livre du Cuer, represents the Heart as a wandering knight, while in the Jagd of Hadamar von Laber the Heart is a hound leading on the lover. Another German work, the Red von Hertzen und von Leib, includes an argument of Heart and Body before Venus; and in La Fontaine's Différend de Beaux Yeux et de Belle Bouche the judge decides for the Mouth as the more valuable servant of Love.

Earlier than any of these, earlier than Gower's allusion (Confessio Amantis VI: 827-29) to the eye as the "lusti coc" of the heart's "fode delicat", is the brief Latin poem attributed to Walter Map and printed by Wright in the volume above cited, p. 93, as the Disputatio inter Cor et Oculum.

The far longer English poem which I print below presents the admixture of motives usual in Court of Love poems. The chase, the dream, the "strife", the tourney, the pleading before Venus, are all here, and all have their parallels in other medieval works. We may for instance compare Gower's Con∣fessio Amantis V: 7400 ff. with the opening of this poem.