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INTRODUCTION.
shore after three days. Here was an obvious symbol of Christ's resurrection. John Waleys, an English Franciscan of the thirteenth century, in his moral exposition of Ovid's Metamorphoses[1], affords many other instances equally ridiculous; and who forgot that he was describing a more heterogeneous chaos, than that which makes so conspicuous a figure in his author's exordium, and which combines, amid the monstrous and indigested aggregate of its unnatural associations,
Sine pondere habentia pondus.
"At length, compositions professedly allegorical, with which that age abounded, were resolved into allegories for which they were never intended. In the famous Romaunt of the Rose, written about the year 1310,
- ↑ Mit. L. i. 20.
