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To a certain degree these Latin poems of the 'Clerici vagantes' of the twelfth century, with all their remarkable frivolity, are, doubtless, a product in which the whole of Europe had a share; but the writer of the song 'De Phyllide et Flora' and the 'Aestuans Interius' can have been a northerner as little as the polished Epicurean observer to whom we owe 'Dum Diana vitrea sero lampas oritur. Here, in truth, is a reproduction of the whole ancient view of life, which is all the more striking from the medieval form of the verse in which it is set forth.
I see misery as near beyond two thousand crowns a year as if it stood close by me; for besides that it is in the power of chance to make a hundred breaches to poverty through the greatest strength of our riches there being very often no mean betwixt the highest and the lowest fortune: "Fortuna vitrea est: turn, quum splendet, frangitur," Ex Mim.
You know, I dare say, that Glastonbury is supposed to have its derivation from British "Ynyswytryn," "Inis vitrea," the "Island of Glass," because the water surrounding it was blue and clear as crystal. So many golden apples grew in the island orchards, that it became also the Isle of Avalon, from "Avalla" an apple.
Does she not go in broad daylight, with her shameless train, clad in a tunica vitrea or ventus textilis? Does she not allow herself to be painted as Venus vulgivava? And is there an orgy, a bacchanalian festival, in which she does not play the loathsome part of queen?
The messengers rushed in immediately after to claim the saint's intervention. Broichan had been suddenly stricken by an angel sent for the purpose; and as if he had been taking his dram in a modern gin-palace, we are told that the drinking-glass, or glass drinking-vessel, "vitrea bibera," which he was conveying to his lips, was smashed in pieces, and he himself seized with deadly sickness.
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