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As it had given to the world so many illustrious sons, it desired, no doubt, that its actual scions, the Caballucos, Merengues, and Pelosmalos, should renew the glorious Gesta of their predecessors. Whenever there was disaffection in Spain, Orbajosa gave proof that it was not in vain that it existed on the face of the earth, although it is true that it was never the theatre of a real war.
The romance of Apollonius, in the Gesta, furnished the plot of two or three of Chaucer's tales, and of Gower's most celebrated poem, which again gave the ground-work of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The Merchant of Venice, the Three Black Crows, and Parnell's Hermit, are indebted also to the Gesta Romanorum.
We are the American France! We are all ready. We are the people of God. In the words of a brother: 'This blood was set in America in the midst of a material world, like France in Europe, to regenerate these peoples and perpetuate the reign of ideals. God has willed it: 'GESTA DEI PER FRANCOS!"
The words "gehwart" and "gichwart" being no doubt blunders of an illiterate artist. In Modern German the lines would be: Darin Frieden gewarte Therein peace await, or look for. Gewarte darin Frieden Await, or look for, therein peace. In allusion, perhaps, to the eucharist of alms, to hold one or the other of which the dish seems to have been intended. þ. MS. of English Gesta Romanorum.
Dion Cassius. See the 2nd Philippic, passim. In a letter to Decimus Brutus, he says: "Quare hortatione tu quidem non egos, si ne illa quidem in re, quae a te gesta est post hominum memoriam maxima, hortatorem desiderasti." Ad Fam. xi. 5. To Atticus, xi. 5, 6. Ad Caelium, Ad Fam. ii. 16. To Atticus, xi. 7. See To Atticus, xi. 7-9; To Terentia, Ad Fam. xiv. 12.
As the title of Gesta Populi Romani was given to the Aeneid on its appearance, so the Historiae ab Urbe Condita might be called, with no less truth, a funeral eulogy consummatio totius vitae et quasi funebris laudatio delivered, by the most loving and most eloquent of her children, over the grave of the great Republic.
In such a narrative, the first event is the direct cause of the second, the second of the third, the third of the fourth, and so on to the culmination of the series. This very simple structure is exhibited in many of the tales which have come down to us from early centuries. It is frequently employed in the "Gesta Romanorum," and scarcely less frequently in the "Decameron" of Boccaccio.
I must have told the boys stories out of my Goldsmith's Greece and Rome, or it would not have been known that I had read them, but I have no recollection now of doing so, while I distinctly remember rehearsing the allegories and fables of the 'Gesta Romanorum', a book which seems to have been in my hands about the same time or a little later.
The conception of love as a civilizing and humanizing power already underlay the sensuous stanzas of the Ninfale fiesolano, while the later part of the romance was not uninfluenced by recollections of the Divine Comedy . It is true that a modern mind will with difficulty be able to reconcile the amorous confessions of the nymphs with the characteristics of the virtues, but in Boccaccio's day the tradition of the Gesta Romanorum was still strong, and the age that mysticized Vergil, and moralized Ovid, was capable of much in the way of allegorical interpretation .
Freeman, Norman Conquest, Vol. V, App. DD., is right in calling attention to the fact but wrong in the use he makes of it. Gesta Stephani, 14. Ibid., 7. The year 1138, which began with the siege of Bedford castle, has to be reckoned as belonging to the time when Stephen's power was still to all appearance unshaken.
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