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THE "Speculum Perfectionis", as a separate work, was first published by M. Paul Sabatier in 1898. A translation of it into English by Dr. Sebastian Evans appeared in the November of the same year. " I am not unmindful", says Lady De La Warr in her prefatory note to the present translation, "of the fact that another translation exists, but in that work the mediaeval Latin is reproduced in mediaeval English more suited to the scholar than to the general reader". It would be impossible to claim a hearing in more graceful or charitable terms, for truth to tell it is the scholar rather than the general reader who is likely to lose patience under the stilted archaisms of the first translation. Thirteenth-century Latin is made no more real to us by adopting English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: to talk of "adread", and "uneath", and "natheless", and " enow " in rendering the language of thirteenth-century Italians who wrote in Latin does not enlighten and can only befog those whom it does not irritate. Lady De La Warr has done her translation well, into good, straightforward, unaffected English, catching at times with very happy turns the homespun simplicity of the original. It is the only method: simple medieeval Latin is best rendered by simple English, dignified if you will, but peculiar to no century, and from this point of. view the present translator has done her task faithfully and at times admirably. And Franciscan scholars, too, will note with pleasure 'the' moderation of the title-page. The "Mirror of Perfection" is now only "ascribed" to "Brother Leo of Assisi"; Dr. Evans. following M. Sabatier, roundly states that it was "written" by "Brother Leo of Assisi" be fully agrees with the French writer in regarding the whole book as having been completed within seven months of the death of S. Francis. The view has been very generally accepted in England, presumably owing to the influence of Dr. Evans' translation, and" the present work should have the desirable result of at" least suggesting the possibility of another view. In an all too brief preface Father Cuthbert' admits that. the book certainly bears "the impress of various hands ", and he calls attention to the fact that "the majority of critics hold that it is of a later date". (He is in error in stating that M. Sabatier "claims. that it was written in the year 1228, two years after S. Francis' death": the claim of the French critic is far more precise, namely that it was completed on 11 May 1227, about seven months after the Saint's death.) But the book would have been all the more valuable for a few notes : as it is even its most obvious errors are left standing without comment. For instance S. Francis is said, by the slip of a scribe or the error of a late writer, to have died at forty years of age instead of forty-four. So, too, the year of his death is given as 1227, but we should have been told that that is according to the Pisan calculation, and that 1226 is the date according to our calendar. --The Saturday Review, Vol.95

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