Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 1.djvu/25

book in the earlier ages of printing, and this popularity continued down to the seventeenth century. Then, for a long period, the Gesta Romanorum was regarded as a curious and interesting old book, but which you only saw by accident, or met with in the libraries of collectors of old books, and in the last century and earlier part of the present it was read only by those who took an interest in our older literature, or who sought illustrations of our old poetry. In the latter half of the last century, the attention of scholars was indeed drawn anew to these curious tales by the appearance of Warton's History of English Poetry, in which he gave an excellent and very learned "Dissertation on the Gesta Romanorum;" but it was not until the year 1824, that a member of the university of Cambridge, a scholar of Catherine Hall, whose taste had led him to the study of our early English literature, sought to