Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 1.djvu/15

ferent forms, and, after the introduction of a written literature, they were thus written in books. Latin was the common book-language of the Middle Ages, and we find these tales in a Latin dress, scattered through the manuscripts, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups, from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. I have brought together a rather large selection from these manuscripts in a volume of Latin Stories printed for the Percy Society in 1842, from which their character will be fully understood. But the collections of these stories took sometimes very peculiar forms, which appear to have originated among the Orientals, and are found at a very early period among the literature of the Hindoos. The plan of these collections was to unite them in a regular plot, in which one or more of the personages are made to carry out their parts by telling stories. One of the earliest of these is said by the Sanscrit philologists