MARY, an Anglo-Norman Poetefs.- 49

amongft the fables of Mary, and particularly the Lay of the Bird, the Fabliaux of the mowed- meadow, of the woman who drowned her- felf, &c. To prove his point he fhoukl have informed us who were the real authors of thefe {lories, and, not having done this, his mere aflertion is not entitled to much attention. As they are found, however, in the Englifh MSS. before cited, it muft be argued againft every appearance of probability, that the French and Erig- lifh tranfcribers have entered into a combination to alter, or rather increafe the number of the fables ; but as we find a perfect corre- fpondence in this refpecl: in the copies of both nations, we are bound to regard the arguments of Monfieur le Grand as abfolutely chi- merical. Let me be permitted to afk, fmce when has the infertion of 'fabliaux, or little {lories in a collection of fables, amounted to a proof of interpolation in the MS ? We muft, in this cafe, consider all the fables of ^Efop and of Phaedrus as having been altered, and throw afide, as foreign to thefe authors, every piece of the kind w r hich at prefent contributes to the pleafure of their readers, with which they have themfelves embellifhed their works, and which no one has hitherto imagined to have been falfely afcribed to them. Let us reject fuch a rule of criticilm, as falfe as it is novel, and let us believe that Mary tranflated the. fabliaux which we find amongft her fables, as well as the fables themfelves. She had found both in her Englifh model; and equally decorated them with the charms of the poetry of the time me lived in. But Monfieur le Grand does not believe in the collection of Englim fables ; he affirms pofitively, that this was no more than a fort of literary quackery, very much praclifed at that time, of art* nouncing a work as translated from the Latin or the Englifh [s]. With refpecT: to the firft of thefe languages, I muft admit that [z] Fabliaux, Vol. IV. p. 329. VOL. XIII. H all