“Let this judgment, which we have given with extreme care, and after taking counsel of a large number of ladies, be to you a constant and irrefragable truth. Thus determined in the year 1174, the third day before the kalends of May.” _Question._ Do the greater affection and livelier attachment exist between lovers or married people? [It having been already decided, let us remember, that married people could not love one another.] _Judgment_, by Ermengarde, Viscountess of Narbonne: “The attachment of married people and the tender affection of lovers are sentiments of a nature and custom altogether different. There can consequently be no just comparison established between objects which have no resemblance or connection the one with the other.” _Question._ A lady attached to a gentleman in an honorable love marries another. Has she the right to repel her former lover and refuse him his accustomed favours? _Judgment_, by Ermengarde, Viscountess of Narbonne: “The supervenience of the marriage bond does not bar the right of the prior attachment, unless the lady utterly renounces love, and declares that she does so for ever.” The _Gesta Romanorum_, one of the most important collections of moral tales, was put together during the thirteenth century by a learned Frenchman named Pierre Bercheure, who was a Benedictine Prior. He chose to lay the scenes of the stories in Rome, though this was not historically true. Gesta means merely acts or exploits, and many of the tales are descended from Oriental Folk Lore. Not all students of ancient literature agree as to the authorship of the Gesta as it appears in its present form, but the consensus of opinion seems to point to the aforesaid Frenchman. However, the collector’s name matters little; the work itself, while it harks back to the Fables of Æsop and Pilpay and to the _Talmud_, is of interest as a veritable storehouse of Mediæval stories. Each of these has its religious application, but it is easy to think that the readers were oftener intrigued by the story than by the appended moral. _OF SLOTH_