_Patience_ is the story of Jonah told by an original artist. Jonah is here painted in English colours. He is the Jonah not of a tragic-hearted Hebrew but of a familiar Lancashire man who wrote in a Lancashire dialect at the time of Chaucer. Tertullian had written a Latin poem on the same theme, and Mr. Bateson gives us the text of this in an appendix, suggesting, as other scholars have done, that it is one of the sources of _Patience_. The Jonah of Tertullian, however, is a formal figure compared to the Jonah of the Englishman. Jonah in the old Lancashire poem is a lithe and live fellow from the moment at which he steps aboard the ship to make his escape from the perilous will of God. Was neuer so joyful a Jue as Jonas was thenne, we are told in a lively line at this point of the narrative. The storm that follows is described with such a sense of reality that it has been suggested that the poet himself must have experienced some such tempest when making a pilgrimage to Compostella, “the favourite journey of Englishmen at the time,” and a journey of the ancient popularity of which we are still reminded in the streets of London once a year when children set up their grottoes on the footpaths as an excuse for begging pennies. Mr. Bateson attempts to bring home to us the desperate circumstances of seafaring in the Middle Ages by quoting the statement that “John of Gaunt, on one occasion, was tossing about in the Channel for nine months, unable to land at Calais.” I confess I cannot believe the story in this form, and we need no such incredible example to enable us to realise the terrors of the storm that swept down on Jonah, when the frightened sailors attempted to lighten the ship by throwing overboard Her bagges, and her feather-beddes, and her bryght wedes. The introduction of the feather-beds into the narrative would alone be a sufficient reason for welcoming the Lancashire version of the Jonah story. The description of the panic-stricken sailors “glewing,” or calling, on their very various gods (who included Fernagu, a French giant) is another addition that pleases by its strangeness: Bot vchon glewed on his god thet gayned hym beste; Summe to Vernagu ther vouched avowes solemne, Summe to Diana deuout, and derf Nepturne, To Mahoun and to Mergot, the Mone and the Sunne. Both in Tertullian and in _Patience_ Jonah is made not only to sleep but to snore while the others pray during the storm. Tertullian puts it: Sternentem inflata resonabat nare soporem. The English poet writes still more vividly that Jonah lay in the bottom of the boat, Slypped vpon a sloumbe-slepe, and sloberande he routes. A “freke,” or man, was sent to rouse him and to prepare him for the casting of lots: The freke hym frunt with his fot, and bede hym ferk up. Then came the casting of the lots: And ay the lote, vpon laste, lymped on Jonas. The sailors immediately began to upbraid Jonah in masculine English: