The next poem in the collection is called “The Life of our Lady, Saint Mary of Egypt,”--a saint formerly much more famous than she is now, and one whose history is so coarse and indecent, that it has often been rejected by the wiser members of the church that canonized her. Such as it appears in the old traditions, however, with all its sins upon its head, it is here set forth. But we notice at once a considerable difference between the composition of its verse and that of any Castilian poetry assigned to the same or an earlier period. It is written in short lines, generally of eight syllables, and in couplets; but sometimes a single line carelessly runs out to the number of ten or eleven syllables; and, in a few instances, three or even four lines are included in one rhyme. It has a light air, quite unlike the stateliness of the Poem of the Cid, and seems, from its verse and tone, as well as from a few French words scattered through it, to have been borrowed from some of the earlier French Fabliaux, or, at any rate, to have been written in imitation of their easy and garrulous style. It opens thus, showing that it was intended for recitation:-- Listen, ye lordlings, listen to me, For true is my tale, as true can be; And listen in heart, that so ye may Have pardon, when humbly to God ye pray. It consists of fourteen hundred such meagre, monkish verses, and is hardly of importance, except as a monument of the language at the period when it was written.[26] [26] St. Mary of Egypt was a saint of great repute in Spain and Portugal, and had her adventures written by Pedro de Ribadeneyra in 1609, and Diogo Vas Carrillo in 1673; they were also fully given in the “Flos Sanctorum” of the former, and, in a more attractive form, by Bartolomé Cayrasco de Figueroa, at the end of his “Templo Militante,” (Valladolid, 1602, 12mo,) where they fill about 130 flowing octave stanzas, and by Montalvan, in the drama of “La Gitana de Menfis.” She has, too, a church dedicated to her at Rome on the bank of the Tiber, made out of the graceful ruins of the temple of Fortuna Virilis. But her coarse history has often been rejected as apocryphal, or at least as unfit to be repeated. Bayle, Dictionaire Historique et Critique, Amsterdam, 1740, fol., Tom. III. pp. 334-336. The last of the three poems is in the same irregular measure and manner. It is called “The Adoration of the Three Holy Kings,” and begins with the old tradition about the wise men that came from the East; but its chief subject is an arrest of the Holy Family, during their flight to Egypt, by robbers, the child of one of whom is cured of a hideous leprosy by being bathed in water previously used for bathing the Saviour; this same child afterwards turning out to be the penitent thief of the crucifixion. It is a rhymed legend of only two hundred and fifty lines, and belongs to the large class of such compositions that were long popular in Western Europe.[27]