XIX. How the Lady Poverty sorrowed over certain Religious who were poor in the World, and yet more prone than others to Self-indulgence in Religion 99 XX. How the Lady Poverty showed the Blessed Francis the Perfect Walk in the Religious Life 107 XXI. How the Blessed Francis made answer to the Lady Poverty 114 XXII. How the Lady Poverty gave her consent 118 XXIII. How the Blessed Francis thanked God for the consent of the Lady Poverty 119 XXIV. Of the Sojourn of My Lady Poverty with the Brothers 121 XXV. How My Lady Poverty blessed the Brothers, exhorting them to persevere in the Grace which they had received 130 On the Spiritual Significance of Evangelical Poverty, by Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C 141 APPENDICES-- I. A Prayer of the Blessed Francis to obtain Holy Poverty 183 II. Paradiso. Canto XI. (lines 28-123) 200 INTRODUCTION EDITIONS The “Sacrum Commercium” is an Allegory, simple in form and charming in conception, telling how St Francis wooed and won that most difficult of all Brides, my Lady Poverty. It was written some time in the thirteenth century (most probably in the year 1227) by an unknown Franciscan, and has been six times printed, thrice in Latin, and thrice in Italian. {The Latin Editions.} The first Latin edition was printed at Milan in 1539. It is of exceeding rarity, and has escaped the vigilance of Brunet and Græsse. Père François Van Ortroy, the noted Bollandist (whom few things escape), was the first to call attention to a copy in the Ambrosian Library, and it is the only copy known to exist. (See “Analecta Bollandiana,” xix. 460.) The second Latin edition was published nearly 400 years later, in 1894, under the editorship of Professor Edoardo Alvisi, in the “Collezione di Opuscoli Danteschi inediti o rari diretta da G. L. Passerini.”[1] Professor Alvisi’s edition has no pretensions to being critical: his sole object in publishing it was to supply an illustration to part of Canto XI. of the “Paradiso.” This edition has, perhaps justly, been decried for its entire want of critical apparatus, but it at least served to call attention to a gem that had hitherto slumbered uncared-for in parchment Codexes.