"If a woman be delivered of a man childe, she layes his first meate upon her husband's sworde, and putting it softly to his prettie mouth gives him the first hansel of his sworde upon the very point of the weapon, praying (according to the manner of their country) that he may not otherwise come to his death, than in Battel and among weapons."-- 'The Excellent and Pleasant Worke of Julius Solinus Polyhistor. Translated out of Latin into English by Arthur Golding, Gent.' At London, 1587. p. 105. The last name in the list of authorities on the subject of St. Patrick's Purgatory is "Mensignano," with the reference in the margin of Montalvan's 'Vida y Purgatorio' to his 'Florilegium'. This of course is Messingham, out of whose book, aided by his own wild imagination, Perez de Montalvan created the character of Luis Enius, who is presented to us with such dramatic power by Calderon. Notwithstanding the length of these notes, the following summary, taken with some corrections from the Introduction to the former translation of this drama (1853), may still be useful:-- The curious history of Luis Enius, on which the principal interest of the play depends, has been alluded to, and given more or less fully by many ancient authors. The name, though slightly altered by the different persons who have mentioned him, can easily be recognised as the same in all, whether as Owen, Oien, Owain, Egan, Euenius, or Enius. Perhaps the earliest allusion to him in any printed English work is that contained in Ranulph Higden's "Polychronicon," published at Westminster, by Wynkin de Worde, in 1495: "In this Steven's tyme, a knyght that hyght Owen wente in to the Purgatory of the second Patrick, abbot, and not byshoppe. He came agayne and dwelled in the abbaye of Ludene of Whyte Monks in Irlonde, and tolde of joye and of paynes that he had seen." The history of Enius had, however, existed in MS. for nearly three centuries and a half before the Polychronicon was printed; it had been written by Henry, the monk of Saltrey in Huntingdonshire, from the account which he had received from Gilbert, a Cistercian monk of the Abbey of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Luden, or Louth, in Lincolnshire (Colgan, 'Trias Thaumaturgae', p. 281. Ware's 'Annals of Ireland', A.D. 1497). Colgan, after collating this MS. with two others on the same subject which he had seen, printed it nearly in full in his 'Trias', which was published at Louvain, A.D. 1647, where with the notes it fills from the 273rd to the 281st page. Messingham, as we have seen, had printed it earlier from other sources, in 1624. Matthew Paris, however, had before this, in his History of England, under the date 1153, given a full account of the adventures of Oenus in the Purgatory, and in the few places that I have compared his account with that given in Colgan, I find both generally agreeing in substance, though not in words. In the folio edition of Mathew Paris, London, 1604, the history of Oenus begins at