ALBERT S. COOK, EDITOR XXXVI THE COMPLAINT OF NATURE BY ALAIN DE LILLE TRANSLATED FROM THE LATIN BY DOUGLAS M. MOFFAT HC NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1908 PREFACE The connection of the De Planctu Naturæ with Chaucer's Parlement of Foules and with the Roman de la Rose, the increasing frequency of references to it in works of scholarship, and its inaccessibility save in its peculiar Latin, have furnished the reasons for this translation. The importance of Alain's work lies wholly in what it prompted; by itself it would have long since been justly forgotten. The theologian whose great stores of recondite learning made him the 'Doctor Universalis' of his day, the 'Alain who was very sage,' the 'Doctor SS. Theologiæ Famosus,' is now known chiefly because of two lines in the blithe and famous poet of early England. He is distinctly of that number to whom the interests of scholarship alone give any present life. Still, in the eye of scholarship his importance is not inconsiderable. Not only the great interest attending everything which has to do with Chaucer, with the sources from which he drew, and with the very hints which he throws out so lightly, but also the extensive influence which the De Planctu Naturæ exerted on Jean de Meun's part of the Roman de la Rose, give him a position which all investigators in these fields of literature must recognize. The statement of Langlois that 'more than five thousand verses of the Roman de la Rose are translated, imitated, or inspired by the De Planctu Nature' is excellent authority that this mysterious scholar of the Middle Ages, whose very identity is unascertained, was of those who beget kings in literature, though he himself were none. It is difficult to render the Latin of Alain into a translation which shall be at once accurate and yet not too much at variance with the fundamental a |