INTRODUCTION
THE little family of mystical treatises which is known to students as "the
Cloud of Unknowing group," deserves more attention than it has hitherto
received from English lovers of mysticism: for it represents the first
expression in our own tongue of that great mystic tradition of the Christian
Neoplatonists which gathered up, remade, and "salted with Christ's salt" all
that was best in the spiritual wisdom of the ancient world.
That wisdom made its definite entrance into
the Catholic fold about A.D. 500, in the writings of the profound and nameless
mystic who chose to call himself "Dionysius the Areopagite." Three hundred and
fifty years later, those writings were translated into Latin by John
Scotus Erigena, a scholar at the court of Charlemagne, and so became available
to the ecclesiastical world of the West. Another five hundred years elapsed,
during which their influence was felt, and felt strongly, by the mystics of
every European country: by St. Bernard, the Victorines, St. Bonaventura, St.
Thomas Aquinas. Every reader of Dante knows the part which they play in the
Paradiso. Then, about the middle of the 14th century, England--at that
time in the height of her great mystical period--led the way with the first
translation into the vernacular of the Areopagite's work. In Dionise Hid
Divinite, a version of the Mystica Theologia, this spiritual
treasure-house was first made accessible to those outside the professionally
religious class. Surely this is a fact which all lovers of mysticism, all
"spiritual patriots," should be concerned to hold in remembrance.
It is supposed by most scholars that
Dionise Hid Divinite, which--appearing as it did in an epoch of great
spiritual vitality--quickly attained to a considerable circulation, is by the
same hand which wrote the Cloud of Unknowing and its companion books;
and that this hand also produced an English paraphrase of Richard of St.
Victor's Benjamin Minor, another work of much authority on the
contemplative life. Certainly the influence of Richard is only second to that
of Dionysius in this unknown mystic's own work--work, however, which owes as
much to the deep personal experience, and extraordinary psychological gifts of
its writer, as to the tradition that he inherited from the past.
Nothing is known of him; beyond the fact, which
seems clear from his writings, that he was a cloistered monk devoted to the
contemplative life. It has been thought that he was a Carthusian. But the rule
of that austere order, whose members live in hermit-like seclusion,
and scarcely meet except for the purpose of divine worship, can hardly have
afforded him opportunity of observing and enduring all those tiresome tricks
and absurd mannerisms of which he gives so amusing and realistic a description
in the lighter passages of the Cloud. These passages betray the
half-humorous exasperation of the temperamental recluse, nervous, fastidious,
and hypersensitive, loving silence and peace, but compelled to a daily and
hourly companionship with persons of a less contemplative type: some finding in
extravagant and meaningless gestures an outlet for suppressed vitality; others
overflowing with a terrible cheerfulness like "giggling girls and nice japing
jugglers"; others so lacking in repose that they "can neither sit still, stand
still, nor lie still, unless they be either wagging with their feet or else
somewhat doing with their hands." Though he cannot go to the length of
condemning these habits as mortal sins, the author of the Cloud
leaves us in no doubt as to the irritation with which they inspired him, or
the distrust with which he regards the spiritual claims of those who fidget.
The attempt to identify this mysterious writer
with Walter Hilton, the author of The Scale of Perfection, has
completely failed: though Hilton's work--especially the exquisite fragment
called the Song of Angels--certainly betrays his influence. The works
attributed to him, if we exclude the translations from Dionysius and Richard of
St. Victor, are only five in number. They are, first, The Cloud of
Unknowing--the longest and most complete exposition of its author's
peculiar doctrine--and, depending from it, four short tracts or letters: The
Epistle of Prayer, The Epistle of Discretion in the Stirrings of the Soul, The
Epistle of Privy Counsel, and The Treatise of Discerning of Spirits.
Some critics have even disputed the claim of the writer of the Cloud
to the authorship of these little works, regarding them as the
production of a group or school of contemplatives devoted to the study and
practice of the Dionysian mystical theology; but the unity of thought and style
found in them makes this hypothesis at least improbable. Everything points
rather to their being the work of an original mystical genius, of strongly
marked character and great literary ability: who, whilst he took the framework
of his philosophy from Dionysius the Areopagite, and of his psychology from
Richard of St. Victor, yet is in no sense a mere imitator of these masters, but
introduced a genuinely new element into mediaeval religious literature.
What, then, were his special characteristics?
Whence came the fresh colour which he gave to the old Platonic theory of
mystical experience? First, I think, from the combination of high spiritual
gifts with a vivid sense of humour, keen powers of observation, a robust
common-sense: a balance of qualities not indeed rare amongst the
mystics, but here presented to us in an extreme form. In his eager gazing on
divinity this contemplative never loses touch with humanity, never forgets the
sovereign purpose of his writings; which is not a declaration of the spiritual
favours he has received, but a helping of his fellow-men to share them. Next,
he has a great simplicity of outlook, which enables him to present the result
of his highest experiences and intuitions in the most direct and homely
language. So actual, and so much a part of his normal existence, are his
apprehensions of spiritual reality, that he can give them to us in the plain
words of daily life: and thus he is one of the most realistic of mystical
writers. He abounds in vivid little phrases--"Call sin a lump": "Short
prayer pierceth heaven": "Nowhere bodily, is everywhere ghostly": "Who that
will not go the strait way to heaven, . . . shall go the soft way to
hell." His range of experience is a wide one. He does not disdain to take a
hint from the wizards and necromancers on the right way to treat the devil; he
draws his illustrations of divine mercy from the homeliest incidents of
friendship and parental love. A skilled theologian, quoting St. Augustine and
Thomas Aquinas, and using with ease the language of scholasticism, he is able,
on the other hand, to express the deepest speculations of mystical philosophy
without resorting to academic terminology: as for instance where he describes
the spiritual heaven as a "state" rather than a "place":
"For heaven ghostly is as nigh down as up, and up
as down: behind as before, before as behind, on one side as other. Insomuch,
that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then that same time he were
in heaven ghostly. For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and
not by paces of feet."
His writings, though they touch on many subjects,
are chiefly concerned with the art of contemplative prayer; that "blind intent
stretching to God" which, if it be wholly set on Him, cannot fail to reach its
goal. A peculiar talent for the description and discrimination of spiritual
states has enabled him to discern and set before us, with astonishing precision
and vividness, not only the strange sensations, the confusion and bewilderment
of the beginner in the early stages of contemplation--the struggle with
distracting thoughts, the silence, the dark--and the unfortunate state of those
theoretical mystics who, "swollen with pride and with curiosity of much clergy
and letterly cunning as in clerks," miss that treasure which is "never got by
study but all only by grace"; but also the happiness of those whose "sharp dart
of longing love" has not "failed of the prick, the which is God."
A great simplicity characterises his
doctrine of the soul's attainment of the Absolute. For him there is but one
central necessity: the perfect and passionate setting of the will upon the
Divine, so that it is "thy love and thy meaning, the choice and point of thine
heart." Not by deliberate ascetic practices, not by refusal of the world, not
by intellectual striving, but by actively loving and choosing, by that which a
modern psychologist has called "the synthesis of love and will" does the spirit
of man achieve its goal. "For silence is not God," he says in the Epistle of
Discretion, "nor speaking is not God; fasting is not God, nor eating is not
God; loneliness is not God, nor company is not God; nor yet any of all the
other two such contraries. He is hid between them, and may not be found by any
work of thy soul, but all only by love of thine heart. He may not be known by
reason, He may not be gotten by thought, nor concluded by understanding; but He
may be loved and chosen with the true lovely will of thine heart. . .
. Such a blind shot with the sharp dart of longing love may never fail of the
prick, the which is God."
To him who has so loved and chosen, and "in a
true will and by an whole intent does purpose him to be a perfect follower of
Christ, not only in active living, but in the sovereignest point of
contemplative living, the which is possible by grace for to be come to in this
present life," these writings are addressed. In the prologue of the Cloud of
Unknowing we find the warning, so often prefixed to mediaeval mystical
works, that it shall on no account be lent, given, or read to other men: who
could not understand, and might misunderstand in a dangerous sense, its
peculiar message. Nor was this warning a mere expression of literary vanity. If
we may judge by the examples of possible misunderstanding against which he is
careful to guard himself, the almost tiresome reminders that all his remarks
are "ghostly, not bodily meant," the standard of intelligence which
the author expected from his readers was not a high one. He even fears that
some "young presumptuous ghostly disciples" may understand the injunction to
"lift up the heart" in a merely physical manner; and either "stare in the stars
as if they would be above the moon," or "travail their fleshly hearts
outrageously in their breasts" in the effort to make literal "ascensions" to
God. Eccentricities of this kind he finds not only foolish but dangerous; they
outrage nature, destroy sanity and health, and "hurt full sore the silly soul,
and make it fester in fantasy feigned of fiends." He observes with a touch of
arrogance that his book is not intended for these undisciplined seekers after
the abnormal and the marvellous, nor yet for "fleshly janglers, flatterers and
blamers, . . . nor none of these curious, lettered, nor unlearned men." It is
to those who feel themselves called to the true prayer of
contemplation, to the search for God, whether in the cloister or the
world--whose "little secret love" is at once the energizing cause of all
action, and the hidden sweet savour of life--that he addresses himself. These
he instructs in that simple yet difficult art of recollection, the necessary
preliminary of any true communion with the spiritual order, in which all
sensual images, all memories and thoughts, are as he says, "trodden down under
the cloud of forgetting" until "nothing lives in the working mind but a naked
intent stretching to God." This "intent stretching"--this loving and vigorous
determination of the will--he regards as the central fact of the mystical life;
the very heart of effective prayer. Only by its exercise can the spirit, freed
from the distractions of memory and sense, focus itself upon Reality and ascend
with "a privy love pressed" to that "Cloud of Unknowing"--the Divine Ignorance
of the Neoplatonists--wherein is "knit up the ghostly knot of burning
love betwixt thee and thy God, in ghostly onehead and according of will."
There is in this doctrine something which should
be peculiarly congenial to the activistic tendencies of modern thought. Here is
no taint of quietism, no invitation to a spiritual limpness. From first to last
glad and deliberate work is demanded of the initiate: an all-round wholeness of
experience is insisted on. "A man may not be fully active, but if he be in part
contemplative; nor yet fully contemplative, as it may be here, but if he be in
part active." Over and over again, the emphasis is laid on this active aspect
of all true spirituality--always a favourite theme of the great English
mystics. "Love cannot be lazy," said Richard Rolle. So too for the author of
the Cloud energy is the mark of true affection. "Do forth ever, more and
more, so that thou be ever doing. . . . Do on then fast; let see how
thou bearest thee. Seest thou not how He standeth and abideth thee?"
True, the will alone, however ardent and
industrious, cannot of itself set up communion with the supernal world: this is
"the work of only God, specially wrought in what soul that Him liketh." But man
can and must do his part. First, there are the virtues to be acquired: those
"ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage" with which no mystic can dispense. Since
we can but behold that which we are, his character must be set in order, his
mind and heart made beautiful and pure, before he can look on the triple star
of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, which is God. Every great spiritual teacher has
spoken in the same sense: of the need for that which Rolle calls the "mending
of life"--regeneration, the rebuilding of character--as the preparation of the
contemplative act.
For the author of the Cloud all human
virtue is comprised in the twin qualities of Humility and Charity. He
who has these, has all. Humility, in accordance with the doctrine of Richard of
St. Victor, he identifies with self-knowledge; the terrible vision of the soul
as it is, which induces first self-abasement and then self-purification--the
beginning of all spiritual growth, and the necessary antecedent of all
knowledge of God. "Therefore swink and sweat in all that thou canst and mayst,
for to get thee a true knowing and a feeling of thyself as thou art; and then I
trow that soon after that, thou shalt have a true knowing and a feeling of God
as He is."
As all man's feeling and thought of himself and
his relation to God is comprehended in Humility, so all his feeling and thought
of God in Himself is comprehended in Charity; the self-giving love of Divine
Perfection "in Himself and for Himself" which Hilton calls "the sovereign and
the essential joy." Together these two virtues should embrace the sum of his
responses to the Universe; they should govern his attitude to man as
well as his attitude to God. "Charity is nought else . . . but love of God for
Himself above all creatures, and of man for God even as thyself."
Charity and Humility, then, together with the
ardent and industrious will, are the necessary possessions of each soul set
upon this adventure. Their presence it is which marks out the true from the
false mystic: and it would seem, from the detailed, vivid, and often amusing
descriptions of the sanctimonious, the hypocritical, the self-sufficient, and
the self-deceived in their "diverse and wonderful variations," that such a test
was as greatly needed in the "Ages of Faith" as it is at the present day. Sham
spirituality flourished in the mediaeval cloister, and offered a constant
opportunity of error to those young enthusiasts who were not yet aware that the
true freedom of eternity "cometh not with observation." Affectations of
sanctity, pretense to rare mystical experiences, were a favourite
means of advertisement. Psychic phenomena, too, seem to have been common:
ecstasies, visions, voices, the scent of strange perfumes, the hearing of sweet
sounds. For these supposed indications of Divine favour, the author of the
Cloud has no more respect than the modern psychologist: and here, of
course, he is in agreement with all the greatest writers on mysticism, who are
unanimous in their dislike and distrust of all visionary and auditive
experience. Such things, he considers, are most often hallucination: and, where
they are not, should be regarded as the accidents rather than the substance of
the contemplative life--the harsh rind of sense, which covers the sweet nut of
"pure ghostliness." Were we truly spiritual, we should not need them; for our
communion with Reality would then be the direct and ineffable intercourse of
like with like.
Moreover, these automatism are amongst the most
dangerous instruments of self-deception. "Ofttimes," he says of those who
deliberately seek for revelations, "the devil feigneth quaint sounds in their
ears, quaint lights and shining in their eyes, and wonderful smells in their
noses: and all is but falsehood." Hence it often happens to those who give
themselves up to such experiences, that "fast after such a false feeling,
cometh a false knowing in the Fiend's school: . . . for I tell thee truly, that
the devil hath his contemplatives, as God hath His." Real spiritual
illumination, he thinks, seldom comes by way of these psycho-sensual automatism
"into the body by the windows of our wits." It springs up within the soul in
"abundance of ghostly gladness." With so great an authority it comes, bringing
with it such wonder and such love, that "he that feeleth it may not have it
suspect." But all other abnormal experiences--"comforts, sounds and
gladness, and sweetness, that come from without suddenly"--should be set aside,
as more often resulting in frenzies and feebleness of spirit than in genuine
increase of "ghostly strength."
This healthy and manly view of the mystical life,
as a growth towards God, a right employment of the will, rather than a short
cut to hidden knowledge or supersensual experience, is one of the strongest
characteristics of the writer of the Cloud; and constitutes perhaps his
greatest claim on our respect. "Mean only God," he says again and again; "Press
upon Him with longing love"; "A good will is the substance of all
perfection." To those who have this good will, he offers his teaching: pointing
out the dangers in their way, the errors of mood and of conduct into which they
may fall. They are to set about this spiritual work not only with energy, but
with courtesy: not "snatching as it were a greedy greyhound" at
spiritual satisfactions, but gently and joyously pressing towards Him
Whom Julian of Norwich called "our most courteous Lord." A glad spirit of
dalliance is more becoming to them than the grim determination of the
fanatic.
"Shall I, a gnat
which dances in Thy ray,
Dare to be reverent."
Further, he
communicates to them certain "ghostly devices" by which they may overcome the
inevitable difficulties encountered by beginners in contemplation: the
distracting thoughts and memories which torment the self that is struggling to
focus all its attention upon the spiritual sphere. The stern repression of such
thoughts, however spiritual, he knows to be essential to success: even sin,
once it is repented of, must be forgotten in order that Perfect Goodness may be
known. The "little word God," and "the little word Love," are the only ideas
which may dwell in the contemplative's mind. Anything else splits his
attention, and soon proceeds by mental association to lead him
further and further from the consideration of that supersensual Reality which
he seeks.
The primal need of the purified soul, then, is
the power of Concentration. His whole being must be set towards the Object of
his craving if he is to attain to it: "Look that nothing live in thy
working mind, but a naked intent stretching into God." Any thought of Him is
inadequate, and for that reason defeats its own end--a doctrine, of course,
directly traceable to the "Mystical Theology" of Dionysius the Areopagite. "Of
God Himself can no man think," says the writer of the Cloud, "And
therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to my love
that thing that I cannot think. "The universes which are amenable to the
intellect can never satisfy the instincts of the heart.
Further, there is to be no wilful choosing of
method: no fussy activity of the surface-intelligence. The mystic who
seeks the divine Cloud of Unknowing is to be surrendered to the direction of
his deeper mind, his transcendental consciousness: that "spark of the soul"
which is in touch with eternal realities. "Meddle thou not therewith, as thou
wouldest help it, for dread lest thou spill all. Be thou but the tree, and let
it be the wright: be thou but the house, and let it be the husbandman dwelling
therein."
In the Epistle of Privy Counsel there is a
passage which expresses with singular completeness the author's theory of this
contemplative art--this silent yet ardent encounter of the soul with God.
Prayer, said Mechthild of Magdeburg, brings together two lovers, God and the
soul, in a narrow room where they speak much of love: and here the rules which
govern that meeting are laid down by a master's hand. "When thou comest by
thyself," he says, "think not before what thou shalt do after, but forsake as
well good thoughts as evil thoughts, and pray not with thy mouth but
list thee right well. And then if thou aught shalt say, look not how much nor
how little that it be, nor weigh not what it is nor what it bemeaneth . . . and
look that nothing live in thy working mind but a naked intent stretching into
God, not clothed in any special thought of God in Himself. . . . This naked
intent freely fastened and grounded in very belief shall be nought else to thy
thought and to thy feeling but a naked thought and a blind feeling of thine own
being: as if thou saidest thus unto God, within in thy meaning, `That what I
am, Lord, I offer unto Thee, without any looking to any quality of Thy Being,
but only that Thou art as Thou art, without any more.' That meek darkness be
thy mirror, and thy whole remembrance. Think no further of thyself than I bid
thee do of thy God, so that thou be one with Him in spirit, as thus without
departing and scattering, for He is thy being, and in Him thou art that thou
art; not only by cause and by being, but also, He is in thee both thy
cause and thy being. And therefore think on God in this work as thou dost on
thyself, and on thyself as thou dost on God: that He is as He is and thou art
as thou art, and that thy thought be not scattered nor departed, but proved in
Him that is All."
The conception of reality which underlies this
profound and beautiful passage, has much in common with that found in the work
of many other mystics; since it is ultimately derived from the great
Neoplatonic philosophy of the contemplative life. But the writer invests it, I
think, with a deeper and wider meaning than it is made to bear in the writings
even of Ruysbroeck, St. Teresa, or St. John of the Cross. "For He is thy being,
and in Him thou art that thou art; not only by cause and by being, but also, He
is in thee both thy cause and thy being." It was a deep thinker as well as a
great lover who wrote this: one who joined hands with the
philosophers, as well as with the saints.
"That meek darkness be thy mirror." What is this
darkness? It is the "night of the intellect" into which we are plunged when we
attain to a state of consciousness which is above thought; enter on a plane of
spiritual experience with which the intellect cannot deal. This is the "Divine
Darkness"--the Cloud of Unknowing, or of Ignorance, "dark with excess of
light"--preached by Dionysius the Areopagite, and eagerly accepted by his
English interpreter. "When I say darkness, I mean a lacking of knowing . . .
and for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of
unknowing that is betwixt thee and thy God." It is "a dark mist," he says
again, "which seemeth to be between thee and the light thou aspirest to." This
dimness and lostness of mind is a paradoxical proof of attainment. Reason is in
the dark, because love has entered "the mysterious radiance of the
Divine Dark, the inaccessible light wherein the Lord is said to dwell, and to
which thought with all its struggles cannot attain."
"Lovers," said Patmore, "put out the candles and
draw the curtains, when they wish to see the god and the goddess; and, in the
higher communion, the night of thought is the light of perception." These
statements cannot be explained: they can only be proved in the experience of me
individual soul. "Whoso deserves to see and know God rests therein," says
Dionysius of that darkness, "and, by the very fact that he neither sees nor
knows, is truly in that which surpasses all truth and all knowledge."
"Then," says the writer of the
Cloud--whispering as it were to the bewildered neophyte the dearest
secret of his love--"then will He sometimes peradventure send out a beam
of ghostly light, piercing this cloud of unknowing that is betwixt thee and
Him; and show thee some of His privity, the which man may not, nor
cannot speak."
*
* * * * * *
Numerous copies of the
Cloud of Unknowing and the other works attributed to its writer are in
existence. Six manuscripts of the Cloud are in the British Museum: four
on vellum (Harl. 674, Harl. 959, Harl. 2373, and Royal 17 C. xxvii.), all of
the 15th century; and two on paper (Royal 17 C. xxvii. of the 16th century, and
Royal 17 D. v. late 15th century). All these agree fairly closely; except for
the facts that Harl. 2373 is incomplete, several pages having disappeared, and
that Harl. 959 gives the substance of the whole work in a slightly shortened
form. The present edition is based upon Harl. 674; which has been transcribed
and collated with Royal 17 C. xxvi., and in the case of specially obscure
passages with Royal 17 C. xxvii., Royal 17 D. v., and Harl. 2373. Obvious
errors and omissions have been corrected, and several obscure
readings elucidated, from these sources.
The Cloud of Unknowing was known, and
read, by English Catholics as late as the middle or end of the 17th century. It
was much used by the celebrated Benedictine ascetic, the Venerable Augustine
Baker (1575-1641), who wrote a long exposition of the doctrine which it
contains. Two manuscripts of this treatise exist in the Benedictine College of
St. Laurence at Ampleforth; together with a transcript of the Cloud of
Unknowing dated 1677. Many references to it will also be found in the
volume called Holy Wisdom, which contains the substances of Augustine
Baker's writings on the inner life. The Cloud has only once been
printed: in 1871, by the Rev. Henry Collins, under the title of The Divine
Cloud, with a preface and notes attributed to Augustine Baker and probably
taken from the treatise mentioned above. This edition is now out of print. The
MS. from which it was made is unknown to us. It differs widely, both
in the matter of additions and of omissions, from all the texts in the British
Museum, and represents a distinctly inferior recension of the work. A mangled
rendering of the sublime Epistle of Privy Counsel is prefixed to it.
Throughout, the pithy sayings of the original are either misquoted, or expanded
into conventional and flavourless sentences. Numerous explanatory phrases for
which our manuscripts give no authority have been incorporated into the text.
All the quaint and humorous turns of speech are omitted or toned down. The
responsibility for these crimes against scholarship cannot now be determined;
but it seems likely that the text from which Father Collins' edition was--in
his own words--"mostly taken" was a 17th-century paraphrase, made rather in the
interests of edification than of accuracy; and that it represents the form in
which the work was known and used by Augustine Baker and his
contemporaries.
The other works attributed to the author of the
Cloud have fared better than this. Dionise Hid Divinite still
remains in MS.: but the Epistle of Prayer, the Epistle of Discretion,
and the Treatise of Discerning of Spirits, together with the
paraphrase of the Benjamin Minor of Richard of St. Victor which is
supposed to be by the same hand, were included by Henry Pepwell, in 1521, in a
little volume of seven mystical tracts. These are now accessible to the general
reader; having been reprinted in the "New Medieval Library" (1910) under the
title of The Cell of Self-knowledge, with an admirable introduction and
notes by Mr. Edmund Gardner. Mr. Gardner has collated Pepwell's text with that
contained in the British Museum manuscript Harl. 674; the same volume which has
provided the base-manuscript for the present edition of the Cloud.
This edition is intended, not for the student of Middle English, nor for the specialist in mediaeval
literature; but for the general reader and lover of mysticism. My object has
been to produce a readable text, free from learned and critical apparatus. The
spelling has therefore been modernised throughout: and except in a few
instances, where phrases of a special charm or quaintness, or the alliterative
passages so characteristic of the author's style, demanded their retention,
obsolete words have been replaced by their nearest modern equivalents. One such
word, however, which occurs constantly has generally been retained, on account
of its importance and the difficulty of finding an exact substitute for it in
current English. This is the verb "to list," with its adjective and adverb
"listy" and "listily," and the substantive "list," derived from it. "List" is
best understood by comparison with its opposite, "listless." It implies a glad
and eager activity, or sometimes an energetic desire or craving: the
wish and the will to do something. The noun often stands for pleasure or
delight, the adverb for the willing and joyous performance of an action: the
"putting of one's heart into one's work." The modern "lust," from the same
root, suggests a violence which was expressly excluded from the Middle English
meaning of "list."
My heartiest thanks are due to Mr. David Inward,
who transcribed the manuscript on which this version is based, and throughout
has given me skilled and untiring assistance in solving many of the problems
which arose in connection with it; and to Mr. J. A. Herbert, Assistant-keeper
of Manuscripts in the British Museum, who has read the proofs, and also dated
the manuscripts of the Cloud for the purposes of the present edition,
and to whose expert knowledge and unfailing kindness I owe a deep debt of
gratitude.
EVELYN UNDERHILL.