Note 145 — Chapter V
Reading edition
Hist. of Eng. Poetry, Sect. 24, near the end. It appears also in French very early, under the title of “Le Débat du Corps et de l’Ame,” printed in 1486. (Ebert, Bib. Lexicon, Nos. 5671-5674.) The source of the fiction has been supposed to be a poem by a Frankish monk (Hagen und Büsching, Grundriss, Berlin, 1812, 8vo, p. 446); but it is very old, and found in many forms and many languages. See Latin Poems attributed to Walter Mapes, and edited for the Camden Society by T. Wright (1841, 4to, pp. 95 and 321). It was printed in the ballad form in Spain as late as 1764.