FOOTNOTES
Reading edition
“Here I may see what it is to give other men’s (goods) with harm. As will many rich men with unright all day take, Of poor men here and there, and almisse (alms) sithhe (afterwards) make.”
For the tongs and the stone he accounts by saying that, as he used them for “good ends, each thing should surely find him which he did for God’s love.”
But in the prose version of Wynkyn de Worde, the tongs have been changed into “ox-tongues,” “which I gave some tyme to two preestes to praye for me. I bought them with myne owne money, and therefore they ease me, bycause the fysshes of the sea gnaw on them, and spare me.”
This latter story of the ox-tongues has been followed by Mr. Sebastian Evans, in his poem on St. Brendan. Both he and Mr. Matthew Arnold have rendered the moral of the English version very beautifully.