Note 1 — Foreword

The objection—if it be an objection—that de Coster borrowed unblushingly from his predecessors need never be disputed. His style is frankly Rabelaisian. The stage whereon his actors play their parts is set, scene almost for scene, from the generally available documents that served such a writer as Thomas Motley for his “History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic.” Even the name, the very lineaments of Ulenspiegel, are borrowed from that familiar figure of the sixteenth-century chap-books1 whose jolly pranks and schoolboy frolics have been crystallized in the French word espièglerie, and in our own day set to music in one of the symphonic poems of Richard Strauss.