“ THEBES, ROMANCE OF. The French Roman de Thèbes is a poem of some 10,000 lines which appears to be based, not on the Thebaid of Statius, but on an abridgment of that work. This view is supported by the omission of incidents and details which, in spite of the altered conditions under which the poem was composed, would naturally have been preserved in any imitation of the Thebaid, while again certain modifications of the Statian version can hardly be due to the author’s invention but point to an ancient origin. As in other poems of the same kind, the marvellous disappears ”

“ The author asserts that he translated from a Latin book lent him by Gilbert Fitz-Baderon, 4th lord of Monmouth, but in reality he has written romances of chivalry on the usual lines, the names of the characters alone being derived from antiquity. ”