The Legend of Ulenspiegel is not one of the "fake" romances which have been put forward of late by English and American writers. It is a modern, not a medieval, masterpiece, and makes no pretension to antiquity. But no help is vouchsafed to the foreign reader in the body of it, and it would be to expect too much from an English public to presume that the nature and history of this extraordinary work are universally familiar.