Translated from the Italian and edited by Henry Edward Cardinal Manning

303 pages. First Published in 1915.

As the author of the Imitation of Christ is unknown, so is the writer of the Little Flowers of St. Francis. These admirable poems in prose may justly be compared to flowers which give evidence of the season which has brought them forth, but do not reveal the name of the gardener who planted them. Every page of this little book breathes of the faith and the simplicity of the Middle Ages.
Each of the little flowers is in itself a sacred poem. A divine ideal forms their principal feature from beginning to end, and throws a halo round the personages they describe. This ideal is Christ, whose saints are all, in a certain sense and measure, reproductions of Himself. St. Francis owes all his greatness to his conformity with his divine Lord; and the purport of the Little Flowers is to draw out and exhibit this resemblance.