The English poem Widsith (composed in the 7th century) contains two passages (v. 116 and v. 119 ff.) that refer to stories known to us also from the Icelandic Hervararsaga. The present paper is primarily an attempt to determine the form and relationship of these stories as the Widsith poet knew them. Any such attempt, however, necessarily involves an examination of the Hervararsaga. This saga has been much studied, but never investigated with the Widsith primarily in mind. Even R. W. Chambers, in his monumental edition of Widsith, relegates to a few footnotes his comments on the relation of the English poem to the Icelandic saga. That there is much to be said, the length of the present paper will suffice to demonstrate! It is my hope, moreover, that my discussion will serve likewise to clear up some of the obscurities of the saga.

Spenser, realizing how doubtfully his allegory or dark conceit might be construed, wrote a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh explaining, in part, the general structure of The Faerie Queene. The poet of the Pearl, except within the poem itself, has given us no inkling of its meaning. The attempt to find that meaning has been and is yet a matter of unusual interest to scholars.

No systematic study of the parallels in the Orlando Innamorato and the Faerie Queene has hitherto been presented. Random references to analogues were noted by Upton,1 but most of them remain of little value as positive proof of influence.

The importance of the appeal to Nature in the eighteenth century is well known, but the subject as a whole is so vast that it still awaits its historian. The present article aims to present in brief space the results of a study of this particular topic in the works of Voltaire. It is evident at once that in Voltaire the nature doctrine has less importance than it does in Diderot or in Rousseau or in a host of lesser writers, but this is not to say that it is negligible. On the contrary, it is much more influential in his thinking than one might at first be inclined to suspect, and it leads him to express ideas which one does not ordinarily associate with his name. Yet it is not at all surprising, on second thought, that Voltaire in this respect, as in others, should share the mental attitude of predecessors and contemporaries. Rabelais and Montaigne had appealed to nature. Fénelon had drawn for the readers of Télémaque an idyllic picture of Bétique and its inhabitants. Montesquieu's Troglodytes in the Lettres persanes make one think, not only of Rousseau, but of El Dorado in Voltaire's Candide. Then there was the Epicurean school of the Temple, with which Voltaire was in close contact when he was a youth of eighteen or twenty. In that group were men like Chaulieu and La Fare,1 who were imbued with a natural religion, which appears in Voltaire as early as 1716 and never disappears from his thought.

An even half-century ago, Moritz Heydrich, in giving to the world the posthumous writings of Otto Ludwig, expressed his belief that Ludwig was more closely akin to Heinrich von Kleist than to any other German dramatist, and that this kinship was based principally on an inner relationship of both poets to the German “Sturm und Drang.”1 In the years that have intervened, no one has proceeded further than to a brief and sporadic reference in the direction suggested by Heydrich. And yet Ludwig, no less than Hebbel,2 may claim poetic consanguinity with Kleist; if Hebbel is primarily the heir and continuator of Kleist's dramatic art,3 Ludwig may be said to share with Kleist a tragic idiosyncrasy of genius. In the internal as well as the external fate of their lives, they represent a phase of the tragedy of greatness which has been described as peculiarly German.

The “villain-hero,” as he developed in the plays of Marlowe and in those of some later Elizabethans, is a distinct and important type of character. Moreover, he did not make his final exit with the ending of the Elizabethan period, but has reappeared at various times since, especially during the Romantic Revival at the end of the eighteenth century. This “Romantic Movement,” as we are accustomed to call it, was in many ways a revival of the earlier Romantic spirit which we call Elizabethanism. Nothing shows the resemblance between the two periods more strikingly than this habit of taking for the dominating figure in the story a man of great power, stained with crime.

In the year 1793, James Lawrence, an Englishman living on the Continent, contributed to Wieland's Deutsche Merkur an essay on what he called the “Nair system of gallantry and inheritance.” The system was highly Utopian. Its main ideas were so distinctly different from those of even the radical philosophers and theorists, that the essay must have attracted considerable attention. We know from Wieland's footnotes in the Merkur that he was interested.

In no other novel of Dickens is there presented so sinister a picture of evil as in Oliver Twist. It was Dickens' first and last excursion into that underworld which he describes with such psychological truth and objective unreality. His other novels do, indeed, contain villains and murderers but they become less and less melodramatic and more realistic until we have a Mademoiselle Hortense and Julius Slinkton drawn from life. The prototype of Fagin in Oliver Twist may have been Ikey Solomons, a celebrated fence of Dickens' own day. Had Dickens followed the same method in depicting Solomons as he used in drawing Mrs. Manning, the original of Mademoiselle Hortense, the result would have been a realistic presentation of a criminal. But he has invested Fagin, Bill Sikes, the Artful Dodger, and their companions in crime, with a quality of horror which Mr. Pugh says lends them “something of the hectic effect of leering, grinning devils in red torment. Fagin, the arch-devil, though he is limned in the fewest possible words, stands forth lurid and malignant as the figure of Satan in medieval pageantry.”1 It is this satanic quality which particulary distinguishes the villains in Oliver Twist from those in Dickens' other works.

Charles Reade's masterpiece, The Cloister and the Hearth, gives an admirable picture of life in the Fifteenth Century. The reader wanders along deserted roads and through deep forests; he sees the inside of cottages, monasteries, inns, caves, and palaces; he makes the acquaintance of peasants and nobles, churchmen and artists, hermits and robbers. The life so opulently pictured is not limited to one country, but flows through Holland, Germany, Burgundy, and Italy.

The American sonnet before the Civil War is not a rich field. Few of our literary men had written in this difficult and conventional form. Some, like James Gates Percival and William G. Simms, wrote poems of fourteen lines in such eccentric variations as to defy classification. A few, like Jones Very or Park Benjamin, hid an occasional fine sonnet among numerous negligible ones. Some, like David Humphreys and Washington Allston, achieved mere mixed echoes of English originals. Among the major poets before the War, Bryant wrote five and Lowell twenty-seven sonnets. Longfellow, whose great period of sonnet writing was yet to come, had written but nine sonnets in 1861. Compared with these poets, George Henry Boker stands alone, both for the quality and quantity of his work. By his contemporaries he was regarded as the greatest American sonnet writer. The Book of the Sonnet,1 a collection of American and English Sonnets, edited by Leigh Hunt and S. Adams Lee, is dedicated to Boker. Both in the text and introduction he is given more space than any other American. The editors' phrase, “such sonnets as those of Wordsworth in English and George Henry Boker in American literature” indicates the height of his contemporary reputation. The Philadelphia Press, December 22, 1881, tells the story of Boker's confusion, when as a young man, he attended a dinner addressed by Daniel Webster, who, in the midst of his discourse, acknowledged Boker's presence and recited his beautiful “Lear and Cordelia” from start to finish, to illustrate a point.

In classifying the feet of English verse and their variations we may remove some of the difficulties, and some of the divergencies in the conclusions, by a scientific defining of the terms stressed and unstressed syllables. For simplicity we may confine the discussion at present to iambic feet.

In the history of English metrics the verse of the popular ballad occupies a strategic position. From it one may look backward toward Anglo-Saxon verse, and forward toward many developments of modern times. This investigation has been conceived in the belief that solution of some problems of ballad metrics not only will be of value in connection with the ballads, but also will open a new line of approach for the study of other verse, both more ancient and more modern. The principles here worked out will be found applicable, I believe, to popular verse in general; it is impossible, however, to cover the whole field, and the present investigation has accordingly been confined to the material in Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, as the best-known, most readily available, and on the whole most authoritative collection. At the same time no effort has been made to scrutinize very carefully the canon. The battle of the ballads is not our battle. Trojan and Tyrian are alike to the metrist. Be a poem Christmas carol, song, border ballad, minstrel ballad, or ballad par excellence, there is no necessary peculiarity of its meter, and the evidence here presented will go to show that as a whole Child's material is indeed reducible to a single metrical norm. The few exceptional cases will be pointed out in their places, but in general examples can be drawn indiscriminately from any of the different types.

One cannot read through the mass of discussions of the problem of shall and will published during the past century nor even those written since 1900 without being impressed by the wide diversity of the points of view and the definite conflict of the opinions and conclusions thus brought together. Even among those articles that can be grouped as expressing the conventional rules there is considerable variety and contradiction, not in the general rule for independent declarative statements (that a shall with the first person corresponds with a will with the second and third) but in the other rules concerning questions, reported discourse, and subordinate clauses. That there is a considerable body of literary usage which conflicts with the conventional rules is indicated by the many pages in these articles devoted to pointing out instances in which “the best of our authors” have violated the rules.