It is rather surprising that the subject of Scott's influence on the English vocabulary, a subject which has excited the interest of many students of language, has not heretofore been carefully examined. That such an influence existed became apparent soon after Scott achieved popularity. Francis Jeffrey, in his review of Marmion in the Edinburgh Review of April 1808, remarks: “His genius, seconded by the omnipotence of fashion, has brought chivalry again into temporary favor. Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk indeed of donjons, keeps, tabards, scutcheons, tressures, caps of maintenance, portcullises, wimples, and we know not what besides … ” This faintly petulant tone pervades the early remarks on Scott's contributions to the language. When the Waverley Novels appeared there seems to have been in the reviews considerable displeasure at the abundant intermixture of Lowland Scottish dialect, whence some words now very current have come to us. When The Monastery was published, a word-minded reviewer used one of Scott's innovations to solve to his own satisfaction the mystery of the Author of Waverley: “I believe that the author of ‘The Monastery’ and ‘Waverley’ has hitherto kept himself concealed, although these Works and several others … are attributed … to Sir Walter Scott, an opinion which is strengthened by the liberal employment in them of that feeble expression ‘he undid,‘ which so frequently disgraces the most beautiful passages in the Poems he avows.”

The Nightingale ode has been judiciously dealt with from inside the tradition of Keats scholarship by such experts as Sir Sidney Colvin, Ernest de Sélincourt, Douglas Bush, and H. W. Garrod. Recent reinterpretations by Brooks and Warren, by Thomas and Brown, by Allen Tate, F. R. Leavis, Marshall McLuhan, G. Wilson Knight, Albert Guérard, Jr., and others, have brought the Ode into contact with current critical theories. In following them here I can, I believe, be most useful by steering something of a middle course between the modern and traditional: with, however, an unusual emphasis upon general English Romanticism. My explication, then, will consider the Ode to a Nightingale as a Romantic poem, and will venture some exposition of its Romantic principles. I shall also try to bear in mind the implications of recent criticism.

The Posthumous Works of William Wycherley, Esq; in Prose and Verse. Vol. II (1729), is an important and neglected document for the study of the canon and the poetical abilities not only of its author but also of its editor, Alexander Pope. It consists of a preface, a carefully annotated reprint of the table of contents to the first volume, a collection of letters between Pope and Wycherley, and a series of poems or parts of poems by the two men. It is extremely rare—the Bodleian copy seems to be the only one in an institutional library—and while large portions have been separately reproduced, no one has pointed out the significant relationships between them and the rest of the volume.

So much ink has already been spilt in discussing the relationship between Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that one may very well hesitate before adding his jot. Yet the interaction of these two uncomfortably brilliant personalities is of exceptional interest both for their psychological drama and for the literature they wrote because of each other. As drama their relationship may be divided into three acts: friendship, estrangement, and enmity. Unfortunately, with the sparse documentation that survives, the action must be patiently reconstructed from fragmentary clues. Since both chief actors had complex, if not crafty minds, their motives are not simple, and must be carefully and sceptically determined. To favor either Lady Mary or Pope is to distort their drama; one must try instead to judge impartially on the basis of the facts that remain. At present, with valuable new data added to a fresh appraisal of the old, an account may be given which is less equivocal and more credible.

Dryden's prologues and epilogues have always been much admired, but, on the whole, rather negligently studied by scholars. The editors of the William Andrews Clark Edition of Dryden's Works, now in preparation, hope that it will provide for these poems, as well as for Dryden's more important works, better texts and notes than those presently available. The possibility that an edition may add substantially to the findings of its predecessors will perhaps appear from the case of the prologue and epilogue to Nathaniel Lee's Mithridates, as revived by the King's Company in 1681.

Robert bridges published his second edition of Milton's Prosody in 1921. It was a study both highly promising and a little repulsive. Modestly, in his whimsical preface (p. iv), he referred to it as his “poor little grammar.” And in one very important sense, that is what it actually was: a grammar, or grammatical prosody, of the verse of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. What the poet's modesty concealed, however, was that underneath the linguistic surface, which was almost Teutonic in its precision and thoroughness, there lay, scattered but brilliant, an ore of metrical theory. For example, it is from Bridges as much as from anybody that we have derived the notion of “scansion divorced from rhythm,” of speech-accents counter-pointing metrical accents. Historically more important, I think, is the debt we owe Bridges for restoring to its original dignity the broadly European metrical system, characteristic of the Renaissance and of Milton, which Bridges called the “syllabic” system. It was he, surely, who first approached that system without a strong bias in favor of a stress prosody, or of a prosody insisting on extra-metrical liberties, and who consequently saw in it not only a rigid side—the syllable-count—but a flexible side, wherein genuine musical variation was possible—the manifold devices of “elision.”

To students of the classics the Roman practice of declamation has long been known as an influence on Roman satire and drama and on the early Greek romance. Apparently this rhetorical exercise is less well known to students of English drama, for in the standard histories and editions there is little to be found on the subject. Yet the controversia, the most important form of declamation, affected English drama early and late. A Renaissance imitation of a controversia furnished the plot of the earliest surviving secular play in English, Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucrece (1497?), and some of the Roman originals provided the most fashionable dramatists of the Jacobean era with plots for a number of plays. Of these, Massinger and Field's The Fatal Dowry (1618-19?), whose source has not previously been identified, is an unusually fine example of the transformation of controversia into drama. The early interlude and the later tragedy, examined side by side, reveal much of the operation of this special branch of classical rhetoric. I shall suggest that the controversia gave much more than plots to the English playwrights—that it influenced literary theory, method, and style.

The Beowulfian dragon seems to keep as jealous a watch on the mystery of its ultimate significance in the poem as on the buried hoard. And when a critic boldly tries to force the entrance of the monster's barrow, he must sooner or later reckon with a shattering counter-stroke. Though it looked as if Professor Tolkien's brilliant attempt had finally disposed of the problem, it appears that the dragon was dormant only and the retour de flamme has now come, more than fifteen years later, in the form a of competent and courageous article, vigorously questioning the legitimacy of the critic's progress. Mr. Gang's article—and this is not the least of its merits—clearly raises the question of premises and methods in Beowulf criticism, and lucidly probes the actual base of Tolkien's interpretation of the poem. We shall not venture to decide the point (much too perilous a plight for minnows to judge the Triton's issue). Moreover, to examine so dense an article in all its implications would mean an extensive study. Our modest purpose here is merely to discuss, with special reference to the dragon, Mr. Gang's main contention, viz., “that the arguments by which Professor Tolkien shows that the poem may be symbolic are not cogent, and that the internal evidence is against this view, or at least against the particular symbolism that he discerns” (p. 6).