The caricature of the Englishman in the Middle Ages was never complete in the eyes of the French without some allusion to or parody upon his incorrect and unpleasant manner of speaking French, the French of Marlborough or of Stratford atte Bowe. A number of parodies of this sort have come down to us and are still of interest, popular caricatures of real though at times coarse humor. One of the best episodes of the Roman de Renard depicts Renart in the disguise of an Anglo-Norman jongleur affecting the outlandish accent and thus concealing his identity from his wife. Perhaps the best known of all these parodies is found in the fabliau Des Deux Anglois et de l'Anel, a conte entirely insignificant in itself, but nevertheless suggestive of the lack of esteem in which the French dialect spoken in England must have been held by the continentals about the epoch of St. Louis.

Among the penitentials of the middle ages, that by Thomas Chabham is of particular importance on account of its detailed classification of minstrels and players. In distinguishing different classes among these players and entertainers instead of condemning all alike, Chabham affords a notable illustration of the gradual growth in the Church of a tolerant attitude toward innocent amusements. M. Gautier, while recognizing the importance of this passage in Chabham's Penitential, raised the question whether “cette somme n'est qu'une compilation d'oeuvres antérieures, ou s'il y faut voir l'original de plusieurs autres Sommes de pénitence.” In order to decide this question it is necessary to consider such evidence as is available concerning the author and the date of the Penitential.

Among mediaeval compendiums of devotion one of the most widely known—in England at least—was the Speculum Ecclesie, written about 1240 by Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury. The extent of its popularity is indicated by the fact that it occurs in Latin, French and English versions and that nearly sixty MSS. are still preserved which contain this treatise either as a whole or in part—twenty-nine in Latin, seventeen in French, and the others in English.

Occleve's Lerne to Dye has been spoken of as “a really fine Ars Sciendi Mori, the most dignified, and the most poetical, thing that Occleve has left us.” It may be worth while to determine how much of this praise should be given to Occleve as translator and amplifier, how much to his original, an eloquent and famous chapter in Henry Suso's Horologium.

The attack of the Puritans and of the city authorities upon the amusements of London under Charles I and the Interregnum was directed primarily against plays and playhouses. The sport of bear-baiting—one of the favorite entertainments of the Londoners—was allowed to continue almost without interruption throughout the Commonwealth.

Much has been said about Balzac's interior descriptions and their intrinsic value in his character portraitures, of his “oyster-and-its-shell” theory, as it is called, but very little exact analysis has been given them. Monsieur H. Clouzot's interesting article, L'Ameublement dans la Comédie Humaine d'Honoré de Balzac, is the only one which treats the subject at any length. Even here the author does not show how Balzac worked to obtain his effects, nor does he succeed in proving that a particular setting is as nearly indispensable to a complete rendering of the characterization as Balzac hoped and as his admirers have supposed.

But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
“That portion of the river of my mind
Came from that fountain?“ (The Prelude, II, 203ff).

To what extent, it may profitably be asked, did German literature exert an influence, direct or indirect, upon the life and writings of Wordsworth?

The poet Wordsworth has been for a century the synonym of wholesomeness and piety. It is only within the past decade that it has become the fashion to regard him as a dangerous influence. There is a school of critics at the present moment who go about sadly shaking their heads over Wordsworth's case. They think it a pity that, like Shelley, he should have devoted so fine a talent to the propagation of a subtly vicious teaching.

Although Wordsworth professed contempt for Macpherson's “translation” as a worthless forgery, it can be shown that he was familiar with the subject-matter, the spirit, and, in places, with the exact phraseology of Ossian; that he borrowed an Ossianic word or two when he needed it; that many of his poems deal with themes relating to the Ossianic poems, or present images or lines to which parallels may be found in Ossian; and that in his passionate love of the mountain wilderness he came very near the spirit of the blind bard of Selma.

Coleridge, more than any other man in the England of his time, sensed what were the significant currents of thought then in the civilized world, although his recognition of many of these ideas seems instinctive rather than conscious. Coleridge was often a prophet who saw as in a glass darkly. But though darkly, he saw—or, at least, felt.

Miss Austen, in a letter to her sister Cassandra dated December 18, 1798, writes thus of a circulating library about to be opened, presumably at Steventon, on January 14:

As an inducement to subscribe, Mrs. Martin tells me that her collection is not to consist only of hovels, but of every kind of literature, etc. She might have spared this pretension to our family who are great novel readers and not ashamed of being so; but it was necessary, I suppose, to the self-consequence of half her subscribers.

In his admirable paper upon the sources of Browning's Childe Roland, Mr. Harold Golder shows from what a rich storehouse of nursery tale, poetry, and romance the poet drew for many of the incidents that go to make up that poem. Childe Roland is such a synthetic poem that the problem of finding satisfactory sources for it is not simple. Nor is it made easier by Browning's stubborn insistence that the only true source of the poem is the line from King Lear. But it has been impossible to be content with Browning's statement, and critic after critic has ransacked ballad, fairy tale and legend to find the origin of the simples which the poet has compounded in his poem. In the light of Browning's statement, the problem becomes one of “establishing a subconscious connection between Edgar's maudlin words and the material from which Browning obviously drew”; in other words, we must find for the sources of Childe Roland materials so familiar to Browning at the impressionable time of his life as to have become a part of his own mental character, and further, the materials must be such as would definitely suggest the images which appear in the poem.

In an interesting paper which appeared in March, 1924, Miss Hélène Harvitt discussed “How Henry James Revised Roderick Hudson.” The investigations on which this article was based were made in Paris where original American editions were presumably not available, for we are told that “All quotations from the revised version of Roderick Hudson refer to the Macmillan edition of 1921, those from the first edition, to that of 1883 (2 vols).” If the author had been able to refer to an American edition published after 1882, she would have noticed the two copyrights (one issued to the publishers in 1875, and one to the author in 1882) and the “Note” (which has a page to itself): ‘Roderick Hudson’ was originally published in 1875. It has now been minutely revised, and has received a large number of verbal alterations. Several passages have been rewritten.“ That is, she would have seen that the text which she quotes throughout her article as from the first edition, comes in reality from a thoroughly revised later version.

It is generally known that the timely discovery in Paris of specimens of Japanese color-prints and watercolor painting in the late sixties had an immediate influence on the French Impressionist painters. However, it is not always noted that the writers who supported this school of painting: Baudelaire and Zola, Manet's special friends; the Goncourt brothers who admired Degas; Clemenceau and Théodore Duret, knew certain aspects of Japanese art, and were collectors of curios. Japanese stories and legends entered Europe at about the same time as the color-prints, descriptions of Japanese life are numerous in the magazines of the period. The first poem in French about Japan appears to be this sonnet by Catulle Mendès, which he dates back in his Œuvres complètes to the volume Philoméla (1863).

The distinction in use between the verbs ser and estar constitutes one of the thorniest points in Spanish grammar. It is not discussed in a thoroughgoing way in any treatise. Most of the native Spanish grammars, as Bello-Cuervo, are weak on this particular subject. Users of language are always guided primarily by instinct, not by rule, and we shall see that in the present case the instinct of Spaniards is delicate and especially difficult to reduce to formal law.

Since reading Professor A. Stanley Walker's article in the March Publications on “Peterloo, Shelley and Reform,” I have come across a somewhat similar article by F. A. Bruton, M.A., Litt.D., “The Story of Peterloo,” to which Mr. Walker makes no reference. Dr. Bruton writes in general from the point of view of the historian and in particular from the point of view of a citizen of Manchester. He draws material from several contemporary sources to which Mr. Walker does not direct us; and his narrative is illustrated with several portraits and contemporary prints and has, moreover, a valuable “Plan of Peterloo” which makes clear the position of the crowd and the disposition of the military forces. The effect of the “Peterloo Massacre” on Shelley does not, however, fall within the scope of Dr. Bruton's paper. Hence it does not anticipate or render nugatory the results of Mr. Walker's inquiries but is, rather, a parallel discussion along somewhat different lines. Students of Shelley will find the article of interest. It may be added that Dr. Bruton's paper was originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Manchester on the occasion of the centenary of the Massacre, August 16th, 1919.