The view that the first three pieces in the Exeter Book really constitute a single poem was first put forward in 1853 by Franz Dietrich who, as a convenient designation for the texts which he had thus joined together, called them der Crist, a title which was adopted by Grein in 1857 in his Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie and has been employed by subsequent scholars generally.

There existed in Scandinavia a well-defined legendary tradition that, when Hamðir and Sǫrli seemed about to achieve their vengeance upon the Gothic king Jǫrmunrekkr for slaying their sister Svanhildr, the Goths were instructed (or advised) to stone them to death. The two have been sent, against their will and with considerable misgivings, by their mother Guðrún to avenge their sister. On the way they have met Erpr, a third brother, and, after an exchange of sneers and insults, have slain him. Upon arriving at the Gothic hall they have cut down large numbers of Goths and have lopped off the hands and feet of Jǫrmunrekkr. Now they stand, themselves unscathed, Gothic weapons useless against them. Nothing seems to stand in the way of complete execution of their vengeance. Then, at the moment of their apparent triumph, come the instructions (or advice) to stone them. Upon this the ninth-century Eddic Hamðismál, the thirteenth-century Vǫlsungasaga, and the Edda of Snorri Sturluson all agree. Bragi the skald, in his Ragnarsdrápa, recounts only the attack in the Gothic hall, but he too represents Hamðir and Sǫrli as stoned.

Villon's propensity for punning needs no comment. It is not often, however, that an entire stanza of his represents a well-knit and complex chain of word-plays in the manner of the following one.

Item, je donne a Basennier,
Notaire et greffier criminel,
De giroffle ung plain panier
Prins sur maistre Jehan de Ruel,
Tant a Mautaint, tant a Rosnel,
Et, avec ce don de giroffle,
Servir de cuer gent et ysnel
Le seigneur qui sert saint Cristoffle.

That Masuccio's tale of the adventures of Giannozza and Mariotto was the principal source for Luigi da Porto's Giulietta e Romeo, a novella which agrees rather closely in plot with Shakespeare's tragedy, is generally acknowledged. The purpose of this paper is to show that many of da Porto's deviations from Masuccio are due to neglected literary influences rather than, as has commonly been supposed, to da Porto's originality.

In 1684 William Winstanley summarized the Tudor reputation of Richard III:

But as Honour is always attended on by Envy, so hath this worthy Princes fame been blasted by malicious traducers, who like Shakespear in his Play of him, render him dreadfully black in his actions, a monster of nature, rather then a man of admirable parts; whose slanders having been examined by wise and moderate men, they have onely found malice and ignorance to have been his greatest accusers, persons who can onely lay suspition to his charge; and suspition in Law is no more guilt than imagination.

The frame thereof seemd partly circulare,
And part triangulare, O worke divine;
These two the first and last proportions are,
The one imperfect, mortall, foeminine;
Th' other immortall, perfect, masculine,
And twixt them both a quadrate was the base
Proportioned equally by seven and nine;
Nine was the circle set in heavens place,
All which compacted made a goodly diapase.
—The Faerie Queene,ii. ix. 22

To offer one more interpretation of the meaning of Spenser's cryptic “House of Alma” may appear like the gratuitous opening of an old wound. I do so only in the fond belief that my proposed therapy will produce a lasting cure, since it satisfies the twin requirements of entire self-consistency and consistency with the Aristotelian ethics which dominate both the canto and book of which this stanza is a part.

In 1934 Professor Lebègue devoted a series of three articles to the changes made by Montchrestien in the language of his play Sophonisbe as evident in the 1596, 1601, and (to a lesser degree) in the 1604 editions. In these articles Lebègue further attempted to show that the changes made by Montchrestien were the result of the latter's conversations with his compatriot Malherbe. It must be admitted at the outset that Lebègue establishes a very convincing argument for Sophonisbe and especially in so far as concerns the changes made between the 1596 and 1601 editions upon which he has concentrated his main effort. But at the same time one cannot escape the conclusion that if Montchrestien had been a willing pupil of Malherbe before 1601 and had retained some of the latter's teachings, he, nevertheless, reasserted his linguistic independence shortly thereafter. For the 1604 edition of his plays teems with forms, uses, and expressions which, no doubt, would have suffered the ignominy of being crossed out by the irritable pen of the “Docteur en négative.”

In my recent discussion of drama and the passions I here and there cited Cicero and W. B. Yeats; and on further reading in them I find that I had more occasion than I suspected. In criticism, since there are no longer any rules or scarcely any generally accepted principles, argument from authority is almost the only argument acceptable; and the best authority is a genius, either a critic like Aristotle or Longinus, who has had a wide and life-long experience, or else an artist who takes to criticism for a change. Some of the most notable critics have been artists—Horace, Petronius, Sidney, Milton, Dryden and Pope, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Goethe and Heine, Arnold and Swinburne, Molière and Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Delacroix, Wagner, Berlioz.

So far as is now known, only two comedias from the pen of Tirso de Molina have survived in holographic form; they are the first and the third parts of the Sancta Juanna trilogy. In the study to follow, the two comedias will be investigated in their orthoëpic aspects. The findings may serve as a check on those discovered by previous investigators in texts which are not in holographic form. Some years ago Mr. Morley published a study of the orthoëpy of five of Lope's plays. The present investigation resembles that of Mr. Morley, and the excellent outline which he developed for his compilation is followed below; the deliberate parallelism of our procedure with his facilitates comparison between Tirso and Lope in the matter under discussion. In Part I there will be presented a tabulation which concerns the individual word with its various combinations of vowels, weak and strong, tonic and atonic, in pretonic, tonic or post-tonic syllables, in diphthong, dieresis, syneresis or bisyllabism. In Part II of the compilation there is offered a consideration of the combinations of the words in synalepha or hiatus under varying conditions.

In a day when psychiatry, easy divorce, and the “lie-detector” are integral parts of our civilization, it can hardly be inappropriate to recall to the scholarly public the history of Seleucus, Antiochus, and Stratonice. This story, which affords interesting parallels to our own epoch, has appeared at intervals in most of the theatres of western Europe, and in Spain, at least, its recurrence would seem to form an interesting example of literary Strömungen.

That Philip Freneau, “the poet of the American Revolution,” outspokenly devoted to the cause of freedom and the democratic ideal, and plunging into the midst of the political activities of his time with an ardor that forswore all compromise, bears a strong spiritual kinship to the blind poet of the Commonwealth certainly no one familiar with the stormy public careers of the two would for a moment deny. That this extended in Freneau's earlier poetry to an actual literary discipleship has been more than once stated, but illustrated only in the most general terms. The temptation to cite concrete examples of the youthful poet's indebtedness to Paradise Lost, extending from borrowed phrase to actual paraphrase, is difficult to resist; “The Rising Glory of America,” “The History of the Prophet Jonah,” and “The Monument of Phaon” in particular prove rich ground and practically unturned. However, in the interest of exactness, as well as correction of what seems a mistaken attitude, it will be well to restrict the present discussion to one poem. Upon the publication of “The Power of Fancy” (1786) Freneau appended to line 33, “See's this earth a distant star,” the note “Milton's Paradise Lost B. ii, v, 1052.” This allusion to Satan's viewing “this pendant world, in bigness as a star” has been several times cited as evidence of the American's debt, but, strangely enough, with little effort to find substantiation in the matter and manner of the poem itself.

In 1843 when Lord Jeffrey reviewed the critical activity of his early maturity he took pains to explain his unsympathetic treatment of fiction in the columns of The Edinburgh Review:

It may be worth while to inform the present generation that, in my youth, writings of this sort were rated very low with us—scarcely allowed indeed to pass as part of a nation's permanent literature—and generally deemed altogether unworthy of any grave critical notice.

A careful student of the Romantic poets will soon or late encounter the name of Thomas Taylor, whose chief claim to importance is that he was an extraordinarily diligent scholar and the first translator into English of all Plato's works. An inquirer will find brief and not always accurate accounts of this man in several encyclopedias; he will discover that certain nineteenth-century antiquarians wrote a number of sketches of Taylor in which fact is liberally sprinkled with fiction; and finally, he will come upon half a dozen more recent articles of a scholarly nature, including an almost complete bibliography of Taylor's books, three papers suggesting rather doubtful parallels between some passages of these and certain poems of Blake and Wordsworth, one which reprints from manuscript sources a few of Taylor's own poems, and another which endeavors unsuccessfully to demonstrate an acquaintance between Taylor and Shelley. Taylor's various translations and original works have also been cited occasionally in studies such as Professor Lowes's The Road to Xanadu. But with all this array of scholarship, imposing when it is called forth by a man so obscure as Thomas Taylor, there is still no comprehensive or accurate account of the man himself and his work. He is important, however, as the most energetic exponent of Platonism in England between the Cambridge Platonists and Benjamin Jowett, this at a time when Platonism once more became significant in literature after the eighteenth-century dismissal of Plato. Yet before we have a study of Taylor's Platonism in its relation to that of the Romantic poets, we should have a reasonably trustworthy biography of the man. For although it will not be found that Thomas Taylor was a person of hitherto unrecognized and startling importance for the student of literature, it is certain that he was known to such people as James Boswell, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Wollstonecraft, probably William Blake, and quite possibly Shelley; that his books were read by Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Emerson in America; and that he was a conspicuous figure in the intellectual world of England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since the available accounts of him are incomplete and contradictory, he deserves the services of a biographer who will simply collect and set forth the facts.

The following pages communicate certain features of the Westmorland Parliamentary campaign of 1818; the text of two articles by William Wordsworth apparently not hitherto reprinted; a number of facts regarding the publication of Wordsworth's Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland; the readings of a broadside printing of a portion of Two Addresses; the variants of the several texts of Two Addresses; the text of a pamphlet by Thomas De Quincey never reprinted, of which but one extant copy has been reported hitherto; the text of eight letters, of which only a few slight extracts have been published, addressed by De Quincey to Wordsworth, dealing with the campaign, revealing his labors on the pamphlet and other political pieces, and applying for the editorship of the Westmorland Gazette; and materials exhibiting more definitely the relations between De Quincey and Wordsworth in the period.

During his Dresden days Tieck had reached the height of his fame. Not only was he the acknowledged head of the German Romantic movement but he was sought far and wide on account of his very talented dramatic readings. Foreign writers—such as H. C. Robinson, Coleridge, and Carlyle from England; Ticknor, Irving, and Cooper from America; Ampère, Marmier, and Montalembert from France—came to visit and pay homage to the famous German poet. Tieck also maintained cordial relations with Scandinavians, particularly with the Swedish poet Bernhard von Beskow, the Swedish diplomat Brinkman, and the Danish poet Oehlenschläger. It is not surprising then that such an attractive personality should receive his share of respect and attention from Germany's most important neighbor to the East, namely, Russia.

An interest in Whitman's sources is to be expected, partly because of Whitman's secretiveness. The extent of his indebtedness to Emerson continues to be a problem. That this influence was felt before the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 is questioned, since Walt himself and his earliest biographers say that he had not read Emerson before publishing the first edition of the Leaves. Thus, in his Notes on Walt Whitman, John Burroughs writes: “Up to the time he published the quarto edition [the 1855 edition] he had never read the Essays or Poems of Mr. Emerson at all. This is positively true. In the summer following that publication he first became acquainted with the Essays.” Whitman's friend, W. D. O'Connor, says that Walt had read Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, and that any fancied indebtedness to Emerson “is referable to the German source both had drunk from.” Though I believe that Whitman had read more of Emerson before 1855 than he would admit or would allow his friends to admit, I believe, too, that much of the resemblance between the writings of Emerson and Whitman, with reference especially to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, may be due to their “having drunk from the same source,” that source being Carlyle.

The fact that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most widely read poets in the British Isles during the middle of the nineteenth century cannot be explained entirely by the popular nature of a large portion of his writings. Equally important are the circumstances connected with the publishing business, which, prior to the passage of the American international copyright act in 1891, made possible the purchase of pirated editions of his various works at a price within the range of the lower levels of the reading classes. Tennyson was indeed popular, but in the 1850's a copy of one of his books cost a good round sum. Longfellow likewise was popular, but a copy of his latest work could often be bought for a shilling. The result was inevitable. When an English woman wrote to Longfellow in 1876 protesting against American publishers, who had reprinted her works without permission, the poet replied:

On a beaucoup discuté l'influence de Sainte-Beuve sur Victor Hugo dans le domaine de la métrique, influence qui d'après quelques critiques se trouve bien marquée dans les Orientales de Victor Hugo, publiées en janvier 1829. Sainte-Beuve qui fit la connaissance de Hugo vers la fin de janvier 1827 étudiait depuis le mois d'août 1826 en vue d'un concours proposé par l'Académie, “l'histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, depuis le commencement du XVIe siècle.” Ce fut de ce travail que sortit le célèbre Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du Théâtre français au XVIe siècle, paru d'abord, à partir de juillet 1827, dans le Globe et ensuite en librairie, en août 1828. Comme chacun sait, cet ouvrage révéla aux romantiques les richesses des poètes de la Pléiade.

De nombreux critiques ont déjà noté des analogies évidentes d'idées et de formes entre Bergson et Proust. M. Léon Pierre-Quint a révélé l'existence de relations personnelles entre le philosophe et le romancier: Marcel Proust fut l'élève de Bergson en Sorbonne et M. Bergson devint parent éloigné de Proust en épousant Mlle Neuburger. De plus, M. Pierre-Quint a indiqué, dans leurs grandes lignes, les thèmes proustiens qui auraient pu être dérivés des propositions contenues dans L'Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Matière et Mémoire et L'Évolution créatrice. M. Étienne Burnet a conseillé d'éclairer plus vivement les procédés d'analyse que Proust doit à Bergson: “qu'il y ait du Bergson dans Proust, on l'a dit, mais on ne l'a pas assez dit” Le Dr. Robert Proust, dans la NRF de janvier 1923, numéro consacré à la mémoire de Marcel Proust mort deux mois avant, répète que l'influence de Bergson sur Marcel, après celle de Darlu, son professeur de philosophie à Condorcet, fut considérable. En Allemagne, M. Jackel Kurt a publié dans Sprache und Kultur der Germanischen-Romanischen Volker, un article intitulé “Bergson und Proust.”