William Congreve is undeniably the most polished of our dramatic writers and probably the most witty. Of his four comedies, The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, Love for Love, and The Way of the World, the first is one of the most scurrilous plays in English, and the last one of the most exquisite. If this were all that is to be said of him, one might be content to leave him to the scholars and the connoisseurs who at present seem to be his only earnest readers. But there is another and a greater claim to be made for Congreve. There is the claim not merely that he should be regarded as a classic—an empty and neglectful honor—but also that he should have that loving perusal by a younger generation which is the rightful prerogative of a classic. A reputation for indecency, a suspicion that he is one of those “to be read for style only,” most of all, ignorance or a misunderstanding of the real quality of his plays, have made his immortality an immortality on shelves, bookcases, and desks, dusty altars for his brilliance. This is of little moment for Congreve, who professed to despise literary fame in his lifetime, and would ask for no popularity now, but it is of some importance for readers of our generation who have revived the old interest in published plays, and should not be frightened or discouraged from the best.

It is not easy to form an adequate conception of the course of Italian lyric poetry in the fourteenth century; partly because not all the relevant material has been published, partly because the admitted faults of the period have been held to justify a neglect of most of its representatives in favor of a concentrating of attention on the great names of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Such an attitude, however, involves the disregard of much that is needed for an accurate view of the time, and the neglect of many poets who, while not uniformly inspired, give us much of genuine beauty and significance. It is accordingly my design to set forth, in broad but not unfaithful fashion, the main causes which gave this large body of verse not only its easily noted defects, but also its real, tho not always recognized, merits.

Estimates of the work of the Goncourts have varied considerably. While the majority of critics have treated the inseparable brothers as one man, a few writers such as Jules Lemaître and A. de Pontmartin have insisted on drawing a distinction between these literary Siamese twins. To the minds of these critics, the novels due to the pen of Edmond alone were vastly inferior to those produced in collaboration with Jules. Among the host of critics who do not feel that a difference is discernible in the talents of the two brothers, there is further diversity of opinion. Sainte-Beuve, a friend of the Goncourts, freely recognizes their merits as collectors of notes, books, and engravings, and would grant at least that their novel Sœur Philomène appears to be drawn from life. For Emile Zola, the authors are admirable in their descriptions of human beings as related to environment. Ferdinand Brunetière finds that the Goncourts, while pretending to follow nature in the minutest detail, unconsciously illustrate the excesses of Romanticism, in their exclusive attention to the abnormalities of human nature. Paul Bourget would emphasize their determinism, which has exerted a noteworthy influence upon Alphonse Daudet and Emile Zola. A large number of critics have, of course, given special consideration to that obvious lack of organization in the work of the Goncourts which is due to their use of note-books.

One of the chief abuses urged against plays by the puritans of the sixteenth century was their immoral language. At all periods of the dispute this offence of plays was the puritans' “floodgate which let in the most, or the most substantial of all their arguments.” Writing at the beginning of the dispute, Stephen Gosson particularly denounces this corruption in English comedies cut by the Italian pattern; and following Gosson other critics of plays increased the severity of their denunciations on this account. In fact no “abuse” of plays received a more continued, severe, or unanimous denunciation than that of their immoral speeches.

In using satire to ridicule the vices and follies of his contemporaries, Fielding is the direct successor of the last member of that “Triumvirate of Wit,” Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift, to which he so often refers in his works. In his novels and in his periodical essays Fielding often refers to the luxury of the times and the consequent general moral corruption among all classes of society. He ridicules especially the affectation of his contemporaries—their vanity and hypocrisy, the twin roots of affectation—and assails with direct invective their spiritual and moral degeneration. Believing that example is stronger than precept in reforming human conduct, he likes to place before them examples, ridiculous or odious, of what they are to avoid; but his satire is more kindly than Swift's.

Most readers of Spenser's Muiopotmos will recall Professor Palgrave's comments upon the poem in his essays on The Minor Poem of Spenser. He said in part: “The lyric regarded from this point of view, is as light and fanciful, as winged and ethereal, as Clarion himself: the sunshine of the Summer's day which it describes glitters through it: the musical ripple of rhyme and metre is unbroken.” Then, finding but a fantastically slight connection between the episodes of the tapestries and the story of Clarion, Mr. Palgrave further summed up his comment upon the poem: “The tale hence seems even more inconsecutive than Mother Hubbard's; it neither is a whole as a story, an allegory, nor a moralization; and one asks in what humour a poet so sage and serious as Spenser, an artist so finished, can have painted this picture?—a question for sufficient answer to which he might have pointed triumphantly to the exquisiteness with which the fairy web is wrought and embroidered; to the poet's right, now and then, to be fancy free.”

The relationship of the manuscripts of the Middle-English poem Ipotis has been studied in detail by Dr. Hugo Gruber on the basis of the nine mss. known to him. In addition to these there are five others, four of which are printed for the first time below. One of these, unfortunately a fragment, is of the greatest importance, since it carries back the date of the poem at least fifty years. On the basis of the earliest manuscript known to him—ms. Vernon, written about 1385—Gruber assigned the Ipotis to the second half of the fourteenth century. But in the light of the new evidence, the composition of the poem is pushed back to the very beginning of the century.