Terza Rima is a series of threes, the two outer lines of each riming with each other, the inner line riming with the two outer lines of the next three; in homely terms, like a pile of paper cones set into each other. The first rime in a canto and the last therefore occur only twice, but all the rest three times; none is dropped before a new rime is begun, or, except at the beginning and end of a canto, is confined to a single terzina. A consequence of this structure is that, while (if the sense permits) one or more terzine may be cut off at the beginning or end of a canto without detection of the loss, this is impossible anywhere else; the alternation of rimes and the linking with the preceding and following terzine would be upset. Accordingly omission of lines or passages occurs in the manuscripts with notable rarity.1 This result of the verse form no doubt is well known to some, but, so far as I find, it has never been mentioned in print.

Through the notion of corruption, we come to the third example of bug sb. in Moufet's great pioneer work of entomology, of which the first two had been attached to the dung-beetle. As already described (l, 1037), the Insectorum … Theatrum was finished in 1590, though not printed till 1634.

Like the English language, English law may be regarded as the fusion of two great cultural forces—the Germanic “folk-laws,” expressed in the early dooms of Æthelberht (c. 600) and in the laws of Alfred and Canute; and Roman law, as interpreted by the Norman conquerors, and set forth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Glanvill and Bracton. From this fusion has developed a body of law which, in scope and influence, is probably without parallel in modern history. It is interesting to see how many of its basic principles find expression in the common proverbial wisdom of the folk. These proverbs correspond, on a popular level, to the Latin legal maxims of the learned, which represent the concentrated experience of generations of lawyers.

Within the past few years several scholars have been attracted by a challenging passage from the “Preface to the following Hymns” in the second edition of Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans (1655): you will (peradventure) observe some passages, whose history or reason may seem something remote; but were they brought nearer, and plainly exposed to your view, (though that (perhaps) might quiet your curiosity) yet would it not conduce much to your greater advantage.—Silex Scintillans, Part ii, Sig. B-3-v.

M. Etienne, in his study of the sources of Victor Hugo's first novel, Bug-Jargal, suggests that a kinship clearly exists between this, as well as earlier French stories of Negro characters, and Mrs. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave. He is led to this conclusion because of certain indications of the popularity of Oroonoko in France during the eighteenth century, and because of the recurrence in French literature of the noble, romantic Negro. This very just inference as to the importance of Oroonoko is worthy of elaboration and emphasis because in this early English novel we can find the substance and technique of much of the littérature négrophile of the eighteenth century, a period in which the Negro emerges from his despised condition and takes on heroic qualities and possibilities; and also because this English story, of which the purpose might well have been didactic, written by “the first literary abolitionist … on record in the history of fiction,” as Swinburne called Mrs. Behn, was to have far-reaching consequences in French humanitarian thought.

That William Shenstone has some share in the preparation of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry has been recognized ever since Percy made an acknowledgment of his indebtedness in the preface to the first edition. But Percy's account of their collaboration as given in the preface is inadequate and misleading; and a misinterpretation of two of Shenstone's letters to his friends has resulted in an entirely false impression on one significant point, as to who was instrumental in getting Percy started on a collection of ballads for publication. The purpose of this article is to correct the misconception and to develop in some detail the story of their collaboration. It is based in part on unpublished Manuscripts in the Harvard College Library.

Now that five years have elapsed since The Letters of Robert Burns went to press, a postscript may be in order. Though no great mass of new material has come to light, eight hitherto inedited letters have been discovered, fifteen originals of letters already in print have been located, and new secondary material has corrected the dates or addresses of a few letters which I printed from the holographs. Part of the new material has already appeared in the Burns Chronicle. Summarizing this briefly, I shall add my new matter, which includes three inedited letters and one hitherto published only in garbled and fragmentary form. Some comments and speculations regarding manuscripts still untraced may also be allowable.

Having thus completed the death cycle, we turn now to the metaphors of sickness, and again we must start with Werther's application to himself of what he had said of the unhappy suicide girl. He sees himself as “der Unglückliche, dessen Leben unter einer schleichenden Krankheit unaufhaltsam abstirbt. … Und das Übel, das ihm die Kräfte verzehrt, raubt ihm zugleich den Mut, sich davon zu befreien” (61.22). In Werther's case it is not just a sickness of love as with Rousseau's St. Preux. From the very outset, Werther sees himself as a sick man, his own emotionalism as a “verderbliche Leidenschaft … Auch halte ich mein Herzchen wie ein krankes Kind” (10.12–14). And so it continues after he has met Lotte: “Was Lotte einem Kranken sein muss, fühl' ich an meinem eignen Herzen, das übler dran ist als manches, das auf dem Siechbette verschmachtet” (42.4); “wenn meine Krankheit zu heilen wäre” (78.2). Hence his sympathy for the invalid in whom he sees his own case: “Müsse der trostlos umkommen, der eines Kranken spottet, der nach der entferntesten Quelle reist, die seine Krankheit vermehren, sein Ausleben schmerzhafter machen wird” (137.4–). This invalid serves as a double simile; he is like Werther himself on the one hand, he is like a religious pilgrim on the other: “das bedrängte Herz, das, um seine Gewissensbisse los zu werden und die Leiden seiner Seele abzutun, eine Pilgrimschaft nach dem heiligen Grabe tut” (137.9). Ill humor, the peevishness and jealousy of the lover, becomes the subject of discussion at the home of the vicar and is treated als eine Art Krankheit, and the question is, “ob dafür kein Mittel ist” (45.8). The moral is found by developing the simile—seek the remedy and take it: “Gewiss, wer krank ist, wird bei allen Ärzten herumfragen, und die grössten Resignationen, die bittersten Arzneien wird er nicht abweisen, um seine Gesundheit zu erhalten” (45.28). This Art Krankheit is “eine Art Trägheit” and so indolence and inertia also becomes a disease (45.16).

Die Interpretation der individualistischen Geschichtsauffassung.—In der Einleitung zu Goethes politischen Lehrjahren bemerkt Lorenz, auf die Frage, warum verhältnismässig wenig von Goethes politischem Denken, Wesen und Handeln geschrieben worden sei, habe ihm einer der besten Goethekenner geantwortet: “die geschulte Goethephilologie sei eben zu gewissenhaft, um aus Epigrammen und leichten Gesprächen die politische Grund- und Weltanschauung eines Mannes herzustellen und zu beleuchten.” Mit Recht konnte Lorenz darauf einwenden, dass die geschulte Goethephilologie, wenn sie nur Goethes Epigramme und leichte Gespräche in Betracht ziehe und seine praktisch-politische Wirksamkeit einfach ausser Acht lasse, eine grundfalsche Auffassung vom Wesen der Politik verrate. Das hinderte aber den Historiker Lorenz nicht daran, Goethes praktisch-politische Wirksamkeit weit über das gebührende Mass hervorzukehren und den Mythus eines “wahren Staatsmannes” zu schaffen. Wie die Goetheforschung seiner Zeit geht Lorenz von der individualistischen Geschichtsauffassung aus. Diese sieht in der politischen Erscheinung lediglich die Wirkung der historisch bedeutenden Persönlichkeit und muss folglich die politische Wirksamkeit, wie z.B. die Ministertätigkeit Goethes, als das Resultat des persönlichen Willensausflusses des “geborenen Staatsmannes” interpretieren. Wie erklärt sie sich aber das klägliche Ergebnis dieser Tätigkeit, die Widersprüche in seinen Handlungen, seinen Betrachtungen und gelegentlichen Aeusserungen?

Through the gracious courtesy of the Hungarian authorities I have been permitted to seek for Slavonic material in the Royal Hungarian National Museum. I was gratified to find that owing to a millennium of close contacts between the Magyar and the Slav, Budapest contains much interesting material. During this search I was fortunate enough to come upon the unpublished manuscript which is here reproduced. It was found by itself and was not a part of any collection. For purposes of identification I suggest calling it Slovak Manuscript M.M.C.

In a letter to Wedgewood from Göttingen in 1799, Coleridge said: Before I left England, I had read the book of which you speak [Malthus's first Essay on Population, published in 1798]. I must confess that it appeared to me exceedingly illogical. … My objections to the Essay on Population you will find in my sixth letter at large—but do not, my dear sir, suppose that because unconvinced by this essay, I am therefore convinced of the contrary. … Is the march of the human race progressive, or in cycles?

The “Ode to the West Wind” has received considerable special comment from a number of students of Shelley. H. B. Forman has indicated, in part, its emotional background; Professor H. C. Pancoast has discussed it in relation to the scene and climate in which it was written; W. E. Peck has pointed out parallels of its thought and imagery in Shelley's earlier work; and Professor B. P. Kurtz has recently shown in an admirable study the relation of its theme of life and death and regeneration to the poet's “pursuit of death” throughout his work. There is wanting, however, a detailed account of the sources, the development, and the significance of the poem's central symbols, the Wind and the Leaves, and of the intellectual and emotional disturbances, associated for Shelley with the symbols, which may have been the direct causes of his writing the “Ode.” This study attempts such an account.

It is generally agreed that had either Hyperion or The Fall of Hyperion: A Vision been completed, the result would have been a lofty utterance of Keats' best wisdom in fundamental matters. As to what these matters and this wisdom comprised there has been wide difference of opinion, particularly in respect to Hyperion.* In The Fall the poet, speaking in his own person, gives us some pretty clear hints; in Hyperion we must guess the meaning from the nature of the story and the characters. Hyperion, the longer of the two, is usually held to be the better poem; it is certainly the more cryptic. It has been variously explained as signifying: “the unity of all existence”; “a self-destructive progress toward good … that beauty and not force is the law of this change … light and song passing into union and perfection out of elemental crudeness”; as “the old dynasty of formless powers, driven into oblivion by new creators of form and order”; as “the epic of the Revolutionary Idea”; and as the apotheosis of “disciplined imagination” and “a state in mental stature where all facts, pleasant or otherwise, will appear in their proper perspective.”

What goes into a masterpiece is one thing. The form in which it emerges is another. What happens between, mechanics or miracle, is a third. This note is a summary statement, for a single passage in The Fall of Hyperion, A Vision, of the first of the three alone. It has developed through a series of surprises, as again and again some fact the bearing of which had been unnoticed has proved to be an element in a complex design—a design which has nevertheless achieved the effect of an effortless simplicity. It has to do, in a word, with an extraordinary convergence of impressions which, through their blendings, took form in an imaginative conception of rare beauty—a conception in which five themes interweave, almost as in a great symphonic movement: themes drawn, amazingly, from Greece, Judea, Egypt, the island of Staffa, and the Mount of Purgatory. That, I am well aware, is a statement which may not be lightly made, and warrant for it must be given.

The young romantic poet, Antoine Fontaney, returned to Paris in August, 1831, after a stay in Madrid as private secretary to Count d'Harcourt, the French ambassador. The fragments of his Journal in-time, which were published in 1925, are dated from the month of his return and continue through December, 1836. There have recently come to light fragments of another journal, as yet unpublished, covering the same period and written by a contemporary of Fontaney, Charles Didier, a young Genevan who arrived in Paris from Switzerland on 20 November, 1830. For the period covered by the journal of Fontaney, there are only extracts from the mémoires of Didier, the original manuscript having been destroyed. These fragments fell into the hands of a certain Mlle Benoît, Genevan, who wrote under the name of Berthe Vadier, and she in turn sold them to the Viscount Spoelberch de Lovenjoul. They are now a part of the valuable collection which the latter left to the Institut de France, housed at Chantilly.

In the early stages of his long residence in England after 1843, Romeo Elton, who had earlier occupied the positions of Baptist pastor and Professor of Latin and Greek at Brown University, corresponded with Longfellow. In a letter of December 28, 1846, he remarked: On a late visit to Ambleside Mr. Wordsworth inquired after you, & mentioned the pleasing interview he had with you at Rydal Mount, & passed a deserved eulogium upon your Poems. The Poet Laureate is still vigorous both in mind & body. He & his good wife walked a mile, in preference to riding, one evening to take tea with their daughter. He observed that he was solicited to accept of the title of Poet Laureate four times before he consented. In a volume of his Poems he has written a few verses commendatory of the Queen, for which in return she has sent him her portrait, Prince Albert's, & their children's.

Two forces are always at work in a language—one licentious, tending towards a disregard of regulation and convention; and the other conservative, tending to hold the language within bounds and to keep it neat and tidy. It is customary to think of English in America as being under the influence of the former, because our exuberant linguistic creations very readily attract attention. Yet there is a strong current in the opposite direction, and the pattern of American speech is not complete unless that is taken into account. Among the evidences of it are the recurring suggestions that an “academy” should be founded, with duties similar to those of the Académie française. Such agitation has been incessant in England since the sixteenth century, and the early suggestions in America reflected opinion in the mother country.

Since positivism, with its cut-and-dry concepts of schools and influences has more and more lost its hold on literary criticism, a wide search for new methodological principles has become a distinctive feature of German endeavors. Their name is legion, their enumeration not pertinent. Suffice it to recall Nadler's regional theory, which, when used with discretion, appears as one of the most fruitful contributions. If Nadler bases his groupings on affinities of space, the Generationsprinzip or Altersgruppenprinzip proceeds similarly in terms of time. It has of late claimed increasing attention in Germany, but only very recently begun to attract interest in this country. On the following pages I shall attempt to discuss critically the more important German contributions to this methodological problem.