None of her writings now exists; if any existed, it would be in Latin, and perhaps little better than the earliest poem in English, that of the earliest English poet.

In 1113 nine canons of Laon in northeast France traveled through southern England, raising money to restore their church through miracles wrought by their relics of Mary, and casually giving us the earliest information as to the vogue of the Arthur-tradition after the Norman conquest. At the great nunnery of Wilton in Wilts they were shown the grave of the Venerable Bede (containing a relic perhaps, hardly the body); “prope quern sepulta est inclyta versificatrix, quae proprio nomine vocata est Murier.” Defuncta adhuc loquitur. A feverish patient who had been hoping for a cure from Bede was warned in a dream by “Murier ilia versificatrix” to betake himself to the mother of the Lord, who was descending among them. From all this we can draw several inferences. She enjoyed for whatever reason high fame at Wilton; not only the canon's manner of speaking, but her grave near Bede's, seemingly with her name on it, shows this. They believed also that her repute as a poetess was great and wide. The surprising word versificatrix, probably on her tomb, may show unwillingness for some reason or other to call her poeta or votes; probably also that she excelled especially in the technique of verse, as her correspondents did. Her strange name was unfamiliar to the canons, but is little corrupted if at all: by proprio nomine they tell us that Murier is her proper name and not a distortion of mulier.

It is well known that whoever wrote Piers the Plowman felt bitterly against the administration of the law in his day and never tired of railing against lawyers, but what has not been pointed out is that the references to the law which occur in the three texts of this poem reveal a significant increase in legal knowledge from the A-text to the later texts. Throughout the three texts William scorns the attendants of the courts as a class and arraigns the legal system for its cruelty, its injustice, and its gross favoritism towards the rich. Meed and False use as horses for their trip to Westminster a sheriff and a juryman; jurors, sumners, sheriffs, pleaders of the court of arches, over which the archbishop of Canterbury presided, all run about Meed when she arrives at Westminster; and William warns judges and others to consider what they do, for the Day of Doom will find them out. But William is perhaps most severe when he declares of the sergeants of the law:

pow mihtest beter meten pe myst Ŀ on Maluerne hulles,
pen geten a Mom of heore moup Ŀ til moneye weore schewed.

In 1873 in Trial-Forwords to Minor Poems: Further Additions and Corrections Furnivall called attention to seven records under the heading “Thomas Chaucer, esquire and vintner (?1 man, or 2)”:

[1] 1399-1400. Duchy of Lancaster. Ministers' Accounts. Div. 29, Bundle 144. Payment of £20 to Thomas Chaucer for his two Annuities, due at Easter and Michaelmas, with £10 arrears.

[2] 1406, March 12. City Hustings Roll, 133. Thomas Chausers: Deed of entail on him of City lands, near St. Paul's, by his ‘consanguineus,’ William Chaumbre, cleric.

[3] 1416, February 3. Hustings Roll, 145. Release to Thomas Chaucer of the interest of Thomas Hoo and Agnes his wife in these entaild lands.

[4] 1413, June 7. Conveyance by Geoffrey Dallyng, Citizen and Vintner, and Matilda his wife, to Thomas Chaucer, esquire, and 4 other men, of a reversion in some City houses and land (no doubt as Trustees for some City Corporation).

[5] 1426, December 7. Hustings Roll, 155. Conveyance by William Manby, cleric, to Thomas Chaucers and Richard Wyot, esquires, and 4 others, clerics, of land in the parish of St. Margaret's, Lothbury, in the City of London, seemingly as Trustees for some ecclesiastical Corporation.

[6] 1428, May 20. Hustings Roll, 156. Conveyance by William atte Watir, barber, and John Cole, junior, Citizen and Vintner, of a tenement in Fleet Street to Thomas Chawsere and 12 other men—all 13 being described in one part of the Deed as Citizens and Vintners, evidently as Trustees for the Vintners' Company.

[7] 1428, June 11. Release to Thomas Chawsere and his 12 co-trustees—Thomas Chawsere and another (Lewis John), being called esquires, the rest Citizens and Vintners— of the estate of Thomas Croften, as mortgagee in possession, in the said tenement in Fleet Street.

In the present state of our knowledge it is best to assign the Tractatulus eximii doctoris Henrici de Hassia de arte praedicandi to an auctor incertus. The name Henry of Hesse was borne by two scholars in the fourteenth century; but we have no proof that this is the work of either. They were both professors of theology, both brilliant preachers, and practically contemporary; and the works of one have in the past often been attributed to the other.

“A little less than certain,” is the summing up by Eugène Vinaver of the evidence in regard to the identity of Sir Thomas Malory. The new material recently brought to light by Mr. Edward Hicks has practically established the theory presented by Professor Kittredge in the nineties. Of course, since other contemporaries of the same name have been pointed out, it is still possible that an extraordinary group of coincidences may have led to an erroneous conclusion, but the probabilities of this seem slight. One argument supporting this identification has not as yet been fully presented. This is the fact that the Morte Darthur gives an unmistakable reflection of the impressions which would have stamped themselves on the consciousness of a man living through the events which this Malory of Warwickshire must have experienced. As one of the retinue of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, he would have had his youthful enthusiasm enlisted in the efforts of Henry IV to establish his royal title and quell rebellions against it; he would have had a share in the continental victories of Henry V and have gained a vivid impression of the terrible conditions in France resulting from the savage feuds of the Burgundians and Armagnacs; he would have witnessed the crowning of Henry VI in Paris and probably have been on duty in Rouen at the burning of Jeanne d'Arc.

Three works attributed to Robert Greene, all published posthumously, have served as the basis for almost all that has been written about the life of that interesting Elizabethan author; portions of these works have been accepted as pure autobiography, and the information contained in such passages has been used to confirm similar details, apparently also autobiographical, in the earlier works. The hazard involved in the use, for purposes of biography, of material contained in the novels of Greene, or of any other writer of fiction, should be obvious to any modern critic; but the earlier scholars were evidently unaware of the danger.

For a number of years Francis Meres, the glorifier of Shakespeare, has been puffed as a classical scholar. The translated quotations from innumerable classical authors in his Palladis Tamia as well as his references to many recondite poets of antiquity in the celebrated section on poetry have misled many scholars. One of the chief sinners in this respect is the late Sir Sidney Lee, who on at least two occasions called attention to Meres's powers as a classical scholar. Even the able American scholar, Professor C. F. Tucker Brooke, has on one occasion lumped Meres and Gosson together as puritans and classicists. Others who have attributed various epithets to Meres as “careful,” “learned,” “scholar,” “classical critic,” “Professor at Oxford,” and “Professor at Cambridge” are myriad; and one can locate these phrases through the index rerum of many works on Elizabethan literature. There are, indeed, some scholars who have had reasonable doubts; but as yet there has been no definite effort to investigate the matter for the truth. In the course of this paper, I shall point out the sources of Mere's classical allusions, and I trust that the shallowness of his knowledge in this respect will stand as a caveat regarding his evidence in general.

It was Coleridge who so definitively characterized Sir Thomas Browne as “a hunter of oddities and strangenesses.” There is no key which fits his temper so perfectly. He was, his life long, an indefatigable searcher after what was unusual, in his reading, in his friends' experience, and in his own. Clearly it is this penchant for the exceptional, this probing for the bizarre, the exotic, which accounts for his lively interest in foreign countries, notably those which were least like his own—an interest attested by the fact that so generous a portion of his reading concerned other lands.

The early reactions of Englishmen to the famous works of Jean Jacques Rousseau have never been adequately studied. Jacques Pons, Louis J. Courtois, and Margaret Hill have been the only writers to present well-documented studies of any large phase of the subject; but their attention has been confined to the impact of Rousseau's pedagogical theories and to various aspects of his visit in England during the years 1766–67. Even the bibliography of Théophile A. Dufour is very incomplete in its citations of English editions. Under these circumstances, authors have generally taken refuge in assertions of tremendous and universal influence emanating from Rousseau, or they have surmised as to the effect of his works in England. The present work undertakes to provide a basis for more definite conclusions. The numerous assertions of the impetus which Rousseau is alleged to have given to the “romantic” revival of the late eighteenth century are familiar, and we know already that the diffusion of his works in England was wide. Furthermore, the first production of the French writer to excite attention there was the Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750); and, although several works intervened, including the Devin du village (1752), Narcisse (1752), and the Lettre sur la musique française (1753), the next writing to excite comment was the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité (1755). Thus, although Rousseau's diffusion and popularity in England were due chiefly to La nouvelle Héloïse, the two Discours mark the beginning of his reputation in that country. Furthermore, the theses of these two productions have been closely associated with Rousseau. The insistence in the first Discours upon the baneful effect of modern civilization was also closely allied with the praise of primitive life in the second, and the designation of private property as the source of human inequality. Moreover, both of these productions questioned the justice of existing institutions; and Roussean himself maintained that, with Émile, they form a single entity.

Den Märchengestalten eine tiefere Bedeutung zu verleihen, wie es Goethe mit seinen Königsgestalten tat, wie man sie deshalb auch gern hinter den andern Gestalten des Goetheschen Märchens sucht oder ahnt—das wird für Novalis das Mittel zur Hebung des Märchens auf ein höheres Niveau: Ein höheres Märchen, sagt er in einem Fragment, wird es nun, wenn, ohne den Geist des Märchens zu verscheuchen, irgend ein Verstand (Zusammenhang, Bedeutung usw.) hineingebracht wird. Sogar nützlich könnte vielleicht ein Märchen werden (iii, 20). So bewegt sich sein Märchen der Allegorie zu.

Joseph Fawcett was one of the English revolutionary radicals who provided the intellectual milieu in which the youthful Wordsworth and Coleridge moved and wrote. His name has fallen for several reasons into an undeserved obscurity. He had no biographer among his contemporaries who might have collected pertinent material while it was most readily available. But, at any rate, his ideas could have won only a very small audience in the years immediately following his death in 1804, even before which his reputation was mercilessly dealt with like that of other radicals. Besides, his personal eccentricities threw into shadow the more solid portions of his fame. In spite of the fact that he was the intellectual godfather of two of the leading thinkers of his age, William Godwin and William Hazlitt, the bulk of the literary memorials which they have left of him is slight. We have, therefore, an exasperatingly small body of facts about Fawcett's life, but enough is known about his opinions to give us a fairly distinct portrait of his mind.

There is abundant evidence for the assertion that Shelley at one time thought of devoting all his talents to the study of metaphysics. On August 1, 1811, in a letter to Stockdale, Shelley writes:

My studies have been, since my writing it [St. Irvyne], of a more serious nature. I am at present engaged in completing a series of moral and metaphysical essays.

Tracing originals for the characters of fiction is unquestionably one of the most dangerous of scholarly undertakings, and should not be attempted without copious insistences that no good novelist is likely to have derived a prominent character entirely from one individual. On the other hand, if a particular character stands out in a novelist's work as exceptionally vivid and human—indeed, as exceeding in plausibility any previous fictitious character of the same general type; and if the novelist is known to have used living prototypes for some of the other characters in the same book; and finally, if it is demonstrable that the novelist was well acquainted with the traits of the person who is suggested as his original, then the imputation deserves some attention. On these premises, I venture to propose a living model for Thackeray's most famous character, Becky Sharp.

Some years ago Mr. T. J. Wise said that “Many of Conrad's books may, in fact, be studied profitably in three published states: (1) the serial state (England and America), (2) the partly-revised state from the serial (America), and (3) the finally-revised state (England).” He suggested that a collation of the texts of the magazines with those of the books “would yield very remarkable results.” I have attempted a collation of six of Conrad's short stories: (a) “An Outpost of Progress,” “The Lagoon,” and “Karain,” published with two other stories in Tales of Unrest (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898); and (b) “Youth,” “Heart of Darkness,” and “The End of the Tether,” published in Youth (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902). This collation does not include the American serial and book texts. I have found only “Hearts of Darkness” published serially in America. Moreover Conrad paid little attention to his American editions. For example, of the first American edition of Tales of Unrest Conrad wrote: “Uncorrected by me. Probably differences of text from 1st English edon.” Of the first American edition of Youth Conrad wrote: “1st U.S. edition printed from unrevised proofs. Probably much nearer the Maga text than the 1st Eng. edition.” Mr. Richard Curie declares:

Conrad always regarded his English book-text as the one that mattered. He was not much concerned about perfecting his text for serial publication and not greatly concerned, even, if the American book-text was not his finally revised one.

It does not often happen that a language form created by conscious deliberation and planning wins the warm support and widespread acceptance which has fallen to the lot of New Norse, the creation of Ivar Aasen (1813–1896). A large body of serious literature has grown up in this artificial common denominator of Norwegian dialects; possibly a fourth of the school-children of Norway receive their chief instruction in it. Although New Norse is far from its goal of supremacy, it is a factor of the utmost significance in Norwegian history, and a phenomenon of great interest to students of language and literature.

The earliest detailed study of Aasen's linguistic practice is found in Johan Storm's polemic pamphlet Det nynorske Landsmaal. That brilliant scholar here applied his wit and ingenuity to proving that New Norse (Landsmaal) as written, was not and could not be a language, because of its inevitable tendency to crumble up into the dialects of which it was created. To this end he analyzed in some detail the language of the various New Norse writers, among them Aasen. His purpose did not, however, involve an exhaustive study of Aasen's works, many of which were then unknown or scattered. Hence his classification was inadequate and at times definitely incorrect. He divided Aasen's New Norse into an older form, represented by Prøver af Landsmaalet (1853) and Fridtjofs Saga (1858), and an intermediary form used in Ervingen (2d ed., 1874), Heimsyn (1875) and Symra (3d ed., 1875). But this rough division (based chiefly on the change in 1858 from dan, dat to den, det) gives us no conception whatever of the gradual steps by which Aasen passed from form to form and the experimentation out of which his completed New Norse norm was shaped.

Various attempts have been made to express the difference which is felt between French and English accent; for example, French accent has frequently been described as a caress, while English accent has been compared to a blow. Such rather impressionistic terminology has been found suggestive and helpful in teaching, but it represents an attempt to treat the complex phenomenon of accentuation as if it were more simple than it is. In order to make a quantitative study of accent, it is necessary to measure the various elements which constitute it. The object of the present paper is to describe the method used in making a comparative study of the nature of accent in French and English and to present a summary of the results of this investigation.

The most significant aspect of the intellectual attitude of the twentieth century appears to be the fulfillment of Nietzsche's prophecy that the last achievement of the Occidental intellect will be to question all its achievements and, in the end, to doubt its own existence. Philosophers and logicians, as well as physicists, seem to have arrived at a state of extreme resignation, while those psychologists who can be called scientists have at least their moments of scepticism. It is hardly necessary to refer to Spenglerian pessimism, to what H. Leisegang writes about the crisis and catastrophe of logic, or to Einstein's views, as expressed, for example, in his speech given in honor of Planck in 1918, in which he pointed out the current tendency to seek a simplified synoptic view of the world—a picture comfortable to human nature—and to overcome the world by replacing it with this picture. How little psychology has as yet revealed, or can ever hope to reveal, can be gleaned from C. K. Ogden's enlightening account in The Meaning of Psychology.