cyninges Ðegn,
guma gilphlæden, gidda gemyndig,
sē Ðe ealfela ealdgesegena
worn gemunde —word ōÐer fand
sōÐe gebunden— secg eft ongan
sīÐ Bēowulfes snyttrum styrian,
ond on spēd wrecan spel gerāde,
wordum wrixlan; wēlhwylc gecwæÐ,
Ðæt hē fram Sigemunde(s) secgan …
(Beowulf, ll. 867b–875)

GRENDEL is overcome. The warriors who urged their horses along the trail of bloody tracks are returning to Heorot. A poet-warrior sings, adding the name of Grendel's conqueror to the roll of Germanic heroes. The author of Beowulf gives a brief but precious account of the principles of his poetry. One word finds the other, rightly bound, and there is a varying with words. The inevitable alliteration of Old English poetry, as in the second line above, is obviously the most conspicuous way in which one word found the other, rightly bound. Likewise, varying in words aptly describes the principle underlying the “Kenning” or epic epithet. This principle of style consists in the repetition of words or phrases to round out a full poetic picture by presenting an idea from varying points of view. Examples are cyninges Ðegn, guma gilphlæden, and secg, all of which refer to the poet-warrior in the quoted passage.

One is to infer from this characterization that Beowulf is exceedingly strong. Perhaps one can learn no more. For there may be no significance in the facts that the dragon is fifty feet long (l. 3042), that Beowulf rules the Geats fifty years (ll. 2209, 2733), that Hroþgar rules the Danes fifty years before the coming of Grendel (l. 1769), and that Grendel's dam holds the moors fifty years (l. 1498). And there may even be no connection between these facts except that Beowulf, Hroþgar, and Grendel's dam rule their domains for a very long time and that the dragon is a very long beast. Anything which approaches thirty or fifty in dimension, conventionally approaches the marvellous. Accordingly Deor says (ll. 18–19):

Đeodric ahte þritig wintra
Mæringa burg …

One present-day student of that fascinating product of English medievalism, The Owl and the Nightingale, concludes his survey of the so-called “modern phase of discussion” of its problems with mingled approval and dissent. Hearty appreciation of the range and resourcefulness of the recent contributions of two American scholars to our knowledge of the sources and background of the poem contends with an ever-deepening conviction of the futility of their arguments in favor of an earlier date and environment than any hitherto suggested. May a persistent heretic in the face of their somewhat differing opinions cite first specific reasons for the rejection of these and then give his own grounds for yet another conclusion?

Considerable interest has been manifested of late regarding Chaucer's rhetoric. This was occasioned by the French medievalist, Edmond Farai, when in 1924 he edited five poetical treatises which had circulated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Professor Manly in 1926 in a lecture delivered to the British Academy, concluded that the poet had in all probability studied these texts, and that much of his technical art was learned from them, rather than from his French models, as had formerly been supposed. Two years later, Professor Baldwin climaxed his Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic with a concluding chapter on Chaucer's technique, which records the poet's reaction to such doctrines as these works contain. During the past year, PMLA has published three articles related either to Chaucerian rhetoric or the medieval manuals. Two of these, following the thesis of Manly, assume quite definitely that Faral's treatises exerted a primary influence upon the mind of Chaucer. All these studies are based upon a comparison of only the Chaucerian works and the Latin manuals. Consideration has not been given to the poet's source material as a third element of correlation.

Nicholas Bishop was a well-to-do brewer of Oxford. As he tells us in the first passage printed below, he was the son of a citizen of that place, Bartholomew Bishop, and of his wife, Isabelle, the daughter and heir of Walter Gregory of Watford. He was a litigious man. In furtherance of his actions at law, he compiled with his own hand a volume of annotated transcripts of deeds from various sources, now Cambridge University MS. Dd. xiv. 2. This volume, although mainly in Latin, contains some very interesting specimens of Oxford English, namely: two passages concerning a litigation of Bishop's with the Abbot of Oseney, a version of the Short Metrical Chronicle made to conform more or less to Bishop's dialect, and a series of historical notes following it, presumably composed by him. A note in the manuscript gives its date:

During the latter half of Henry VIII's reign various English presses issued vernacular editions of many of Erasmus' writings. The most popular was a version, published first toward the end of 1533 and frequently thereafter, of the Enchiridion militis Christiani. This treatise had a large circulation throughout Europe. Appearing first in 1503 (or 1504), it received for a decade or so no great attention, but after 1515 edition followed edition in rapid succession. Between 1519 and 1542 it was issued in translation, usually in at least two versions, in eight different languages.

Spenser-Sidney scholarship has for some time been concerned with the problem of the sources of the Mutabilitie Cantos, of the Garden of Adonis passage in the Faerie Queene, and of the Pamela-Cecropia episode in the third book of the Arcadia, with reference to their expression of natural philosophy. Miss Albright, Miss Wilson somewhat briefly, Miss Whitney, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Levinson have rejected as vaguely remote, or have tried to break down completely, the theory of definite influence of Lucretius. These scholars have, in effect, built up a kind of vari-colored stone wall against Lucretius and against all the emphasis of Mr. Greenlaw's careful researches, tip-toeing around the wall to Empedocles by way of Du Plessis Mornay, and then coming back again to Cicero in his De Natura Deorum, or to Ovid, or, finally substantially neutralizing the whole exhibit by the neutral-toned tendency to fall back upon the theory of general Renaissance culture and commonplaces as the only determinative source of influence. Must we, however, leave the problem at this point? Or is there a very definite, direct source?

In the first three books of the Faerie Queene Spenser is primarily interested in the virtue of the individual as such: his holiness, his temperance, his chastity—the harmony of the whole nature controlled by reason. Beginning with the Fourth Book he turns to a more definite study of the individual in relation to other individuals. With his classical background it was reasonable that he should put friendship next. Aristotle had upheld the thesis that all social relationships grow out of friendship, and both Plato and his Neo-Platonic followers had expounded a philosophy essentially consistent with this. In the present paper I shall endeavor to show that in the Fourth Book Spenser conceives of friendship as the operation in the world of man of a principle of cosmic love, a conception which he bases on the Hymn to Venus taken from Lucretius; and that there is a striking correspondence between the concord-discord antithesis in the Fourth Book and the conflict in Mutabilitie, a correspondence which not only throws light on the poet's interests in the Fourth Book but also helps to date Mutabilitie.

The main object of this study is to vindicate Spenser of the implied charge of pedantry in one of the most brilliant of his episodes. His Odyssean voyage during the last decade and more among the pages of scholarly journals has left him cast now on the shores of simple Lucretian materialism, now in the bog of abstruse Neo-Platonism. He has even been observed steering a consciously charted course between opposing rocks of dilemma, to say nothing of having sought refuge and instruction among the pre-Socratic Greeks. It is hoped that he may be returned to native English shores. Should the conclusions of this article be epitomized in the statement that Spenser was a second-rate philosopher, that he was a popularizer of already popularized material, no great loss is suffered. His metaphysical poetry may still be read, its simple and direct message gathered, and its charm enjoyed without a ruinous gloss ranging from Empedocles to the refiners of Platonism. Another advantage of simplifying the doctrines of a poet who meant them to be simple and direct is that, when considered in the light of Spenser's naïvete, they lack that inconsistency and puzzling quality so often discerned by commentators. So viewed, the Garden of Adonis, besides losing its character as a technical history of philosophy, may perhaps be regarded no longer as a catalogue of fallacies.

When we remember the subtle irregularity of Milton's rhymes in Lycidas, and the frequency with which he introduces rhyme into the blank verse of Comus and Samson Agonistes, it is less surprising that there should be rhymes in Paradise Lost than that they should not have been noticed. That they are deliberate rhymes needs little proof, for it is obvious that an ear as fine as Milton's must have heard any rhyme which can be heard by the ordinary reader, and this examination grew out of the vague impression of rhyme given by certain passages in Paradise Lost, and the presence of a few obvious rhymes, such as:

Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound
Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet,
Built like a Temple, where Pilasters round (i. 711–713)
This horror will grow milde, this darkness light,
Besides what hope the never-ending flight (ii. 220–221)
Allegeance to th'acknowledg'd Power supream?
And thou sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seam, (iv. 956–957)
That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie
Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.
Some times towards Eden which now in his view (iv. 24–27)

Mrs. Behn, like Alexander Pope, has almost succeeded in leaving for posterity an embellished and retouched portrait of herself. In her works, especially in Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt, she inserted a number of passages purporting to be autobiographical. These autobiographical bits deal almost exclusively with a period twenty years previous to the publication of the novels in 1688, a period long before Mrs. Behn had attained any literary reputation, so that a little judicious alteration of the details of her life had every chance of passing unnoticed.

Scholarly biographers of James Thomson have shown a tendency to credit the statements made by Voltaire in the Preface to his tragedy, Socrate, which he represented to be a translation of an English original by Thomson given to the supposed translator, one “Mr. Fatema,” by “Mr. Littleton” when the latter was on a visit to Holland. Morel attempted to identify this play with a tragedy which was undertaken by Thomson in 1731: “Il se pourrait bien que ce fût cette même tragédie de ‘Socrate’ dont Rundle lui avait inspiré l'idée, et que plus tard d'autres amis, Mr. Pitt …, Mr. Lyttelton et Gilbert West lui conseillèrent d'abandonner.” Macaulay believes that Socrate was the drama “suggested by Mrs. Sandys” which Thomson referred to in a letter to Rundle in December, 1736. He admits that Voltaire's preface is a “piece of mystification”; but adds:

In 1779 James Dodsley published a slight piece of fiction entitled Columella; Or, The Distressed Anchoret. The author of that work was the Rev. Richard Graves of Claverton, who kept his name from the title page, preferring to figure there as “the author of The Spiritual Quixote,” a clever satire on the Methodists by which he had won attention six years before. This latter work went through four editions before 1800 and was deservedly revived in a handsome reprint for the modern reader in 1926, but the only edition of Columella was the first. Special interest attaches to Columella today, however, because of its connection with the poet, William Shenstone. Graves and Shenstone had been intimate friends. Their friendship began in 1732 when both were undergraduates of Pembroke College, Oxford, and endured with great warmth of affection until Shenstone's death in 1763, when Graves found himself an executor of his friend's will. During Graves's lifetime (he lived on until 1804, one of the few nonagenarians in the history of English literature) it was apparently known that the character of Columella had been created in the image of Shenstone, for the fact was mentioned in the obituary notice of Graves in the Gentleman's Magazine? That interesting point has been duly remarked by recent writers, but as yet nobody has demonstrated how startlingly close the portrait is. In a like manner identifications of minor characters in Columella have been mentioned, but the suggestions, unsupported by proof, have remained only good intuitions. I propose in the following paragraphs to discuss the origins of certain characters in Columella, devoting special attention to showing that Columella himself is a highly intimate portrait of Shenstone.

The attempts to define and to arrive at a standard of taste lie at the heart of the aesthetic inquiries that were being carried on in eighteenth-century England. That such inquiries, by examining certain fundamental assumptions of traditional æsthetics, exerted an influence on the theory and practice of literary criticism, is a commonplace. But why and how this influence was felt has not been explained. Its importance can be gauged by the fact that within a period of twenty years several of the ablest minds in England and Scotland, including Burke, Hume, Hogarth, Reynolds, Kames, and Gerard—most of them interested in literary criticism—were focussed upon the problem of taste. It was not a coincidence that in the years from 1750 to 1770, when the search for a standard of taste was at its height, the old assumptions of literary criticism were crumbling and the new “romantic” principles were being set forth, sometimes timidly and sometimes boldly, by the Wartons, Young, Hurd, Kames, and many others. The relation between these two phenomena is the subject of this study.

Smollett's use of life and scenes in the British navy in the early 1740's in his first novel has long been recognized as an original and important contribution to the materials of English fiction. Chapters 24–38 of Roderick Random with their abundant detail, revealing so graphically the brutalities, disease, and official incompetence involved in the conduct of naval affairs in the expedition to Carthagena 1740–41, have not only impressed Smollett's critics but have offered a firm point of departure for the conjectures of his biographers. Yet although these chapters are successful as realistic art, and suggestive in their biographical implications, there always arises the difficult question of how much of this vivid writing is historical fact and how much is fiction. This question must be the concern of critics in determining Smollett's method in the selection of his materials, and it is central to his biography.

On a chilly September morning in 1827 a young man bearing the humble name of Chardon entered a bookshop on the Quai des Augustins. Plucking up his courage, he announced to two busy partners: “I am the author of a French historical novel, in the manner of Walter Scott. Its title is The Archer of Charles the Ninth. I propose that you should handle the work.” But the busy partners were just lamenting that the great popularity of Scott's novels was prejudicial to their own trade. They rejected the proposal of Chardon, who took his wares to a sly full-bodied publisher called Doguereau. To him the budding author described his novel as “dans le genre de Walter Scott” and developed its theme as concerned with the civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. Doguereau made a paltry offer which was declined. L'Archer de Charles IX, after many vicissitudes, after being revised or puffed by various friends of Chardon, was published by a third firm—at a dead loss.

Charles Baudelaire was born April 9, 1821; Gustave Flaubert, December 12 in the same year. Their families belong to a cultivated and wealthy bourgeois class which offers to them all the advantages of such a milieu. They grow up during the time that French Romanticism attains the quintessence of its literary expression; their intelligence is stimulated by their reading of Victor Hugo's dramas, those of Alexandre Dumas, Sr., and of Théophile Gautier's poetry. At school, both are mediocre students who excel each in one scholastic exercise—Flaubert is awarded first prize in history, Baudelaire third prize in Latin poetry. They are too preoccupied with literature, too conscious of the first awakenings of their latent genius. Having no respect for their professors, they spend their time as best suits their fancy. Flaubert writes letters to his cherished friend, Ernest Chevalier: Lundi soir, 15 avril 1839, classe du sire Amyot, théorie des éclipses, lequel a l'esprit bougrement éclipsé.

In his essay on Hamlet and Don Quixote, Ivan Tourguéniev stated that no man aspires to be called a Quixote. The Russian novelist did not presurmise the dream of Miguel de Unamuno. If the Knight-Errant makes clear that his duty binds him to protect the weak, relieve the oppressed, and punish the bad, Unamuno accepts and practices his creed. But Unamuno, being by far more quixotic, than Cervantes, interprets the psychology of his hero, adapting it to his own way of feeling and thinking. In his work Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, he says, in relation to another of his masterpieces, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho: