No observant person can, I think, have failed to note of late years a certain increasing hesitation and perplexity in regard to the true function of literature in studies. Indeed, there are reasons not a few for thinking that we are preparing for one of those revisions and restatements of the general conception of what we should try to get from literature, of which we have several examples in the past. I do not mean merely that our literary taste is changing, or that we are passing from one set of literary admirations to another. Such lesser variation is incessantly going on. Classicism yields to romanticism, romanticism to realism, and this to something else, in an unbroken round of change. But these minor modifications of feeling and opinion about literature may easily take place without any material disturbance of the general estimate of the nature of literatnre or of the attitude of men's minds towards it. My neighbor may think that bad in books which I think good, and yet we may both seek in our reading to satisfy essentially the same needs, intellectual or aesthetic.

The change, however, to which I have reference, is of a far profounder kind. It affects the very substance of men's thought about books, substitutes for one form of promise and enticement to the reading of them another and quite different appeal, and necessarily carries with it new aims and methods in the study of them. I shall, perhaps, make my meaning clearer on this point by some brief illustration.

Strangely enough the word “weird “has come into modern English entirely from its use in Macbeth. The word occurs six times in this play as usually printed: five times in the expression “weird sisters” (I, III, 32, and V, 8; II, I, 20; III, IV, 133; IV, I, 136), and once in the phrase “the weird women “(III, I, 2). Stranger still, “weird “does not appear at all in the only authoritative text of the tragedy, that of the first folio. In that edition the word is “weyward” in the first three passages in the play, and “weyard” in the last three. It was Theobald, the “dearest foe” of Pope, who saw that Shakespeare must have written “weird,” and that this rare word had been changed because of “the ignorance of the copyists.” Modern editors accept the suggestion of Theobald; but I believe that the full force of the word “weird “is often unapprehended. even by special students of the play.

In an article, entitled Nibelungensage und Nibelungendichtungen, which appeared in the Preussische Jahrbücher a little over a year ago (October, 1894), Dr. A. Schmidt, after a summary of the entire Nibelungensage and a comparison of this Sage with the form it assumes in the Nibelungenlied, makes the following statement: “Though it would be madness after Homer to reconstruct anew the Iliad and Odyssey in poetic form, after the mediaeval author it is really a religious duty of German poets who have the interests of their nation at heart to recast into higher forms the imperfectly coined Nibelungen treasure.” In these words the essayist expresses not merely a personal opinion, but echoes the sentiments of many other German critics, and above all of over forty authors who, with over fifty different productions in drama and epic poetry, have tried to recast into ‘higher forms’ the Nibelungensage as a whole or in part. This large number of attempts includes three or four dramatic sketches, but does not include the ‘lower forms’ of lyric and ballad poetry, or of prose narrative. After the clear and thorough discussion of Nibelungen dramas by Professor Carl Weitbrecht, it might seem unnecessary to discuss this part of the general subject any further, but there are certain aspects of this question which he has not touched upon which it is the purpose of this paper to consider; and, while there is complete agreement with the views advanced by Prof. Weitbrecht, yet the attempt will be made to show that his conclusions do not warrant the same approval.

In the summer of 1895 I had occasion to examine a number of German mss. in the library at Maihingen, belonging to Prince Karl of Oettingen-Wallerstein.