The thirteenth-century French prose romance, Les Prophécies de Merlin, of which we have no later edition than the sixteenth century, has hitherto received little attention. Notices of some of the manuscripts; appear in the printed catalogues of manuscript-collections, but none convey an idea of the contents of the romance except the description of two manuscripts in the British Museum given by Ward in his Catalogue. Practically only two other writers have entered upon any discussion of the Prophécies:—Sanesi, in the introduction to his edition of the Storia di Merlino, an Italian version of the romance, and Taylor, who in a recent dissertation on political prophecy, substantially repeats the information given by Sanesi. Both of these works are so important for the student of the Prophécies de Merlin that it is a pity to allow certain statements made by the authors to remain unsupplemented by facts which naturally have come to the notice of anyone who, like myself, is preparing an edition of the French text of the Prophécies.

The French critics of our day judge the work of Casimir Delavigne with a severity which I consider unjust. His Messéniennes, of which the first three were published in 1818, made the hearts of his contemporaries thrill with patriotic enthusiasm, and his Parisienne, music by Auber, written during the Revolution of 1830, was, for a time, as popular as the Marseillaise. One will always read with pleasure his fourth and his fifth Messénienne, Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, and Mort de Jeanne d'Arc, and the second of his Nouvelles Messéniennes, Trois Jours de Christophe Colomb.

The expressivness of the progressiv form of the English verb has attracted the attention of many foren grammarians, who briefly but with painstaking care hav endevord to analyze its force. Also more ambitious attempts hav been made to penetrate into its history and meaning. Pessels in his doctor's dissertation The Present and Past Perifrastic Tenses in Anglo-Saxon (1896) has patiently recorded the exampls of the construction in a large number of Old English works. Alfred Åkerlund in his On the History of the Definit Tenses in English (1911) has treated both the older and the modern fases of the development with considerabl penetration. Also a number of other scholars hav delt with different fases of the study or hav investigated the development in particular periods or particular sections of the English speaking territory. Several foren scholars hav studied the progressiv form in other Germanic languages and dialects. A brief treatment of the Gothic progressiv in Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, vol. v, pp. 421-6, by Professor H. Gering is refreshingly suggestiv. In spite of this extensiv literature there remains much to be said, and this paper is offerd as a further contribution to the subject.

The Visión Delectable was composed by Alfonso de la Torre, probably between the years 1430 and 1440, at the request of don Juan de Beamonte, for the instruction of the young Prince Carlos of Viana. This work, which gained its author the epithet of el gran filósofo among his contemporaries, was published about the year 1480 and subsequently appeared in several Castilian editions. It was translated into Catalan in 1484, and into Italian by Domenico Delphini in 1556, without mention of the original author. This Italian version was re-translated into Spanish by a Spanish Jew, Francisco de Cáceres, and published at Frankfort in 1623.

No investigator of the expressed theory of pre-Richardsonian fiction need labor long before he discovers that all the declared aims of writers of prose fiction may probably be reduced to five: desire to entertain the reader, to edify him, to impart information to him, to depict life for him, to arouse his emotions. Gradually, however, if the student analyze these intentions, he will become aware of what might be called a sixth expressed aim—the conscious effort of an author to gain the implicit credence of the reader. Yet this effort is so much more than a mere expressed aim that it is perhaps best described as a striving toward a crude form of realism. As such, and in its effect upon both content and structure of nearly all types of early fiction, it merits close study. And nothing save quotation upon quotation can indicate the hold upon pre-Richardsonian fiction of this effort to force belief—so the movement may well be termed. For the phrase, “conscious effort,” does not here imply any consideration of such points as the grave, matter-of-fact tone of Robinson Crusoe or the carefully-maintained scale of measurement in Gulliver's Travels. Only direct remarks in prefaces—only deliberate interpolations of theory into the body of a narrative—will here be used as evidence.

Marc-Michel Rey, l'éditeur d'Amsterdam, ne fut pas seulement le premier qui imprima, d'après les manuscrits de l'auteur, le Discours sur l'Inégalité la Lettre à D'Alembert, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Le Contrat social, la Réponse à l'Archevêque de Paris, et les Lettres de la Montagne; il fut en outre un ami de Rousseau, fidèle, généreux, sincère. Il a droit, dans la biographie du citoyen de Genève, à une place beaucoup plus grande que celle qu'on lui a accordée jusqu'ici. Nous avons sur lui une quantité de renseignements inédits dans les Lettres de Rey à Rousseau, conservées à la Bibliothèque de la Ville de Neuchâtel, en Suisse. Nous avions d'abord pensé publier telle quelle cette assez volumineuse correspondance; et puis nous avons renoncé parcequ'il nous a paru que les frais seraient disproportionnés avec la valeur d'une partie de ces lettres; et nous nous sommes arrêtés à la façon de procéder dont ces pages donnent un échantillon, c. à. d. draînant tout ce qui s'y trouve de nouveau et d'utile sur chaque sujet particulier.

In an interesting article on the Shepheards Calender, Professor Greenlaw has argued that “outside of a small circle even the authorship of the Shepheards Calender was unknown for a considerable time after its publication, and that the work itself attracted no great attention until the popularity of the Faerie Queene made the earlier poems of the author important” (p. 423). He further speaks of the praise which Sidney bestowed upon the Calender as “singularly cold” (p. 420) and explains the fact on the basis of his theory that Spenser, as well as Sidney and Leicester, was in disgrace at the time of the Alençon negotiations, so that “it would not have been politic for Sidney to praise too highly a work under suspicion in itself and written by a man whom it had been found expedient to send out of the country” (p. 450).