One of the many interesting stories current in the Middle Ages is that of a young man who puts his marriage ring on the finger of a statue of Venus and is surprised to find that the image, taking the matter au sérieux, jealously forbids him the embraces of his earthly bride. Its relation to a large group of miracles of the Virgin has been frequently noticed (for example, by Mussafia and by Ward and Herbert ); it has received some attention from students of Mérimée as the source of his Vénus d'Ille; and Massmann, in his edition of the Kaiserchronik (1849-1854) collected a large number of variants (together with an almost equal number of faulty references). But Graf is the only scholar who has studied it in any detail, and his treatment is far from complete. I propose here to bring together the scattered materials of previous students, both of the story of the ring-betrothal to the Venus statue and of the Virgin miracle. I shall add no new versions of either story, but I shall discuss the former from a point of view radically different from Graf's, and shall endeavour to follow the tale from its obscure beginnings before William of Malmesbury, through its adaptation as a miracle of the Virgin, down to some of its present literary forms.

Two modern spectacles have become so familiar that we find it difficult to imagine even a prehistoric state without them: the author stalking a publisher, and the play treated as pure literature. There are, indeed, many plays—and even some successful ones—that do not reach print; but the closet-drama is established, and unquestioned as a literary form, in prose as well as verse. Hence it is difficult to visualize conditions that no more than three hundred years ago were the reverse of these: the play regarded as mere stage directions, not at all comparable with pure literature in prose or verse; and the publisher pursuing, satyr-like, the nymph-coy author for something to print. Yet the understanding of these surprising conditions is a pre-requisite to any establishing of Shaksperean or other Elizabethan texts, especially plays; for on it rests finally the main question of authenticity. A short survey of the following four aspects of Elizabethan publishing may help to show both their universality and their significance.

Literary historians, in characterizing the pamphlet literature of the English Civil War and the early years of the Restoration have, as a rule, contented themselves with the statement that much of the prose of the period was written in dialogue. It is the purpose of this paper to give some idea of the varying popularity of the dialogue during the period from 1640 to 1700, to characterize the commonest type more precisely than has been customary, and briefly to suggest its possible relation to English predecessors and to foreign works, ancient and contemporary.