The Irish, it has often been stated, displayed an interest in Nature which in the Dark or Middle Ages was exceptional. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the references to outdoor nature in Older Irish literature with a view to determining their extent and their special characteristics.

Many strikingly divergent views have been advanced as to the structural integrity or looseness of Piers Plowman. Its early critics, to be sure, had little to say upon the subject but there seemed to be general agreement in the view that the work is loosely put together. The long summaries by Morley and others, for example, give small evidence that the critics had detected any strong organizing elements in the design. With the strenuous attack by Professor Manly, a new epoch in the criticism of the work began. Scholars who favored multiple authorship naturally agreed that the poem lacks a well defined plan, and even advanced the view that we have in fact not only from two to five authors but from two to five poems, all upon themes in important respects dissimilar and more or less loosely constructed. While Professor Manly tore Piers' seamless coat asunder, the advocates of a single authorship—somewhat less emphatically, to be sure—found relative coherence in the poem as a whole and discounted the view that the style is excessively digressive. Throughout the controversy the critics dealt largely with textual problems, only occasionally turning to consider the primary subject-matter of the work. The articles of Mensendieck furnished the most important contributions to an interpretation of an underlying plan, especially in regard to the most difficult section, the Vita de Do-Well. His chief concern, however, was with a few theses relating to special passages, so that his studies hardly deal with the larger problem of the enveloping thoughts of the poem, if indeed such thoughts exist. Thus far investigation has resulted in many contradictory views but in no detailed statement upon the cardinal problem in the interpretation of Piers Plowman.

Strange perversions of the story, tending to the disparagement of Criseyde, began almost in her creator's lifetime, and have been repeated and enlarged upon down to the present day. She has been accredited with a versatility in vice that matches the accusations of Catullus against bis lost Lesbia.

Elsewhere I have undertaken to show that the sermons of Chaucer's Pardoner and Parson conform to the practice of the mediaeval pulpit. It remains to examine Chaucer's utterances regarding preachers and preaching, in order to determine the full extent of his knowledge of the ars praedicandi. I shall treat the passages regarding the methods of sermon making, the times and places of preaching, the conduct of the preacher in the pulpit, and finally the audience.

In his discussion of “The Early Printed Editions of the Canterbury Tales” Dr. Greg endeavored to discover the affinities of the manuscript which was used by Caxton in correcting his second edition, printed in 1484. “We have already seen,” he notes, “that C8 was printed from C7, but we have Caxton's own word for it that the text was carefully revised by comparison with a new manuscript, and this claim is amply borne out by the table of collations.” In other words, whatever manuscript copy Caxton may have had in hand for his second edition, he seems to have used it only for corrections where he felt his earlier source to be at fault. From a thorough examination of the variant readings in the first 116 lines, Dr. Greg concluded that it “does not appear possible to determine the affinities of Caxton's second manuscript for the opening of the Knight's Tale.” According to Koch, Caxton's second manuscript is to be assigned to the “Eλ-Dd group,” but Dr. Greg finds that none of the MSS of this group is consistently more successful than others in the Petworth or Corpus groups: “It cannot, then, honestly be said that there is anything to choose between these three groups, and we seem bound to suppose either that Koch's conclusion was invalid or that the relations of the manuscripts are not constant.” Nevertheless, Dr. Greg's investigation is not without results. The manuscript used by Caxton, he concludes, must belong either to the Eλ-Dd, the Petworth, or the Corpus group. Among these he narrows the selection by his table to a comparatively small number of MSS, and he points out that of those which he has examined “A [BM Addit. 35286] does best.” However, the variants shown in lines 70 and 74 of the Knight's Tale “seemingly bar this manuscript.”

It is evident that Chaucer's depiction of and attitude toward the lover were not always the same. In some of his works, notably his earlier, shorter poems, the conception of the lover conforms apparently in all particulars to the conventional pattern of the romantic lover of chivalry. In other works he shows a definite deviation from this concept. What the character of these deviations is, where they occur, and what deductions may be drawn from them, it is the purpose of this paper to indicate. At the outset of our inquiry two possible explanations of this change may be noted: first, the possibility that Chaucer's attitude changed as he grew older either in revolt against or in conformity to the standard ideal; secondly, the possibility that the changes in his attitude were the result of shifting moods instead of modifications produced by age and experience.

There is no doubt about the effectiveness of the long-bow in the hands of a skilful archer. There is no doubt that the skilful employment of the archers, armed with this formidable weapon, contributed largely to the English victories in the Hundred Years War. The long-bow, peculiarly adapted to the foot-soldier rather than the knight or the horseman, seems a fitting national weapon for a nation which, even in the Middle Ages, showed a more democratic temper than did the great Continental powers.

Gröber, in his history of Romance philology, recognizes Fauchet as the man who founded the study of mediaeval French literature “soweit es die ihm zugänglichen Hss. gestatteten.” England had to wait another two hundred years till Sharon Turner did her a like service with his History of England from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest (1795-1805). Fauchet was also a political historian of the mediaeval period, but in this field he had an illustrious predecessor, in the person of Jean Dutillet (d. 1570), lawyer and secretary to Henry II of France. This able man was commissioned by his king to investigate the trésor des chartres; the result was a six-volume report, La France ancienne, du gouvernement des trois estats en l'ordre de la justice de France avec les changements qui sont arrivés. This is the first modern history of a mediaeval period (the Capetian dynasty), and Dutillet followed it with treatises on the Albigensian Crusade and the Gallican Church, which were published after his death. Fauchet, following in Dutillet's footsteps, but on his own initiative, took as his province the first two dynasties of France. Before taking up the subject of his library it may be well to summarize what is known of Fauchet's life and work.

La selva confusa was made readily accessible to students of the Spanish drama twenty years ago by Professor Northup, who edited it from the Madrid MS. As the editor was well aware, the play had long been listed as having been printed in Barcelona in 1633 in a Parte XXVII of Lope de Vega (commonly referred to as one of the “extravagantes”), though no copy either complete or fragmentary of such a volume could be located at the time he prepared his edition. Doubting whether the reported inclusion of the play in the aforesaid parte of 1633 could be regarded as having any authority, Northup attributed La selva confusa to Calderon on the ground that “it is so characteristically Calderonian from beginning to end that no other author could have written it”—an opinion in which he was supported by Schack and Rennert. His most important argument, however, lay in his conviction, shared by other experts, that the Madrid MS, to which Calderon's name is signed, was written by the dramatist's own hand.

As a philosopher and social thinker, Pierre Leroux has been the object of considerable attention in recent years, and his works on political, religious and sociological subjects have been studied by scholars of distinction. Since he was also a writer and critic not without a certain fame in his own day, it seems a little curious that his literary activities and influence have yet to receive full treatment.

Dans la riche floraison d'articles et d'ouvrages qu'a fait naître, en 1923, la célébration du centenaire de Renan, il semble qu'on ait pu discerner un effort tenté enfin par la plupart des critiques français pour étudier Ernest Renan d'un point de vue plus littéraire et ne plus se borner aux partiales et stériles discussions sur son attitude philosophique et religieuse. La critique française accorde ainsi à Renan la place qui lui revient, celle non seulement d'un historien, d'un philosophe, ou d'un “apôtre de la tolérance,” comme se plaisent à l'appeler les pompeux discours officiels-mais aussi d'un écrivain, dont le style et les procédés littéraires méritent d'être analysés d'aussi près que le sont ceux de Flaubert ou de Michelet. Nous voudrions ici nous attacher à l'un de ces aspects de Renan, négligé jusqu'ici, qui intéresse cependant la littérature française en général, en étudiant Renan dans sa critique littéraire.