Commonsense is a bourgeois virtue, anathema to the temperamental, a red rag to the radical. It disgusts and terrifies the aesthete: it reminds him almost too baldly of the unlegalized reasoning of his middle-class readers. The common-sense reason of the populace, sometimes personified in a critic, hounds the eccentric genius on to wilder vagaries than he would have dared to indulge in unpursued. And, in its turn, abstract reason, fearing an invasion of its prerogatives, occasionally bursts its traditional leash of self-restraint and leaps bare-fanged upon its victims. But be the critic what he may, Time, the most inexorable of critics, judges an author at last by the standards of commonsense. Reason, experience, and intellectual honesty are its component parts: sanity is its ideal.

Wordsworth's relation to Italy has been a subject rather neglected in the annals of English poets who have known and loved “the land of lands,” and have left us memorial records of the beauty of Italy's blue sky, the golden clarity of her air, the soft greenness of her trees, and the fame of her poets and artists. Biographers of Wordsworth have so emphasized his relation to France that the general reader is hardly aware that the poet had crossed the Alps, both in body and in spirit. He belongs with Chaucer, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Milton, Gray, Goldsmith, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Landor, Clough, and the Brownings, all of whom will ever be associated with memories of Italy. An attempt to trace the history of his acquaintance with Italy, may, it is hoped, show that he had for things Italian a really life-long sympathy. Moreover, the study may help to dispel some lingering superstitions about Wordsworth's insularity. Wordsworth was one of the most assiduous travellers of all the English poets except Byron. The difficulty of travel in the early nineteenth century should be remembered in considering the distances he traversed. He knew France, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and various regions of England, including every inch of the Lake Country.

Biographical sketches give us Thomas Campbell's opinion of Wordsworth in only a general way. Carruthers, for instance, informs us in a magazine article that he cared little for the Lake Poets, but considered Wordsworth greatly superior to the others. Again, some reminiscences contributed by an acquaintance to Beattie's biography of the poet make very nearly the same statement,—namely that Wordsworth was as much above Southey as some other poets above Wordsworth. These reminiscences, however, may be likewise from Carruthers, and there is no evidence as to the date at which Campbell expressed either opinion. In 1842, on the other hand, at a breakfast to which Campbell invited Rogers and Moore among other guests, Wordsworth was said to be a great poet. Who expressed the view and whether Campbell agreed with it is not made clear, but since we have just seen that he approved of Wordsworth, it seems likely that he concurred in the opinion.

The Borderers does not, and cannot, rank high among Wordsworth's poems. It is curiously lacking in the glamor, the color, the atmosphere of a remote and picturesque past by which the romantic poets are wont to impart a persuasive verisimilitude to their pictures of the Middle Ages. The characters of the play have slight individuality, and in spite of the calamities that befall them, they evoke no sympathy. Although the poem exhibits intellectual power in the handling of a philosophical problem and a finely whittled precision in the statement of ideas, yet these robust merits are unhappily wedded to the mawkish ineptitude of contemporary literature. The hero, Marmaduke, is the humanitarian freebooter of Schiller's Robbers; however, to do him justice, he does not, like Karl Moor, support young men at college with his tainted money. Herbert and Idonea present a lachrymose picture of virtue in distress; the blind old man is a sentimentalized Oedipus, and his daughter is a Greuze maiden, a girl with a broken pitcher, who has stepped out of her frame to go a-wandering; her angelic perfection only exasperates. Even the “little dog, tied by a woollen cord,” that guides the wandering Herbert, has a sentimental pedigree; he is the faithful animal of current novels—the descendant, for example, of virtuous, old Trusty, the “shag house-dog” of The Man of Feeling.

To live in a day when conceptions of poetry were undergoing rapid change was for Samuel Taylor Coleridge both an advantage and a misfortune. Perhaps his own work, which greatly advanced the change, gained a significance it could not have had in any other period. Yet by the same token, it was generally unappreciated by his contemporaries, inclined as they were to the old, narrow views of what constituted poetic merit. Lack of adequate criticism throughout almost the whole of Coleridge's lifetime is thus not difficult to explain. Nor is it a matter of mystery that two of his young disciples, John Sterling and Henry Nelson Coleridge, appear to have been, before his death in 1834, the only critics who approached his poetry with the same sympathetic effort at understanding that Coleridge himself employed when he criticised the work of others.

On December 7, 1920 there was sold at the Anderson Galleries in New York an interesting collection of Milton documents hitherto entirely unknown to the poet's biographers. These documents, which contain the record to two financial transactions in which Milton was concerned in the years 1657/58 and 1665, were submitted to me for examination by their purchaser, Mr. Rosenbach of Philadelphia, and it is through his courtesy that I am enabled to present an analysis of their contents. Their history previous to their sale in America has not been divulged, but it is to be presumed that they have been preserved as a part of the evidence of title to certain properties described in them, and there is not the slightest question as to their genuineness.

In his tractate Of Education Milton gives astronomy as one of the subjects that the properly educated boy should study. He would first have his pupils “learn in any modern author the use of the globes,” and then having mastered the elements of the subject, proceed to the reading not only of poems abounding in astronomy, but also of those wholly astronomical, such as the Astronomicon of Manilius and the Phaenomena of Aratus.

In the following pages are presented hitherto unprinted texts of the Miracles of Our Lady in Middle English Verse, together with some discussion of the groups in which they appear, with particular regard to their relationship to the principal Latin collections of Miracles of the B. V. In considering the antecedents and the existing relationships of the Middle English versions, one must take as a starting point the results achieved by Mussafia and Ward in their monumental studies of the Legends of the Virgin, which deal especially with the Latin collections, from which presumably the English texts derive, either directly or indirectly. Though the researches of these scholars have been constantly drawn upon in discussing the materials here assembled, it has not seemed necessary in every case to trouble the reader by citing page references to their works, since the material contained in them is so systematically arranged that it is easily accessible. In citing MSS. containing English texts of the Miracles, I have availed myself of the MS descriptions contained in Carleton Brown's Register of Middle English Religious and Didactic Verse.

Fontane confessed on several occasions to a feeling of uneasiness in the presence of scholars, for he was always aware of the irregularity and meagerness of his education and of the consequent gaps in his knowledge. Nor did he believe that he deserved an eminent position as a critic. On the other hand, his long experience as journalist and as successful novelist, together with his wide acquaintance with European literature, make the critical utterances of the mature author particularly significant. But few of the scattered critiques which appeared in various journals, especially the Vossische Zeitung, during the author's lifetime, have been brought together in the posthumous volume of the collected works, under the title Literarische Studien and Eindrücke. However, these essays, with the valuable material found in the poet's correspondence, enable one to form a very fair opinion of Fontane's conception of the novel.

The Don Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was written (1606-1615) in ridicule of the chivalric romance at that time so overwhelmingly popular. The sickening exaggeration of these latter-day tales of knighthood apparently not only cloyed Cervantes but excited his sense of the ludicrous as well, giving him the idea of turning upon this type of story his powers of subtle satire. Since Cervantes was a man of by no means great academic erudition, what he knew of the background of knightly romance he had doubtless secured in the everyday way of popular reading. Certain high lights must naturally enough have struck his attention in his perusal of current tales of chivalry, and such came in for especial attention in his Don Quixote. Each episode of the book has, indeed, its more serious counterpart in the literary background which inspired Cervantes to his task.

Only in a few favored instances did Beaumarchais' minor poems rise to the level of true poetry. Yet it would be a misconception of their significance and historical value to decry them as devoid of importance. They illustrate his talent for improvisation, the causticity of his ready wit; they unveil the complex character of this man, who, by some, was villified as a daring and unscrupulous adventurer, and acclaimed by others as “bon père, bon mari, bon maître, ami sincère.” Ever alert in pugnacious attack or cautious defense, his irrepressible and scintillating repartee reminds one of the flash of a stiletto striking with an almost invisible but mortal wound. Everywhere in his Mémoires and plays this pungency flavors the dusty records of practical contentions or a romantic intrigue and even his minor poems are not devoid of it.

In a study of Chateaubriand's La Maison de France (PMLA XXXVIII, No. 1, pp. 99-114), the present writer, after examining and placing in their respective parts, books, and chapters a series of excerpts from the Génie du Christianisme, declared himself baffled by the fifth excerpt, which reads: “Je remarque qu'Horace, Virgile, Tibulle, Tite-Live, moururent tous avant Auguste, qui est en cela le sort de Louis XIV; notre grand prince survécut un peu à son siécle et il se coucha le dernier dans la tombe, comme pour s'assurer qu'il ne restait rien après lui.” This passage, which looked as though it might belong to Part III, Book 4, Chapter 5 of the Génie, was not to be found either there or elsewhere in the work, and so the writer concluded that it must have been one of Chateaubriand's London notes to his manuscript of the Génie and that it had been inserted, somewhat at random, among the excerpts from that work in the Maison de France.