At the end of a somewhat severe criticism of Evangeline, Theodore Parker said, “American readers may well thank the author for a poem, so wholly American in its incidents, its geography, and its setting.” The careful reader of the poem today naturally wonders at the poet's sources for all this knowledge of American geography and scenery, especially of that part of the country called “the west”; for, although he had visited only one of the places pictured, namely Philadelphia, he has shown a remarkably accurate knowledge of the details of the various regions. A great deal has been written concerning the historical basis of Part One, but little attention has been paid to the underlying sources of Part Two. The purpose of this paper is to point out some of the material which was used by Longfellow in this second Part.

Unusual interest attaches to the ballad of Judas, not only because the manuscript in which it is found antedates by two centuries the manuscript of any other English popular ballad, but also because the story it tells is very nearly unique. The manuscript, Trinity College, Cambridge, B. 14. 39, was written in the 13th century; just where is uncertain. The ballad has been frequently printed, but not correctly until 1904, in the Cambridge Edition of the Ballads. It was Professor Child who first recognized the Judas poem as a ballad; but no one has questioned his judgment.

Jeremy Bentham in his iconoclastic Defence of Usury offers this plausible if somewhat cynical explanation of the well-nigh universal unpopularity of the money lender: “Those who have the resolution to sacrifice the present to the future, are natural objects of envy to those who have sacrificed the future to the present. The children who have eaten their cake, are the natural enemies of the children who have theirs.” And similarly he explains the unhappy rôle that is almost as universally meted out to the money lender of drama. “It is the business of the dramatist,” he says, “to study and to conform to, the humors and passions of those on the pleasing of whom he depends for his success… Now I question whether, among all the instances in which a borrower and a lender of money have been brought together upon the stage, from the days of Thespis to the present, there ever was one, in which the former was not recommended to favour in some shape or other—either to admiration, or to love, or to pity, or to all three;—and the other, the man of thrift, consigned to infamy.”

The puys were pious literary societies in the north of France from the thirteenth century till modern times. Most of them were in honor of the Virgin. The one at Dieppe was dedicated to her assumption, the one at Amiens to her purification, the one at Rouen to her immaculate conception. At first the puys were more religious than literary. Later they became more literary than religious. Some became wholly secular literary academies. The puys encouraged the art of poetry by crowning the victors in poetic contests held according to their rules. The contests were arranged and conducted by a president chosen for one year and called prince or less often maistre. The membership was drawn from the clergy, the officials, and the bourgeois. The puys interest us on account of their acknowledged influence upon the German meistersänger and the French rhétoriqueurs, especially in the development of ballad poetry.

The poet of the Roman de la Rose dreamed one May morning that he came to a park wall decorated with allegorical representations of vices and defects. And when he entered the park he found there a company of dancers, whose individual members also represented different human attributes. With this company was the God of Love, and his attendant who carried his bows and arrows. So that when the dances had ended and the poet went on to explore the park, the god and his squire followed him. They soon found a spring, bubbling up under a pine, with a curb on which was written: “Here the beautiful Narcissus died.” In the spring's depths they could see two stones, like crystal, that changed their color under the sun's rays and reflected all the park round about. This was the water where Cupid had sowed the seeds of love, the famous Fountain of Love,

Dont plusors ont en maint endroit
Parlé, en romans et en livre. (Il. 1606, 1607)

In a debate, December 22, 1819, in the House of Commons on the Newspaper Stamp Duties Bill, Sir James Mackintosh, speaking of the passage of the original act of 1712, said: “Swift—being then a distinguished Tory, suggested the first idea of a stamp duty for the avowed purpose of preventing publications against the government,—Swift, that parricide who endeavored to destroy that very press to which he owed so much, to which he owed all his fame, and at that very moment all his preferment.”

One of the notable changes in English literature during the eighteenth century is a growth in altruism. It is a change which involves not only a breaking down of the old aristocratic indifference to the lower classes of society during the Restoration, but the establishment of a new ethical theory; literature displayed a broader human interest and assigned a new reason for its sympathy. It is usually assumed that the difference is due principally to the influx of French philosophy. This assumption at least minimizes the importance of a development which had taken place in the literature of England itself before the general interest in Rousseau. (The change, especially in poetry, is to be traced largely, I think, to the Characteristics (1711) of Lord Shaftesbury, whose importance as a literary influence in England has never been duly recognized. It has long since been established that his system of philosophy constitutes a turning-point in the history of pure speculation, especially in ethics; it has more recently been shown also that he is responsible for many of the moral ideas which inform the popular literature of Germany from Haller to Herder. But his influence upon the popular writers of his own country has received scant notice.

F. G. Fleay presented to the New Shakspere Society in 1874 his epoch-making paper On Metrical Tests as Applied to Dramatic Poetry. Many early investigations of authorship had been excellent, and some scholars looked askance at the utilization of cold statistics in literary criticism; but Fleay's methods, followed later by Boyle and others, have been vindicated. To Fleay and Boyle the fundamental idea of this paper, namely, that the work of the collaborating dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Massinger and Shakespeare in the case of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, may be tested by a consideration of colloquial contractions or elisions in words used by the authors, must acknowledge inspiration. The test will involve the use of statistical tables of colloquialisms which bear some resemblance to the metrical tables of Fleay and Boyle.