A number of noted scholars from Jacob Grimm to Streitberg have treated this topic. The latter in his Gotisches Elementarbuch (1920) summarizes, under the corresponding heads of the syntactical part of his grammar, the results of the various investigators. I intend in this paper to make an annotation here and there to their statements. And since I have noticed that some critics waver as to where to draw the exact demarcation line, I shall start with a definition of the matter under present consideration, following in part Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik.

After the introduction of Christianity the use of runic characters diminished considerably in continental Europe. While in the times of King Chilperich and Venantius Fortunatus the runic script still played a rôle in public life, it fell into disuse in subsequent periods in central Europe, a fact which is deplored by Otfried in his introduction to the Gospels: Res mira, tam magnos viros, sapientia latos, sanctitate praeclaros, cuncta haec in alienae linguae gloriam transferre et usum scripturae in propria, lingua non habere. It will, therefore, be of interest to discover an unpublished runic inscription in CLM. 13067, a codex belonging to the eleventh or the twelfth centuries. It must be regarded as quite an unusual occurrence to see here the runic characters transcribing a Latin sentence and taking the place of a Hebrew inscription.

In none of the scholarly treatments of the texts of Piers Plowman have I seen the theory advanced that the A-text is a contraction or an abridgment, for any purpose whatsoever, of the B- or C-texts. I take it that B is an enlargement of A, and that C is a revision of both. A, therefore, is the seed, whereas the other two are second thoughts, either of the A poet or of others, and it makes little difference which. If the three texts were written by one man, it is important to know what his original purpose was before one discusses his afterthoughts. If the poets are three, it is still important to know what he meant and planned who gave an idea to his followers.

No other product of the Elizabethans' attempts to improve and heighten the style of their writings is quite so remarkable as the ornate and jingling prose which goes under the name of Euphuism. Its unique character and great popularity have caused many to discuss the problems of its origin, but no satisfactory specific source has so far been discovered. The old theories of Landmann and Feuillerat, who suggested, respectively, that the style was the result of the imitation of Guevara, and of the imitation of the classics, have now been abandoned. In their place the theory now generally accepted is the one put forward by Professor Croll, who said that Euphuism was merely one manifestation of the general medieval tradition, continued into the sixteenth century, of writing patterned prose. Professor Croll demonstrated completely and finally the ultimate origins of the style; but Euphuism is a unique and special variety of schematic prose, and the steps by which the simple and frequently varied patterns of medieval writings came to be elaborated into the stiff, formalistic structure of Euphuism, with all its wealth of learned similes and recondite allusions, has not been explained.

Under date of March 3, 1592, Henslowe's Diary records the acting of the “new” play “Harry the Sixth.” In 1 Henry VI as we now have it, the General of Bordeaux addresses Talbot as “our nation's terror and their bloody scourge,” and Thomas Nashe in his famous allusion to a Talbot play (Piers Peniless, Stationers' Register, Aug. 8, 1592) speaks of him as “brave Talbot the terror of the French.” All this, according to general belief, refers to the same play, “Harry the Sixth,” or the earliest form or version of what we now call 1 Henry VI.

Siegfried Mauermann in Die Bühnenanweisungen im deutschen Drama bis 1700 (1911) made the assertion that we cannot seriously reckon with the presence of a curtain on the German stage before 1600. Since Mauermann's monograph is well documented with numerous quotations of stage directions in which there is no mention of a curtain before 1600, one would be inclined to agree, were it not that several studies made since then incidentally present material that definitely disproves Mauermann's conjecture. As apparently no investigation gives a reasonably complete survey of the introduction and early use of the curtain on the German stage, the following findings are presented.

Hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton and pious Izaak Walton shared enthusiasms other than their common devotion to angling. Both of these seventeenth-century fishermen had some proficiency in singing, and wrote verse to be set to music. Walton, it will be recalled, “made a conversion of an old ketch, and added more to it,” for which Henry Lawes composed the melody of The Angler's Song. Charles Cotton in imitation of Walton's verse, or out of admiration for Lawes' music, wrote The Angler's Ballad, which can be sung to the tune for Walton's ketch. But Cotton's song writing was not limited to the fitting of new words to old measures. A number of his poems were set by Mr. Coleman, and one, The Picture, received the distinction of being “Set by Mr. Laws,” the composer who had provided the music not only for Walton's Angler's Song, but for Milton's Comus songs, for Shakespeare's sonnet cxvi, and for a great many other sixteenth and seventeenth century lyrics.

Although there is no doubt that the French Academy grew out of the meetings at Conrart's home, the fact that its origin has been claimed by two or three other groups shows the widespread vogue of these gatherings at the time of its foundation in 1634. Their importance is manifest in all the satires, poems, and novels of the time—such as Francion (1623), Le Berger Extravagant (1627), and Camus, Bishop of Belley's Alcime (1625). Consciously modeled on that of Baïf, these académies seem to have flourished in unbroken succession since the days of the Pléiade.

In determining more narrowly the date of A Session of the Poets, commonly ascribed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, c. 1676, the dating of the play Wits Led by the Nose has proved to be of preliminary concern, since it contains the first known reference to A Session. Wits Led has on the title-page verso “August 1677,” the date when it was licensed for printing, but there is no external evidence for the date of composition or of its acting at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. Falling back on internal evidence, we find this not explicit, but of a significance beyond the dating. The internal evidence for the acting date offers a clue to an unsettled question of identity: who made up the “younger part” of the King's or Duke's Company that acted in Lent, and what relation if any did these actors bear to the Nursery? The answer to this may provide another principle for determining the acting date of certain Restoration plays—the principle, namely, that a particular set of actor's names in a dramatis personæ may have a seasonal significance.

When Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, turned in his intervals of gouty leisure to dramatic composition, he made his plays supplement the political manœuvers of his active periods by embodying in them the crescent love-and-honor theme, which, rooted in pre-Commonwealth drama, was being sponsored by the Frenchified Charles II. But while thus pleasing the King and the Court by being alertly à la mode, he remembered the dramatic associations of his Cavalier days and revived after the Puritan depression certain elements of Jacobean and Caroline drama. Among them was the friendship theme, so frequently and significantly employed in plays of those former decades. If he had merely repeated the old situations and rephrased the worn clichés, there would be little point in analyzing his plays for his use of the theme except to show continuity between pre-Commonwealth drama and Restoration drama. But he modified it and made it an aid in his persistent king-worship. And more important still, he used the theme in developing the love-and-honor conflict.

Dryden's profits from the publication of his translation of Virgil have long been a topic of considerable interest and speculation. Malone, in 1800, pieced together as much information as he could gather from secondary sources then available to him; but he was explicit in regarding as fragmentary his interpretations of Dryden's profit from this work. The whole question is indissolubly bound up with the agreement between Dryden and his publisher, Jacob Tonson, for the publication of the translation.

De tous les dramaturges étrangers connus en France au XVIIIème siècle, Métastase soulève l'enthousiasme le plus général. Alors que Shakespeare, par exemple, n'obtient que des louanges fort mitigées, et restera, en somme, pendant tout le siècle “un génie plein de force et de fécondité,” mais “sans la moindre étincelle de bon goût,” le librettiste italien a pour lui la faveur à peu près sans réserve de la critique contemporaine. De fait, on voit presque en lui l'heureuse contrepartie de Shakespeare. L'abbé Raynal, par exemple, le juge “un écrivain diffus, mais délicieux, et qui joint à beaucoup d‘élégance et de délicatesse, du sentiment et du pathétique.” Si Shakespeare éveille un intérêt plutôt scandalisé, Métastase, par contre, plaît par la variété de son œuvre où chacun peut trouver quelque chose qui satisfasse son goût: certains s'attendrissent sur des situations touchantes et morales, dignes du drame bourgeois; Diderot cite de Métastase un passage “bien vrai et qui peint fortement la tendresse des mères.” La plupart voient en lui l'auteur de tragédies régulières. Certes, on le loue parfois pour ses qualités lyriques, et à ce point de vue, Saint-Lambert le met au dessus de Quinault; de même, l'enthousiasme débordant de J-J. Rousseau dans son Dictionnaire de Musique est causé par les qualités éminemment musicales de la poésie de Métastase et non par les procédés dramatiques de l'auteur. Saint-Lambert et Rousseau placent ainsi le poète dans son vrai jour. Mais, le plus souvent, on dégage les livrets de Métastase de toutes considérations musicales, et on les juge sur leur valeur dramatique: “Ses pièces, pleines d'esprit, de situations, de coups de théâtre et d'intérêt,” écrit le Président de Brosses, “feraient sans doute un plus grand effet si on les jouait en simples tragédies déclamées, laissant à part tout le petit appareil d'ariettes et d'opéra qu'il serait facile d'en retrancher.” Voltaire, après de Brosses, ne cesse de développer la même idée. Il loue la régularité des tragédies-opéra “du célèbre abbé Métastasio,” “comparables à tout ce que la Grèce a eu de plus beau, si elles ne sont supérieures;” supérieures parfois aux tragedies de Corneille; produits d'un talent “que, depuis les Grecs, le seul Racine a possédé parmi nous.” Palissot, et plus tard Le Prévost d'Exmes, font, après Voltaire, la même apologie et conservent le même point de vue. C'est ce qui explique que l'imitation de Métastase se soit fait sentir dans la tragédie régulière, avant d'envahir la scène de l'Académie Royale de Musique. En effet, ce n'est qu‘à partir de 1783 qu'apparaissent, sous forme d'opéras, des adaptations de Métastase. Bien avant cette date, les auteurs dramatiques français se sont emparés de l'ceuvre du poète italien, dans l'espoir de trouver chez lui des procédés qui puissent insuffler un peu de vie à la tragédie qui languit. La vogue pour Métastase se fera sentir surtout après 1751, date de la publication des premiers volumes de la traduction de Richelet.

One of the most important literary manifestations of that direct interest in the Near East which travellers and travel books created, appears in English prose fiction of the early nineteenth century. The prose fiction thus supplements the Near East poetry of Byron, Moore, Southey, and numerous minor versifiers as well as the travel books themselves, which may be considered a kind of minor literature. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century English readers had shown considerable interest in the Near East, particularly in the oriental tale; yet this interest was almost wholly indirect—the product of French accounts or French translations of the Arabian Nights. It was not until the last quarter of the century that new developments brought “the Orient much nearer to England than ever before … In letters, this modern spirit was first expressed by the increased number of travelers' accounts.”

In the Intermédiaire des chercheurs et des curieux for April 10, 1876 (ix, cols. 196, 197) we read the following query by “Comte de Noverba” under the heading Réalisme:

Victorian society, however emphatic its hostility to French Naturalism, was not unanimous in its disapproval. Indeed, many of the bitterest critics softened their reproaches as the century advanced. Robert Buchanan, for example, not only modified his earlier position in later years, but became a staunch defender of Zola. In 1877 he had aligned himself with the forces of virtue and goodness as embodied in the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the aim of which was to save the land from the blasphemers Rabelais, Boccaccio, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith, Zola, Ibsen, Wagner, George Moore, and many others.

The purpose of this paper is to correlate George Meredith's theory of literature with his philosophy of evolution. At the present time, Meredith's fame rests primarily upon his conception of the Comic Spirit, brilliantly elaborated in the Essay on Comedy and exemplified in many of the novels. His acceptance of natural evolution, and his extension of its principles into a threefold hierarchy of physical, mental, and spiritual attainment, are apparent in his philosophy and poetry, but are often obscured by the very brilliance of the comic social analysis in the novels. The influence is there none the less; it is readily observed in the psychological springs that move the more important characters, and it helps to shape Meredith's attitude toward fiction as a whole. The present study pertains chiefly to this second aspect—the relation between Meredith's evolutionary doctrine and the theory of literature by which he approached his own and his contemporaries' writing.

Luigi Capuana has experienced in his literary reputation what the philosopher-father of Pirandello's Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore experienced in his moral reputation: just as the Pirandellian character became “fixed” in the mind of his step-daughter as a highly immoral man because of one unfortunate contretemps, so Capuana has become “fixed” in the minds of most students of Italian literature as a verista because of a few years of ardent enthusiasm for Zola and his materialistic methods. In Italy, verismo (naturalism) appeared first in Sicilian dress in the works of Giovanni Verga and Capuana. This new type of local literature dealing with the peasant classes, and well-named campanilismo, then spread to many other Italian provinces and was developed by a large group of authors. It is true that Capuana was indeed the banditore del verismo, loudly proclaiming the excellence of Zola's theories and the brilliance of their exemplification in Verga's Nedda (1874) and succeeding stories. But what is too often forgotten is that Capuana is of equal importance in other literary movements, and that he himself rebelled at being too narrowly thought of as a verista.

In this paper, I am analyzing Strindberg's trilogy To Damascus with regard to two basic elements—situation and character. Through this study, as well as others in kind, I hope that eventually a literary æsthetic may be evolved. The final purpose, of course, is the attainment of æsthetic judgment in literature.