Keats' central instinct was for high poetic repose: for the quietude that comes, not from avoiding life, but from surmounting it. The goal, however, was so far beyond his reach that he could not have attained it, I think, even if he had lived a full lifetime. His early death (February 23, 1821) is bound to lose, as the centuries revolve upon that day, much of its tragic color; but at the same time the deeper tragedy of his spirit can appear more distinctly. This deeper tragedy has been considerably dimmed in the atmosphere of uniqueness with which the poet has been invested by the rising admiration of a hundred years. The other chief poets of the past century are now seen more or less clearly in their true boundaries; Keats' limits have been kept uniquely vague. His poetic potentiality and his ruining fate have been so continually balanced against each other, with insensible additions now on one side of the scale and now on the other, that both have come to appear much weightier than they really were. In particular it has been assumed with extraordinary unanimity that Keats' physical disintegration, beginning eighteen months before his death, stopped his progress just as he was approaching a much higher level of poetic achievement.

Few readers of Shelley devote much time to Oedipus Tyrannus, or Swell-foot the Tyrant, and for a very good reason. Intrinsically, the play is not worth it. Mrs. Shelley, ever careful of the poet's reputation, warns us not to take this piece for more than was meant. We are indebted for its inception, and for some of its devices, to the grunting of a drove of pigs beneath Shelley's window. This fact, notwithstanding what we owe to equally trivial experiences persistently reported of Newton and Dick Whittington, adds nothing to the gravity with which the poem is generally read. The revolting setting, with its thigh-bones and skulls, the outrageous characters introduced, such as a sow-gelder, a chorus of swine, and a hoydenish queen, together with extravagant speeches and actions, sometimes in a serious mood of protest, more often with the hysteric sort of grotesquerie which was Shelley's nearest approach to humor—these factors have combined to make most readers regard the poem as a failure even when taken for no more than was meant. Shelley's serious devotion to liberty could never allow him to treat it in burlesque fashion without a touch of hectic incongruity. Byron could have succeeded much better with Shelley's material, and Fielding could have made an uproarious farce of it, but not Shelley.

In Notes and Queries for February 10, 1917, John H. Sandham Griffith, Esq., of Llwynduris, Llechryd, Cardiganshire, announced that he had in his possession Shelley's set of the Hon. Robert Clifford's translation (4 vols., 1797-8) of the Abbé Barruel's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinisme. The set, Mr. Griffith believes, was left by Shelley at Horsham after his expulsion from Oxford;1 and he further explains that “there was such a considerable degree of intimacy existing between the poet's family and my ancestor William Sandham of Horsham, a tenant and near neighbor of Sir Timothy Shelley of Field Place, that the poet was probably a frequent visitor, and obtained a loan of £100 in January, 1811, before being sent down from Oxford, which he never repaid. The unredeemed promissory note is in my possession, and also a holograph letter, requesting a further loan on the plea of ‘now being reduced to the very last extremity,‘ written from Keswick shortly after his marriage to Harriet West-brooke [sic].” Volume II of the set, Mr. Griffith says, “bears the poet's autograph in full, and the date 1810.”

Although Dr. Johnson is one of our best English critics, he has left much that the world would willingly let die. But alas ! the written word is imperishable, and will every now and then repair its drooping head, in spite of the opportunities of oblivion. Johnson's strictures on the shorter poems of Milton have now for a good while been taken for what they are worth; even his severity with Comus is recognized as more than half perversely irrelevant. I say nothing of Paradise Lost, for no other poem so inexorably demands the willing suspension of disbelief which Johnson was incapable of. But recently his obiter dictum that Samson Agonistes is not a dramatic whole in the Aristotelian sense, having a beginning, a middle, and an end; that “ the intermediate parts have neither cause nor consequence, neither hasten nor retard the catastrophe ” has re-entered the listed field. And “ these shifts ” must be “refuted.”

Of the many disputed terms in the Poetics, “imitation,” has always been one of the most fruitful of discussion and of misconception; and these misconceptions are particularly significant because, for whole periods, they were potent in moulding creative activity not only in literature, but also in painting and in music. When “ imitation ” is considered in the light of its technical use in Plato and in Aristotle, its real meaning emerges with some distinctness. Far from the naturalistic theory of a direct and slavish copy of objects and actions, Aristotle's is a distinctly idealistic conception, and signifies “ creating according to a true idea.” Thus, when we are told that Art imitates Nature, “ Nature ” is not a particular thing or act, but is the creative force of the universe. With this conception, we can justify Aristotle's declaration that music is the most imitative of all the arts: it is the most fluid; and its flux is governed most completely by the universal laws of unity, proportion, and symmetry. The conception is almost Platonic; and it makes Aristotelian appear in a sense almost diametrically opposed to the common meaning of the Latin imitatio and the English “ imitation.”

The orthodox view regarding the introduction of end rime into English verse is succinctly set forth in the following quotations : “ Endrime, being a stranger to the early Germanic languages, its appearance in any of them may commonly be taken as a sign of foreign influence. In general, of course, rime and the stanza were introduced together into English verse, under the influence of Latin hymns and French lyrics.” “ Die alliterierende Langzeile war die einzige in der ags. Poesie bekannte Versart und blieb in derselben bis zu ende der ersten ags. oder altenglischen Sprachperiode in Gebrauch.” “ The transformation of the O. E. alliterative line into rhyme verse did not take place before the Middle English period. It was due to the influence of the rhymed French and Latin verse.” “ Alliterative verse was remodelled on Latin and French verse—or foreign verses were directly imitated.” The implication is that there never existed in Anglo-Saxon any verse of a form different from that of the five-type alliterative verse which prevails in the corpus of extant Anglo-Saxon poetry.

The original manuscript of this poem is preserved in Hanover, and over it is written, in Goethe's hand: “For the 17th of September, 1826.” This date Goethe crossed out, writing in its place: “ September 25, 1826.” It was printed during his lifetime, without title, at the end of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, published in 1829, and is followed by the words in parenthesis, “ Ist fortzusetzen.” Only after Goethe's death, in the Cotta edition of 1833, appears the usual title, “Bei Betrachtung von Schillers Schädel,” doubtless added by Eckermann. Nearly all texts, with the notable exception of the Weimar edition, repeat this title. The Jubilee edition has the heading, “Schillers Reliquien.”

When Matthew Arnold called Goethe “ the clearest, the largest, the most helpful thinker of modern times,” he paid tribute to one of the most significant and enduring influences of his life. In him without doubt Arnold found one of those few best things that he held it the critic's function to know and to make known. Yet it was not as a poet, even though he never failed to accord to Goethe the first place after Shakespeare, that he hailed him as the greatest of the moderns, but as the thinker who more than any other had achieved the great task of modern literature, the task of interpreting the modern world to itself. “ People joke about and take fright at the problems of life; few trouble themselves about the words that would solve them ;” so Goethe once wrote to Schiller. Matthew Arnold was preeminently one of the few. His special business was the criticism of literature, but he brought to it the indispensable profound and persistent reflection upon the world which literature is designed to interpret. So he came to his famous campaign to quicken intellectually and spiritually the lives of his people. To that end he drew the main lines of his program, the endeavor to foster and disseminate the critical spirit (which he made the basis of what he called the modern element), the gospel of culture, and the setting up of that ideal of literature that he found most perfectly realized in the classics.

“People joke about and take fright at the problems of life; few trouble themselves about the words that would solve them;” so Goethe once wrote to Schiller. Matthew Arnold was preeminently one of the few. His special business was the criticism of literature, but he brought to it the indispensable profound and persistent reflection upon the world which literature is designed to interpret. So he came to his famous campaign to quicken intellectually and spiritually the lives of his people. To that end he drew the main lines of his program, the endeavor to foster and disseminate the critical spirit (which he made the basis of what he called the modern element), the gospel of culture, and the setting up of that ideal of literature that he found most perfectly realized in the classics.

In Florence, in the Uffizi Gallery, is the famous painting by Botticelli entitled La Calumnia d'Apelle. The picture shows several allegorical figures dramatically grouped and exquisitely colored against a background of classical arcades looking upon a distant sea. The exact date of this picture is not known, but Horne, the greatest authority on the life and works of Botticelli, places it about 1494. It is the object of this paper to trace the theme of the Calumny of Apelles from its origin in classical antiquity to the time of Botticelli, noting particularly the literary manifestations to which it gave rise in Florence in the Quattrocento.

The chief source of information concerning the legal attitude toward woman in the thirteenth century is the Código de las Siete Partidas, compiled during the reign of Alfonso X, and representing an attempt to bring order out of the legal chaos then existent and to substitute a general code for the local fueros. The few generalities to be made about the compilation itself can be summed up briefly.

As to the sources, Martínez Marina states that Roman laws—Decretals, Digest, Code, Pandects—were used, and complains that in the first and fourth Partidas the laws of the Gothic codes and the municipal fueros were omitted, and Castilian customs were disregarded. The identity of the authors is open to question, although they were undoubtedly selected from the leading jurisconsults of the day. Ureña calls attention to the marked development in the use of a legal terminology in Spanish which is substituted for Latin, previously the language of the law.