Among the many curious episodes in the Grail Romance, Perlesvaus, that of the Coward Knight has received comparatively little attention. It is mentioned by Birch-Hirschfeld and by Brugger and a few pages are devoted to it by Professor Nitze in his dissertation. The most recent, as well as the fullest, treatment which it has received thus far is that given to it by Miss Jessie Weston. Professor Nitze and Miss Weston make the story of the Coward Knight the basis of their argument as to the relative date of Perlesvaus and Manessier's continuation of Chrétien, since this happens to be the only episode common to these two texts. But though they deal with precisely the same evidence they arrive at opposite conclusions. The question, therefore, appears to be one which invites further discussion. Before considering their arguments, however, it will be convenient to have before us an outline of those portions of the romance which deal with the Coward Knight and his lady, the Damsel of the Car.

Douce MS 189 in the Bodleian library consists at present of 78 parchment leaves, measuring Om310 × Om210, of which the first 64 contain the Mort Artu, and the last fourteen a fragment of the Prose Romance of Tristan the only manuscript of the prose Tristan preserved in the libraries of Oxford.

In a chapter of my Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance I attempted to prove that the repeated correspondence between the adventures of Cuchulinn in Irish saga and those of Gawain in Arthurian romance could be accounted for only on the hypothesis that the intermediate Welsh figure was Gwri; and that this hypothesis was the key to many things in Arthurian nomenclature. My statement of the case, though it has convinced a number of the most competent judges, suffered from the fact that the interpretation of one Welsh name was questionable, and of another erroneous, that it involved the inconclusive and unessential derivation of the name Cuchulinn from a hypocoristic form of Curoi, and that the argument did not start from the most advantageous point of departure. In the following article I endeavor to remedy those defects.

The romantic tale of Gul o Sanaubar ‘Rose and Cypress’ is one of the traductions de l'Hindoustani which Garcin de Tassy printed in 1876. In his avertissement the translator explains :

j'ai réuni dans ce volume quelques-unes de mes traductions .... de récits .... publiés anciennement et depuis longtemps épuisés.... Je n'ai reproduit ni les textes, ni les préfaces, ni les notes d'érudition qui accompagnaient les premières éditions de quelques-unes de ces traductions.....

De nombreuses recherches ont été faites pour retrouver les sources des romans de Voltaire, recherches fructueuses en ce qui concerne Zadig.

L'objet de ce travail n'est nullement de remonter à des sources déjà mentionnées, mais bien d'indiquer des sources possibles, ou plutôt des rapprochements de quelque intérêt, entre Ie Zadig de Voltaire et certains ouvrages qui l'ont précédé. Dans les résumés et paralléles que nous ferons de Zadig et de ces oeuvres, les expressions en italiques seront tirées des auteurs mêmes.

Balzac has summed up his literary theories in the foreword to the first collected edition of the Comédie humaine, written in July 1842, almost thirteen years after he had begun his gigantic task. Critics are divided in their opinion of this document, some considering it an important manifesto of Balzac's doctrine, others regarding it as simply an afterthought intended to give an appearance of unity to a confused mass of ideas.

Time and the critics have dealt but scurvily with Charlotte Smith, since she has been completely forgotten, being neither as bad as the Minerva Press nor as striking as Ann Radcliffe. The relative position these two novelists held in the years before the publication of Udolpho has been exactly reversed, and this is perhaps an injustice since no little of Ann Radcliffe's success was due to the help and example of her rival.

The characteristic drama of the first years of the nineteenth century was, as everyone knows, absurdly romantic and sentimental. Incited by the extravagant Kotzebue and charmed into emulation by the new mélodrame from France, the first specimen of which reached England in 1802, the English playwrights supplied the stage with a variety of plots involving robber barons, victims of the Inquisition, captive maidens and sentimental villains. Frequently they seasoned these delicacies with supernatural horrors and garnished them with vaulted halls, sepulchral chambers, and dungeons.

In 1816 The Quarterly Review issued its number for October 1815, and among the articles was a review of Miss Austen's most recent novel Emma. This was the review, universally attributed ever since to Sir Walter Scott, and consistently spoken of as “that magnanimous article”. Biographers of both Scott and Jane Austen point to it with pleasure as a signal example of one genius recognizing another. In view of the prominence accorded to this review in the literary histories it is remarkable that no one has taken pains to enquire into the truth of its ascription to such a distinguished pen, especially since a discrepancy exists between the date of this review and the dates of Scott's recorded utterances on Jane Austen, and further since the review itself is unlike Scott's known critical work.

The existence of voluminous Brontë juvenilia has long been known. Anyone who has read Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë must remember the astonishing list of twenty-two ‘books’ therein enumerated as having been completed by August 3, 1830, near the end of Charlotte's fourteenth year. Mr. Clement K. Shorter continues the list through 1839, bringing the number of titles up to forty. To these may be added from sources not included in his list an almost equal number of sketches and fragments, making a total which in volume approximates the author's published works.

In Putnam's Monthly Magazine for October, 1855, appeared the first installment of a sea story entitled Benito Cereno, which was continued and concluded in the November and December numbers. Following the established custom of that periodical, the story was printed without signature: and it remained unacknowledged until the following year, when it was included in The Piazza Tales, a volume of short stories by Herman Melville. Lost for half a century in the oblivion which engulfed all that Melville wrote, it did not again appear in type until its inclusion in the Standard Edition of Constable and Company in 1924. This year it has been republished separately in a limited edition by the Nonesuch Press.

It is well known that a heated controversy took place during the eighteen-nineties over the inclusion of fact, brutal fact, in fiction. It is likewise well known that the controversy ended with a partial victory for the “New Realists.” The chief literary historians of the period—W. G. Blaikie-Murdock, Holbrook Jackson, Harold Williams, and Oscar Burdett—agree in dating the change during the early years of the decade. Of these writers, however, Holbrook Jackson alone has indicated—and then only in romantic generalizations—the turbulent clash of ideas which accompanied the transition. In Emile Zola, Novelist and Reformer 1904, Ernest Vizetelly describes with strong partisan feeling the outcry against his father's published translations of Zola's works. But Vizetelly takes us no further than the year 1889, when his father was imprisoned, and he does not deal with the subsequent reaction in England toward tolerance and even sympathy. Accordingly, Vizetelly's account fails to give an adequate appreciation of the important results which followed the controversy over realism, in fixing the chief line of development which English fiction was to take for at least thirty-five years.

As a direct result of the widespread discussion of Evolution during the third quarter of the nineteenth century and the new interest aroused in the doctrine of heredity, there appeared toward the end of the century a new genre of the novel. The genealogical novel is in itself an interesting phenomenon, marking the introduction of a new type of fiction ruled by science. Additional interest is given to the investigation through the remarkable circumstance that this new type of novel was projected contemporaneously and independently by two writers, Emile Zola and Samuel Butler, one in France and one in England.

It is doubtful whether even in so highly subjective a literature as that of modern Germany can be found an example of more consistent concern with the writer's self and his own particular problems than is furnished by the recently published ten volumes that comprise the collected works of Thomas Mann. From the first volume, Buddenbrooks, for which the author's own family's life and home-town quite frankly furnish setting and subject matter, to the last volume, Bemühungen, whose characteristic title would imply to what pains its author has been put to present his personal reaction upon the world and its problems, there is scarcely a page or paragraph that does not treat situations or sentiments which Mann experienced in his own life. Thus, Volume IX, Rede und Antwort, shows how ready Mann is to expose himself to public scrutiny, to give an account of himself and his ideas—“Rede und Antwort zu stehen.” Similarly, Volume VIII, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, is a personal confession of faith, wrung from his heart by the untoward incidents of the war, attempting to define his relations, as a man and an artist, to his native land. And, finally, the five remaining volumes contain short stories or novels, which, when analyzed even cursorily as here, show themselves to be endless variations on the same theme, which is in its essentials the problem of Thomas Mann's own life.