No traditional story was so popular in the Elizabethan age as that of the siege of Troy and some of its episodes; because of its antiquity and undying beauty, of the fame and greatness of the early writers who had treated it, and to some extent of the tradition that the Britons were descendants of the Trojans, a tradition which certainly often determined the point of view. After the close of the Middle Ages its popularity had increased rather than diminished, among both educated and uneducated. And nothing better than this story illustrates the true relation of the age to the nearer and the remoter past,—the continuation of mediaeval tradition and taste, especially among the little-educated; and the often uncouth modification of it by an increased knowledge and a sharpened understanding of the classics. To Chaucer and the followers of Guido delle Colonne were added a more intelligently-read Virgil and Ovid, and a new-found Homer. But for the most part they were subdued to what they worked in, the romantic and rather undiscerning taste of the not highly educated.

Though three reprints of the anonymous Cæsar and Pompey, together with the discussion devoted to it by Parrott, Mühlfeld, and Boas, seem to represent doubtless quite as much attention as the play really deserves, I venture to add, out of materials long on hand, another note by way of summary and, in one or two places, of addition and correction. Such a review, showing the author's literary method to be one of the closest dependence on his models, may serve to raise a presumption that in his treatment of Cæsar, who resembles Marlowe's Tamburlaine without being a literal copy, he was familiar with plays about Cæsar which are now lost to us; or conscious, at least, of a dramatic tradition which made of Csasar a boastful conqueror.

Basilicata is the name of that territorial division of Southern Italy which is now known as the province of Potenza and which formed a part of the ancient Lucania. It is bounded on the north by the province of Foggia, on the northeast by the provinces of Bari and Lecce, on the east by the province of Cosenza, and on the west by the Mediterranean sea and the provinces of Salerno and Avellino. It has a population of about 512,000 inhabitants and comprises the circondari of Lagonegro, Matera, Melfi, and Potenza. The region is mountainous and the population is given largely to agriculture and sheep-raising. Although centrally located, the province possesses no mercantile towns of any great importance. Many objects of antiquity were discovered in this region: inscriptions, vases, fragments of statues, medallions, and two bronze tables, known as the Heraclean Tables, now in the Naples Museum.

In 1905, two important contributions were made to our knowledge of the sources of Ben Jonson's The Staple of News. Dr. De Winter, in a critical edition of the play, pointed out several important similarities between it and the earlier London Prodigal, which play he urged, further, was “mainly the work of Jonson's hand.” In the same year, Mr. Charles Crawford showed less important similarities between The Staple of News and The Bloody Brother, notably in speeches by the Master-Cook, a character in the former play, and insisted that here also Jonson had had a large hand in the play from which he later borrowed.

No reader of Renaissance literature need be reminded that when Spenser wrote, friendship rivalled love as a poetic theme. High friendships give life whatever good it has, says one of Castiglione's courtiers; and the Elizabethan gentleman agreed with him. If the Elizabethan gentleman was also a story-teller, the thought of friendship, it seems, usually put happy devices into his plot-making, as the thought of Helen's beauty, if he was a poet, kindled his style. Yet Spenser, who himself enjoyed friendships with the best, and who of all men should have risen to the theme of friendship, wrote of it very lamely. At least, so his critics decide. Their general verdict is that of the six books in the Faerie Queene the fourth, on the virtue of friendship, is, in spite of splendid episodes, the least satisfactory as a story and the least comprehensible as an allegory.

P. 530. Description of the MS. The stain in the ms. at ff. 81–84 extends through a number of preceding folios, and therefore occurred since the fragment of the quire was bound up in the present volume. The Latin fragments on the first three pages of the quire are theological commonplaces, and the conclusion of a tract which I have not been able to identify; probably a summary of one of Augustine's sermons, copied in the same illiterate Latin as that of the rubrics.