From 1477 when Caxton, in his little Westminster shop, published the first book printed in England, the history of English book production is richly documented. Even before the invention of printing, the story of monastic books, in England and elsewhere, can be fairly well traced. A good deal is now known about the output of medieval university books. But there is a notable gap, even in our theorizing, about the early production of vernacular works in England, especially about the very large amount of secular verse that was composed before 1350 by anonymous authors. We know practically nothing about either the authors or the transcribers of those works, or about the circumstances under which manuscripts of contemporary date were compiled.

Among the treasures in the Henry E. Huntington Library is a copy of Robert de Gretham's Le miroir, ou les évangiles des domnées, which has some importance for the Anglo-Norman original, and more for the relationship of the Miroir to the Middle English translation, known as the Mirrur. The manuscript (now HM 903) has been known for some time, but it was not listed by Vising or Russell nor employed by Miss Aitken in her extracts from the Miroir. It is bound with a copy of the Manuel des Pechiez, so that it occupies folios 68-205 of the present manuscript book. The copy is fragmentary at the beginning and accordingly was misbound, with a rubric and an illumination at the top of what appeared to be the first folio; the proper sequence of folios is 140-205, 68-139.

Let us suppose that an irate wife complains to her husband: “We used to live like love-birds; now you act as if you were loony; and when I tell you that your behavior is as rude as that of a savage, you respond by roaring like a lion and repeating parrot-like everything your brother says about your being henpecked.” Let us suppose, moreover, that she repeats this indictment over a number of years, in a series of letters to her sympathetic relatives and friends. A commentator on these letters might be tempted to conclude that the lady was fairly familiar with Africa (probably had even been big-game hunting and clearly had been more impressed by the fauna than the flora), that she was aware of and concurred in medieval notions concerning the effect of the moon on the mind, and, finally, that she must have lived for some time on a chicken farm.

That strange dramatic compound of “gross corruption, constant mutilation, meaningless inversion, and clumsy transposition,” the 1602 quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor, has furnished Shakespearean scholars with one of their best puzzles. The garbled condition of the text has long been considered as being the result of the “stolne and surreptitious” method of obtaining the copy. But there are fundamental conditions in the quarto which are hardly to be accounted for thus. The material and the manner of treatment continually suggest some special influence, some distinctive and integrated molding force other than the effort to obtain the play by oblique devices.

The verse preface which Chapman addressed “To the Reader” in 1609 when he brought out the first twelve books of the Iliads contains a succinct statement of his doctrine of translation. This preface is fairly well known as one of the significant critical essays of the English renaissance, but his translation of the Iliad itself has not been fully explored in the light of his doctrine. When the poem is measured against the precepts, it can be observed that nearly all of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Chapman's translation, as distinct from the conceptual divergencies of his rendering, accord with his stated principles. In fact, the pertinent passage from the epistle makes the best possible introduction to a study of the poetic style of the translation.

The early Elizabethan conception of a line of poetry is best illustrated by Puttenham, who compares it to a day's journey in which the traveler rests twice, at noon and at night.” The end-stopped line which results from this conception gives increased importance to the rime; indeed, Puttenham considers it the equivalent of classical “currantnesse” of foot, which “passed the whole verse throughout, whereas our concordes keepe but the latter end of every verse.” Rime is even placed above meter: “your concordes containe the chief part of Musicke in your meetre.” The preference is clearly for rich heavy rimes, with an echo. For this reason monosyllables are most desirable; since “in them, if they finish the verse, resteth the shrill accent of necessitie, and so doth it not in the last of every bissilable, nor of every polisillable word.” Rime is not merely good or bad; it has its own decorum: some words an i figures are suitable for one style but not for others, and the same is true of “concord and measure.?” Thus rimes which fall on the last syllable are “sweetest and most commendable”; those falling on the penultimate syllable are “more light and not so pleasant”; and those upon the antepenultimate syllable are “most unpleasant of all, because they make your meeter to light and triviall, and are fitter for the Epigrammatist or Comicall Poet.” ? Light endings are for light verse; even Daniel seems to agree with this opinion when he says that feminine rimes are “fittest for Ditties.”

It was Milton's habit in his controversial prose to write at considerable length about himself. This habit has been cited often enough as proof of his arrogance, his pride, his self-concern. No doubt it is. There is a great deal of self-concern, and some arrogance, in Milton. But if he liked to write of himself, he made good use of the liking—a use which he explains among other places in the Apology for Smectymnuus:

. . . I conceav'd my selfe to be now not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was perswaded, and whereof I had declar'd openly to be a partaker. Whereupon I thought it my duty, if not to my selfe, yet to the religious cause I had in hand, not to leave on my garment the least spot, or blemish in good name so long as God should give me to say that which might wipe it off.1

Professor E. M. Clark in his edition of The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the present writer in a previous article have incidentally called attention to Milton's employment of the principle of the mixed or balanced state in his venture in commonwealth construction. I wish now to develop the thesis that this principle was a basic one in the poet's political thought, and that a study of its relationship to the development of his ideas yields significant results, not only for his attitude toward episcopacy, monarchy, and dictatorship, but for an understanding of the point at which he finally arrived in The Ready and Easy Way.

It has long been recognized that the fundamental ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder's thought are few and consistent, in spite of the fact that their author frequently expressed his deep-seated aversion to metaphysical systematics. Herder's principle of regarding the individual experience as primordial and the abstract statement as derivative has been labeled by his biographers and commentators as “irrationalism,” when, as a matter of fact, his aversion to systematics was merely the result of a sincere concern with the discoveries of empirical science. Though Herder very often gave voice to his belief that all philosophical systems are “fictions” or “poems,” he was unwilling to go as far as do the radical positivists of our own day—Wittgenstein, Carnap, et al., who deny validity to all metaphysics. In fact, certain conceptions frequently used by Herder are admitted by him to be genuinely metaphysical. At the same time, in his use of the conception of “Kraft,” which definitely belongs among these, Herder will be seen to stand in much the same position as the Kant of the first Kritik, i.e., in that of having to reconcile inherited metaphysics and the results of the scientific experimentation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An examination of Herder's attempted reconciliation has long been overdue; it has been neglected in the past because of the outspokenly pro-Kantian attitude of Herder's biographers, among whom Rudolf Haym and Eugen Kühnemann stand unquestionably preëminent. It is the purpose of the following to sketch the conception of “Kraft” inherited by Herder and to indicate the synthesis he attained between the older idea and the scientific conceptions of his age. In addition, the rôle played by the final development of the idea in the break between Herder and Weimar classicism will be brought forward as a better explanation than the purely personal (and hence unfairly derogatory) motives hitherto adduced to explain it.

Es ist heute eine allgemein bekannte Tatsache, dass das Werk Rousseaus von wesentlicher Bedeutung für Herder gewesen ist, aber es fehlt fast völlig an Versuchen, dieses Verhältnis genau zu bestimmen. Jedermann weiss, dass Herder Rousseau vieles verdankt; aber was er ihm eigentlich verdankt, in welcher Richtung sich der Einfluss des Franzosen ausgewirkt hat, das ist bisher entweder nur flüchtig oder nur unter Beschränkung auf gewisse Spezialgebiete dargelegt worden. Schon Gervinus glaubt, Herders Wesen am besten dadurch verdeutlichen zu können, dass er ihn Rousseau gegenüberstellt, beide als im Grunde gleichartige Geister erkennt und den Unterschied zwischen ihnen allein in ihren Uebertreibungen sieht: Herder geht zu weit in seinem Optimismus, Rousseau in seinem Pessimismus. Sieht Gervinus hier noch von einer Untersuchung der kausalen Bedeutung Rousseaus für Herder ab, so erscheint Herder bei Hettner fast ausschliesslich als ein Schüler des Genfers, und diese Ansicht findet sich in neuerer Zeit bei Bartels wieder, der Herder bedenkenlos als den deutschen Rousseau bezeichnet. Zweifellos geht Bartels dabei weit über das Ziel hinaus, und diese Uebertreibung ist umso erstaunlicher, als der Biograph Herders, Haym, deutlich genug auseinandergesetzt hatte, dass der Einfluss Rousseaus, so gross er auch ist, jedenfalls Grenzen hat und schon von Hettner überschätzt worden war. So zuverlässig aber auch die Ausführungen Hayms über das Verhältnis Herders zu Rousseau sind, so ist doch der Biograph im Gegensatz zu Hettner zu sehr geneigt, gewissen abfälligen Aeusserungen Herders über Rousseau übermässigen Wert beizulegen, und dadurch erscheint bei ihm dieses Verhältnis wieder zu sehr im negativen Licht. Die schon von Hettner erkannten Uebereinstimmungen im Werke Herders und Rousseaus entgehen auch Haym nicht, doch möchte er sie mehr dem “genius epidemicus der Zeit,” als einer direkten Beeinflussung zuschreiben. Einer eingehenden Untersuchung, die allein das Problem von Einfluss oder Parallelität entscheiden kann, geht aber auch Haym aus dem Wege, sodass die Frage nach wie vor als ungelöst gelten muss. Dies gilt in ganz besonderem Masse von derjenigen Lehre, die sowohl bei Herder wie bei Rousseau im Zentrum ihrer Werke steht, der Lehre von der Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, wie sie der berühmte Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inégalité parmi les Hommes am eindrucksvollsten verkündet hat.

Es gibt meines Wissens noch keine zusammenfassende historische oder theoretische Untersuchung über die dichterische Namengebung. Mir sind ausser kleineren Aufsätzen, die das Thema mehr plaudernd und feuilletonistisch behandeln, nur wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen über die Namen bei einzelnen Dichtern bekannt, z.B. bei Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Dickens, Raabe, Fontane. Gelegentliche Bemerkungen und Beobachtungen zu dem Thema finden sich natürlich überall verstreut. Es wäre sicher eine dankbare, wenn auch schwierige Aufgabe, die Frage, nach welchen Rücksichten und Prinzipien die Dichter ihre erfundenen Personen getauft haben, einmal im weitesten zeitlichen und räumlichen Umfange zu beantworten; die Unterschiede der Zeiten, der Völker, der Sprachen würden sich in diesem Spiegel klar auffangen lassen.

Fundamental characteristics of André Gide are his acute sense of the diversity of man and nature and his fervent desire to apprehend the infinitely varied manifestations of life which seem to him the essence of reality. Nowhere in his writings are these chracteristics more readily perceived than in the works inspired by his contact with the land and peoples of Northern Africa. For Jean Hytier, however, author of an excellent analysis of Gide's art, the sincerity and force of the writer's sympathy with diversity explain a certain lack of provocative, picturesque qualities in his African exoticism; indeed, thinks this critic, “Gide a . . . renouvelé l'exotisme en l‘éliminant, à force d'adhérer de tout son cœur, et sans faire la petite bouche, sans discriminations qui rétablissent l‘étrangeté, avec précisément une volonté, ou plutôt un don, de ne pas rester étranger.”

Samuel Butler, the author of The Way of All Flesh, consoled himself during his life for his poor success as a writer with the thought that some day he would come into his own. In order to make certain that his books might be read, he annotated and explained his leading ideas carefully and cleared the way for his future readers. The course of events has shown that he was quite right in expecting his work to interest later generations. He has actually received almost as much attention from critics, students of literature, and readers as the most famous of his contemporaries. At the present time his position among the important writers of Victorian England is assured. What caused this growth of his reputation? Starting at the time of Butler's death, this article will summarize the critical comment on his work up to the point of his greatest popularity in order to supply the material necessary to an explanation of his rise to fame.

It has long been known that the distinction between sl and tl, which existed in Old Norse, has been lost in the modern dialects of Norway. In his Norsk Grammatik of 1864 Ivar Aasen wrote: