We cannot help thinking of certain characters in Shakespeare as real beings. We wonder what this person did before the play opened, and after it closed. What was the girlhood of Portia? Why had Othello never suspected the baseness of lago? What was the fate of Shylock after the scene in court? Of what sort was the married life of Beatrice and Benedick? Such questions are insistent and compelling, irrelevant though they are.

Groethe's literary sources for the Ur-Tasso acquainted him with the legend of Tasso, which had sprung up even before the publication of the first biography of the poet, by Manso, in 1620 (twenty-five years after Tasso's death), and flourisht uncheckt till the appearance, in 1785, in Rome, of the Abbate Serassi's La Vita di Torquato Tasso. One prominent feature of the legend, the love affair between the poet and the Princess Leonora, sister of the Duke of Ferrara, was retained by Goethe, even after he read Serassi's attempts to disprove it, because he was making the love motive in the drama a reflection of his own relation to Frau von Stein. As that Platonic relation had unfolded itself in life its reflection had assumed shape in the drama, till, on the completion of the second act, the poet had realized that there was a crisis ahead, both in life and in the play; and as he did not care to picture it in fancy, the two-act fragment was laid aside, in November, 1781, and was not toucht again till the author went to Italy. This fragment, the Ur-Tasso, was written in “poetischer Prosa.” The finisht drama is in un-rimed iambic pentameters. The revision of the drama was begun in Italy and finisht after the poet's return to Weimar. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss certain features of the history of that revision.

Lorsque la guerre éclata, la France, militairement parlant, n‘était pas prête. Malgré l'arrêt momentané des armées allemandes en Belgique, l'ennemi put arriver jusqu’ aux portes de Paris.

The middle of the eighteenth century was a period of transition, and Charles Churchill, its greatest satirist, was typical of his age. The men whose influence appears most strongly in his works belonged to the classical and the pseudo-classical schools; those whom he influenced were the exponents of some phase of romanticism. In him we find the spirit of revolt against authority that appears in the early romanticists, but we do not find the lofty ideals, the introspective analysis, the spiritual interpretation of nature, that characterized the later poets. The very fact that he was a satirist links him indissolubly with the classicists. In his exaltation of reason as the “Lord Chief-Justice in the court of man,” in his general mode of thought and expression, he is conservative—in revolt, to be sure, against the school of Pope, yet an imitator of it at every turn.

For purposes of discussion it is convenient to divide the literary productions of Pereda into two classes; from 1859 until about 1876 he was occupied chiefly with short sketches known as cuadros de costumbres; from 1877 until the virtual close of his career as an author, in 1895 his attention was centered upon novels. Long sketches that approach the dignity of novels appeared before 1877, and Pereda never ceased entirely the composition of short pieces. The distinction just made, however, is roughly true.

Whenever Herbert Spencer mentioned the origin of his works, he always insisted upon the freedom of his thought from the influence of others. This claim, though attacked in the case of several of his writings, has remained unquestioned as regards The Philosophy of Style. Indeed, so unusual has this essay appeared to all readers that, with the recognition that it possesses much originality, has gone, apparently, the conviction that it was made by Spencer from whole cloth. Thus much Spencer himself did not claim; yet perhaps even Spencer—always a little blind to the influences upon his work—would not have recognized the extent of his indebtedness.

I should like to make the following corrections in the text of the Revelations of Methodius printed in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, XXXIII, pp. 156 ff. The errors are due in some instances to oversight in the proof-reading, in others to original misreading of the ms. For their detection I am indebted to J. P. Gilson, Esq., Keeper of the Manuscripts in the British Museum, to whom I wish here to express my sincere thanks.

The more recent discussions of the dramatic manifestations within the liturgy of Easter-tide have given fair consideration to a type of play,—Peregrinus,—centering in a dramatization of the appearence of Christ to the two disciples at Emmaus, as recounted in the Gospel of Luke. Although the importance of this post-Resurrection play has been sufficiently evident, the limited number of the extant texts has suggested that it was closely restricted in its distribution and development. Recent researches, however, have given promise of substantial future additions to this branch of knowledge. Since the date of the last comprehensive surveys of the subject, one complete new text has been discovered, together with a mutilated fragment of another text. The purpose of the present article is the communication of an additional version, considerably more extended in dramatic content than any of the versions published hitherto.

In what purports to be a definitive life of the poet Young, H. C. Shelley remarks that the question of the identity of Philander, Lucia, and Narcissa, raised by the peculiar chronology of their deaths, as recorded in the Night Thoughts, forms “the most puzzling problem of Young's biography.” Part of the problem had already been solved by M. Walter Thomas, to whom Sir Leslie Stephen refers at the close of his article on Young in the D. N. B., an article referred to by Mr. Shelley himself. M. Thomas shows pretty conclusively that Philander was no other than Thomas Tickell, the lifelong intimate friend of Young, whose death occurred suddenly at Bath on April 23, 1740. Lucia was the poet's wife, the “poor Lady Betty Lee” of Mrs. Pendarves's letter, who was left “with three children to maintain and not a farthing to support her.” The identity of Narcissa, however (which Mr. Shelley makes no attempt to solve), offers greater difficulty. Professor Thomas suggests that she may have been an illegitimate daughter “reconnue par le père, acceptée par sa femme, mais désavouée par le moraliste. Peut-être,” he continues, “encore l'enfant est-elle née trop tôt, Young ayant anticipé en quelque sort sur les droits du mariage.”