Richard Morris, in editing the Blickling Homilies, called attention to a passage in the xviith Homily which presents striking resemblances to the description of the mere of Grendel in Beowulf, “of which [in his opinion] it is probably a direct reminiscence.” Though almost sixty years have passed since this resemblance was pointed out, during this whole period it has received scant attention from students of Old English, being either ignored altogether or dismissed with only brief discussion.

Diese Arbeit stellt sich die Aufgabe, die in den Grundzügen der Fabel aufs engste verwandten Graldichtungen Crestiens und Wolframs auf ihre Behandlung der epischen Zeit hin zu untersuchen. In erster Linie muß es sich darum handeln, die in jeder der beiden Dichtungen tatsächlich obwaltenden Zeitverhältnisse ins Klare zu stellen. Die zeitliche Aufeinanderfolge der erzählten Ereignisse und die Zeitdauer sowohl der einzelnen Abschnitte wie der Gesamthandlung prägen sich nämlich nicht ohne weiteres dem Gedächtnis des Lesers ein. Zumal von dem Punkte an, wo die Erzählung sich gabelt und streckenweise die Laufbahn eines zweiten Helden ins Auge faßt, um dann wiederholt zum Titelhelden zurückzukehren, geht auch dem aufmerksamen Leser die Uebersicht leicht verloren. Wie sich im Lauf dieser Arbeit herausstellen soll, hat manches schiefe Urteil und manche vorschnelle Hypothese der Forschung unklare Vorstellungen über den epischen Zeitverlauf mit zur Voraussetzung.

The present paper, though it has a bearing upon the problems of comparative literature, does not deal directly with literary works themselves, but is confined to the study of a single rhetorical figure which made its appearance more than two thousand years ago and still lingers in folk rimes of the present day. This rhetorical figure, which is striking enough to be easily identifiable, can be traced all the way from the Orient to Western Europe and thus serves as a floating straw to mark the currents and eddies in the stream of literary tradition.

As an Italian scholar has said, Dante's “rime pietrose” are a “questione pietrosa.” The rime pietrose—Pietra or Petra poems—are, strictly speaking, a small group of poems in which there is word-play on the lady's name and disposition. One thinks of Shakespeare's “Will” sonnets. Barbi allots to the Petra group one sestina, one sestina “doppia,” two canzoni, and a doubtful sonnet. Other critics would add more poems as being similar in mood and motive. D'Ancona, conceiving la Pargoletta, la Petra, la Donna Gentile, and Lisetta as “una persona in diversi atteggiamenti,” would include in one cycle nearly all Dante's lyrics not addressed to Beatrice. Certain others would identify la Petra with one other of Dante's ladies. Thus Zenatti, Santi, Misciatelli identify her with la Pargoletta; Serafino identifies her with Gentucca. At the other extreme, Federzoni rejects the idea of a Petra group altogether.

The Dyalogus published by Johannes Stamler in 1508 when he was rector of the parish church in the little German town of Kissing, a suburb of Augsburg, has up to this time been so completely overlooked by literary critics that its appearance now may be in a measure classed as a discovery. Stamler himself has fared no better at the hands of biographers. A few bibliographers list the play, but with the exception of A. Veith in his Bibliotheca Augustana do scarcely more than quote the full title. Several give a detailed account of Hans Burgkmair's frontispiece, a woodcut depicting, besides the characters of the play, Pope Julian II, and the Emperor Maximilian I. But the woodcut was used only in the first edition, of which twenty-five copies have been located so far. It does not appear in the smaller Italian translation published the same year in Venice by the little-known Giovanni Padovano.

The “Cartapacio de Francisco Morán de Estrella formado en Toro hacia 1585,” constituting part of the Poesías varias, M 531, a manuscript in the library of the Royal Palace at Madrid, contains (on folios 142–146) El llanto de San Pedro traducido por Sancho Viezma, octavas. In spite of the use of the word traducido the poem is not a translation of Tansillo's Lagrime di San Pietro and only partly is it an imitation. The term may have been employed by the scribe under an erroneous impression that it was a translation, or may have been loosely employed to stand for imitation or derivation, a procedure not uncommon at the time.

Of all the Euphuists, Robert Greene was the one most fascinated by the rhetorical possibilities provided for literature by science. Similes and allusions drawn from the storehouse of natural history appear on almost every page of his work. One counts references to more than thirty animals, forty minerals and precious stones, fifteen reptiles, thirty birds, fifteen fish, twenty trees, fifteen insects, and sixty herbs in the corpus of his prose romances. The number of his allusions must total almost a thousand—a staggering mass of material for such a mercurial mind to retain. What is the origin of all this learning?

The irresistible whirl of change moves faster as the world grows older, but the student of history and letters may still take uneasy comfort in the reflection that old legend dies hard. It lives long and, grown old, may be born anew if it be good legend—a challenging fable, a pointed parable, a tale which holds old men from the chimney corner because it has poignancy, beauty, truth, even if it be not the whole truth. And as with legend so with certain legendary literary judgments which have captured, as it were, the imagination of men. So it is, for instance, with Wordsworth's famous dictum concerning Milton: Milton's soul was like a star, but he did not dwell far apart from the world of affairs nor from warm and kindly human relationships. Yet Wordsworth's Milton lives, not only because the conception has in it an element of real, though partial truth, but more especially because it is dramatically effective—because it characterizes a complex figure in sharp, clean-cut, easily understandable lines. So it is also, I believe, with a fascinating old half-truth of critical legend which has had a curiously varied revival in our own time: the legend—one of Milton's own sponsorship though neither of his only begetting nor yet of Ben Jonson's—concerning the divine “easiness,” the gloriously unstudied artlessness of “sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,” warbling “his native woodnotes wild.”

Professor Morris W. Croll at the end of his excellent article, “The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose,” says in a note: “Sir Thomas Browne, like his master Seneca, was fond of the cadence of oratory, and a profitable study of his form might be made by one who should be capable of interpreting the subtleties of a great master in variations.” This article is an attempt to carry out Professor Croll's suggestion, an attempt already made to some extent by Norton R. Tempest in his article, “Rhythm in the Prose of Sir Thomas Browne.” Tempest confuses the reader by including many things besides the cursus forms. I propose in this paper to limit myself to the cursus forms and their English variations as pointed out by Professor Croll, and to take as my working example only the Fifth Chapter of Hydriotaphia. There, I believe, will be found practically every variation Browne used, and the condensation of the material will enable the reader to follow the discussion conveniently, with the chapter before him.

Molière's career as an actor-manager would be largely a matter of conjecture today but for the preservation of four account books now in the archives of the Comédie-Française. Of these documents, the two earliest have been published in extenso; first, the “Registre de La Grange” entitled Extraict des Receptes et des Affaires de la Comédie depuis Pasques de l'année 1659, appartenant au Srde La Grange, l'un des Comédiens du Roy, with a biographical notice by Édouard Thierry, published by the Comédie-Française in 1876; and secondly, Le Premier Registre de La Thorilliére (1663–64), published in 1890 in an edition of 340 copies in the Nouvelle Collection Moliéresque of D. Jouaust, with preface and notes by Georges Monval, archivist of the Comédie-Française in 1878 and librarian in 1885. I assume that Monval intended to publish the two account books remaining in the archives of his theater, known traditionally as the Second Registre de La Thorilliére (1664–65), and the Registre d'Hubert (1672–73), for Monval announced the former as in press in 1890, and in 1897 it was still advertised as in preparation. However, Damase Jouaust, Monval's publisher, died in 1893, and his successor, the Flammarion firm, only completed the publication of a series of plays by Molière edited by Vitu and Monval. The last volume of this edition, Monval's Chronologie Moliéresque, appeared in 1897.

Fifty years ago Edmund Gosse observed: “We should know little or nothing of what happened to Congreve between 1700 and 1710 if it were not for the Keally letters.” The further statement must be made that in over two hundred years little or nothing has been discovered concerning the friend to whom those letters were addressed. Gosse knew only that Joseph Keally was of “Keally Mount, Kilkenny” and that he was “a relative of Bishop Berkeley.” Congreve's recent biographer, Mr. D. Crane Taylor, unaware of Keally's early death, deplores the “most regrettable” loss of letters later in date than those of Berkeley's Relics but concludes that Congreve and Keally “unquestionably remained close friends.”

In 1786 Gilbert Wakefield pointed out in a very specific way the similarity of certain passages in the poetry of Lucretius, Thomson, and Gray. In our own day, Miss A. L. Reed and Professor H. W. Garrod have indicated the same parallel passages in the three poets, as well as in Collins. My purpose here is to classify this Lucretian influence as definitely as possible, and to describe its genesis and diffusion as part of a broader Vergilian stream.

In a previous article I showed that James Thomson's juvenile poem, “The Works and Wonders of Almighty Power,” was for the most part a paraphrase of certain passages in the Moralists, a philosophical rhapsody, by the Earl of Shaftesbury. Another one of Thomson's juvenile poems, “Upon Happiness,” contributed to The Edinburgh Miscellany in 1720, was inspired by a letter John Norris wrote at All-Souls College, April 18, 1683, entitled “An Idea of Happiness: Enquiring wherein the greatest Happiness Attainable by Man in this Life does consist.” In addition, Thomson was perhaps indebted to John Norris for some of the general treatment of theme found in his “Preface” to the second edition of Winter (1726).

Events in the life of Edmund Burke from his birth in Dublin in 1729, his schooldays at Ballitore, his undergraduate career at Trinity College, and his venture into pamphleteering during the Lucas controversy, have been reconstructed in much detail. That he came to London to read law and keep his terms in the Middle Temple at some time shortly before May 2, 1750—the date of his bond—is also readily inferred. And then, after a lapse of years, when he contracted with Dodsley in 1758 to publish The Annual Register; when he began to meet Garrick, Johnson, Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, and other distinguished people at about the same time; and finally when he began his political apprenticeship under William Gerard Hamilton in 1759 —Burke's life is increasingly illuminated by well-known names, until within a few years the young Irishman is a celebrity in his own right. But between these dates lies almost a decade which the historians of Burke's career, such as Bisset, MacKnight, and Prior, have passed over with vague conjecture. Lord Morley, in the best-known of all Burke's biographies, refers to these years as “enveloped in nearly complete obscurity,” while the Dictionary of National Biography observes that “we scarcely know anything of this period of his life.” Such lack of knowledge has helped to keep alive various canards which even in Burke's lifetime were circulated about this interlude of his youth—that he went to St. Omer's and became a convert to Popery, that he visited America under mysterious circumstances, and that he was the lover of Peg Woffington. Indeed, the life of such a forthright person as Edmund Burke, who once declared “that he had no secrets with regard to the public,” appears often to attract dark and mysterious legends—perhaps on the principle of lucus a non lucendo.

Nietzsche und Heine sind eins in der Kritik an der Dekadenz des 19. Jahrhunderts und in der Liebe zur grossen Persönlichkeit:

Der Gleiche erkennt den Gleichen. Es ist nachzuweisen, wie alie grosse literarische Einsicht wieder auf die grossen verwandten Ingenien zurückgeht: was einen schönen Beweis für die Erbärmlichkeit des gemeinen Intellekts abgabe. Er kann keine grossen Werke schaffen, ja, er kann sie nicht einmal herauskennen. Der grosse Kanon der Klassiker ist von den Klassikern gebildet.—Nietzsche, Jugendschriften, S. 245.

The purpose of this paper is to add another chapter to the constantly growing account of Melville as a writer who, in calculating his effects, often had recourse to travel diaries and guidebooks to furnish him with factual information and with dramatic episodes, which appear as the authentic experiences of his characters. In this instance the book is Redburn, the novel which he regarded as one of the least of his works, but which many besides John Masefield have admired as a spirited and sometimes harrowing narrative of a boy's running away to sea.

In one of the several accounts Théophile Gautier gave of the life and works of his friend Gérard de Nerval, he expatiated on the extraordinary modesty of the man. The tumult and turmoil of the age was destined to die down; the whisper of Nerval's voice has been echoed down the years, and has become sweet music. His poetical lineage has radiated in every direction, and constitutes the purest lyrical filiation of the century.

Walter Pater is commonly known as an impressionistic critic. Many who use the term of him consider it a compliment. For instance, A. J. Farmer admires him greatly, and calls the Preface to the Renaissance an “admirable plaidoyer” for impressionistic criticism. He explains it thus:

La beauté, écrit-il [Pater] en substance, ne sairait se réduire à une formule ab straite; elle est multiple et diverse, elle varie selon les époques et même selon les individus. A quoi bon essayer de l'enfermer dans tel principe d'ecoie, dans tel concept fatalement arbitrare? La tâche de critique ne consiste-t-elle pas plutôt à communiquer au lecteur ses enthousiasmes, à lui décrire les sensations qu'il a éprouvées devant l'ceuvre d'art, à lui montrer les images qui se sont succede dans le miroir de son ame?

It seems to be a widely accepted opinion that the words father (<OE fæder) and rather (OE rather <*hrathor) have had an identical historical development since ME. Both words occur in the questionnaire of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. Both have been recorded regularly with rather placed in two entirely different contexts—“I'd rather go” and “rather cold.” The more than 400 records of the Atlas reveal conditions in present-day dialect. We shall try to establish, by comparing the vowel qualities as recorded in father and rather, whether the theories of the scholars are confirmed or not.

In Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, the Symbolist movement started as a reaction against the positivism and utilitarianism of the preceding epoch. The eighties and the early nineties were periods of pervading rationalistic thought. Dostoevski and Turgenev were dead. Tolstoi had withdrawn from literature to expound his dogmatic, rationalistic Christianity. The poetry of the so-called civic poets had sunk to the lowest possible level. It was the “autumnal” period of Russian literature.