“The probationary period of translation … marks the first stage in the development of prose fiction,” writes Professor J. W. H. Atkins, and inspection of even a few Elizabethan novels will convince one that the type is not indigenous to English soil. The use of the love affair, of realism in the telling, of ordinary people in ordinary surroundings, of the rival and the confidante, of even the minor love affair, and of a plot with well marked stages and characters influenced by events would have been impossible to English novelists without the example of their Italian predecessors. Before Euphues or The Adventures passed by Master F. I. or The Golden Aphroditis can be adequately accounted for, the contribution of Italy must be studied, not alone through such collections as Painter's Pallace of Pleasure (1566-67) and Fenton's Tragicall Discourses (1567), but—and this is of more importance—through single works outside collections, which were of sufficient length and interest to bear the test of printing as separate volumes.

When the reader of to-day considers the English origins of our monthly magazines of light literature, he seldom thinks back beyond the Gentleman's Magazine (1731-). The Tatler (1709-) and Spectator (1711-) he may regard as aside from the direct line of development, as they are not miscellanies. Yet in 1692 appeared in London a monthly periodical that is fairly startling in its resemblance to the Atlantics, the Harper's, the Smart Sets of our day,—the Gentleman's Journal, which is, I believe, the first notable English venture of its kind.

There seems to be universal agreement among Schiller's critics that his last drama, Wilhelm Tell, means a serious change of attitude toward the ideal which had guided the poet in its predecessors. Some scholars candidly regret its looseness of form, calling this a mistake which the poet should have avoided. Others endeavor with all possible pains to fit the play into the straight-jacket of the established model, and to justify the poet's willful deviations from the rules he himself had laid down. A third group asserts with much praise that the poet has written a real Volksstück—i. e., in this case, a play for the people—by choosing intentionally a popular style and form, and by making a whole people the hero of his play.

Some time ago in an article on Locrine and Selimus I showed the futility of discussing questions of the authorship and chronology of plays written between 1585 and 1595 on the evidence of parallel passages. I endeavored to show that the occurrence of such parallels is much more likely to be evidence of different authorship than of common authorship. If, now, this kind of evidence, by itself, is to be considered of small value, where shall we look for other evidence that may have more weight and certainty? I believe that something of significance can be found if we search carefully for characteristics of style,—forms of expression more or less rhetorical, peculiar arrangement of terms, favorite collocations of words, devices to “bum-bast out” the blank verse.

Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium, which is preserved in a unique manuscript of the latter part of the fourteenth century, has been twice edited; in 1850 by Thomas Wright, and in 1914 most admirably by Dr. Montague Rhodes James. It is apparent, even to the casual reader, that the work was not written continuously from beginning to end, but was redacted from fragments composed at various times and at various degrees of leisure; both editors, however, assume that Map himself arranged the fragments and published the book substantially as it now stands, though Dr. James fully appreciates the formlessness of the work, and admits that “the plan … . is to seek.”