The last hundred years have destroyed the social, political, artistic, philosophical and religious beliefs of the past and substituted new ones. While no one of these new ones has proven satisfactory, it is particularly in the domain of religion that the experiments of a century have borne little fruit. The spiritual indecision of to-day unquestionably had its origin in the peculiar variety of religion which the romantic era gave to the world.

In his interesting discussion of the politics of the greater romantic poets, Mr. Walter Graham throws light not so much upon the work of the poets as upon the men themselves. The illumination is biographical rather than critical. Is it not possible to carry the analysis of the material further, to view the problem involved in the political doctrines of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley in such a way as to give a literary as well as a biographical significance to the data? The importance of such analysis for Scott, Southey, and Keats is less, and in any case cannot be undertaken in the present paper. With respect to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, however, such a consideration has not only its own value but would confirm and also perhaps offer a correction of the biographical view.

At two periods in the eighteenth century, literature was more closely and more frequently associated than is its wont, with immediately contemporary events, and instead of being a disinterested interpretation of life it was enlisted in the service of propaganda. At the outset of the century party-politics, the bickering of Whig and Tory, more than once roused Defoe, Arbuthnot, Addison, and Swift to seize a polemic pen, and from the tumult of controversy emerged works like The Campaign amd The History of John Bull, inspired as much by anticipated rewards as by agitated feelings. Again, at the close of the century, in the presence of such a social upheaval as the French Revolution, it was impossible for thinking men to remain neutral. Problems, born of the intellectual ferment of the age and concerned with the fundamental issues of religion, morals, and government, stirred men to a white heat of partisanship and set them writing passionately, according to their sympathies, in behalf of liberty, equality, the state of nature and civilization, Christianity and atheism, and traditional ethics and individualistic morality. Losing contact with beauty, imaginative literature indeed at this time too often staggers under a weight of social philosophy.

Among the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, Byron is undoubtedly the foremost in the amount of attention he has attracted from Continental critics and imitators. Shelley, however, has also received a rather generous amount of attention. The German translation of Prometheus Unbound, by Helene Richter, and the French translation of The Cenci, with its introductory appreciation by Swinburne, testify to the fact that Continental readers do not ignore Shelley, and a considerable number of German theses on such subjects as “Shelley und die Frauen,” “Shelley's Belesenheit,” and “Shelley's Quellen” show that he has not escaped his portion of industrious German scholarship. Italians, though not so voluminous in their attentions, have felt a special interest in him on account of his Italian residence and sympathies and his use of Italian material in The Cenci. Italian scholars have added a few minor details to our knowledge of Shelley's last years and have devoted some critical attention to The Cenci.

The English newsbooks of the Civil War and the Restoration have long been known to be historically interesting and valuable. That they have also some slight literary interest has not been so generally recognized. Yet a quarter of a century before the first regular “journal of books” appeared in England, the noticing of books was an established practice in the English newspaper; and the notices themselves, indeed, make a certain contribution to literary history.

The old explanation of the modern English accentuation of Old French loanwords (via Anglo-French) as due to the analogy of Germanic stress has been regarded by several investigators with suspicion. It is too summary. Jespersen is not satisfied with it because of the existence of many end-stressed words in English, such as begin, forget, and proposes several explanations of his own. Van Draat takes issue with some of these, but also regards the old explanation as incomplete. Tamson attempts to deduce some regularity from occurrences of varying accentuations in late Middle English poetry.

As the best method of reading Balzac is to follow, through the course of several novels, the history of some one character, so possibly there is no better way of approaching the modern French novel as a whole than by a study of the Catholic priest as there portrayed. He has appealed to practically every writer of first rank, and, moreover, purely as a character of fiction, quite aside from any significance that he may possess as indicating the faith of the author, or as exhibiting the Church and the work of her clergy. It is, accordingly, exclusively from the point of view of his rôle in literature that he is here treated. I shall take up the main themes in the ecclesiastical novel in an endeavor to indicate their relationship and to discover their general trend—an aspect of the subject that is neglected by Paul Franche in his Le Prêtre dans le roman français. I shall also continue the examination by including novels published since 1902, the date of Franche's study.

In 1799, at the very threshold of his literary career, Walter Scott published a translation of Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, containing the single short scene devoted to the judges of the Vehmgericht, who are discovered in “a narrow vault dimly illuminated, … all muffled in black cloaks.” This translation had no second edition, nor is there evidence that it was known in our southern states.