The Cardigan Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was stolen from the Library of Lady Cardigan during the summer of 1923. After passing through various hands, it came into the possession of the Vassar College Library in September, 1923, and was restored to the owner, Mr. George Brudenell, Deene Park, Peterborough, England, the following August.

The reference to Saint Ambrose in Chaucer's Life of St. Cecilia (C. T. G. vv. 271 ff.) has never been explained. Although Chaucer in this reference was clearly following his Latin source, Tyrwhitt regarded these lines as an awkward interruption of the narrative and wished that he could find reason for omitting them. Skeat gave up the problem with the words: “I cannot find anything of the kind in the works of St. Ambrose.” Professor Lowes, in his admirable article upon the interpretation of the two crowns, does not mention this Ambrose passage, or attempt to explain the expression the “palm of martirdom.” His only reference to Ambrose is incidental to his relation of the story of the bee lighting on the infant's lips, from the sermon on St. Ambrose by Jacobus de Voragine.

An uncertainty as to the social position of franklins in general, and of Chaucer's Franklin in particular, has occasionally manifested itself since the early part of the nineteenth century. In 1810, Todd quoted an elaborate note from Waterhous's Commentary on Sir John Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum Angliae, which tended to show that franklins did not belong to the gentry. Todd was unable to square this with the fact that (Chaucer's Franklin was “at sessiouns,” since by a statute of Edward III, which he cited, justices were seigneurs, and that he was “ofte tyme” a knight of the shire, since by another statute members of parliament were “chivalers et serjantz des meulz vaues du paies.”) Todd was thus left in doubt as to the gentility of the Franklin. As a later examination of Fortescue's remarks will show, it is not he but his commentator who must be blamed for lowering the status of Chaucer's sanguine country gentleman. If Todd had been of firmer mind, or if he had studied the subject more deeply, he would not have left the matter in doubt—a trap for unwary feet in later times.

Holinshed has heretofore been considered the primary source of Drayton's Battaile of Agincourt. “Its faithfulness to Holinshed,” declares Mr. H. H. Child in his article on Drayton, “brings it frequently into touch with Shakespeare's King Henry Fifth.” Similar is the statement made by Garnett in his edition of the poem:

Though it is recognized that Beaumont and Fletcher generally followed Jonson's example in inventing their own plots, studies of their plays have led to direct sources elsewhere—largely in Spanish romances. Their plays, instead of attempting to picture real life, are provided with distant settings and filled with improbable situations, unnatural characters, and a sentimental atmosphere, so that it was an easy matter to draw material for them from the romantic tales of such writers as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Gonzalo de Cespedes, and Mateo Aleman.

Shortly after completing my study of Henry Chettle I chanced to read the anonymous Trial of Chivalry, printed in 1605 by Simon Stafford for Nathaniel Butter, as having “bin lately acted by the right Honourable the Earle of Darby his servants,” and before I had half finished the play I became convinced that of the two dramatists concerned in its composition the chief was Chettle. This conclusion I reached quite independently, for I used the Tudor Facsimile reproduction of the quarto of 1605 and was unaware that Bullen in the introduction to his reprint had remarked: “If I were obliged to make a guess at the authorship, I would name Chettle or Munday, or both.” Nor had I observed that Fleay also had suggested Chettle as one of the authors of this play.

Hey for honesty, the lively seventeenth century adaptation of the Plutus of Aristophanes, was long attributed without question to the joint authorhip of Thomas Randolph and a certain F. J. whose identity has never been ascertained. The title-page of the first edition reads: “. A Pleasant Comedie, Entituled Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery. Translated out of Aristophanes his Plutus, by Tho: Randolph. Augmented and Published by F. J.” This unambiguous statement of dual authorship went unchallenged until 1875. Several attempts were then made to prove that Randolph had no part whatever in the translation, and that the whole play was written by F. J. It is the purpose of this article to present new evidence, first, that the play is in truth the result of dual authorship, and second, that Thomas Randolph was the original translator and adapter.

Like others whose work happens to lie in the classics as much as in English, I have been indebted to Professor F. M. K. Foster's English Translations from the Greek (Columbia University, 1918) and the deeper one sinks into bibliographical quagmires the more one appreciates the labor, as well as the infinite possibilities of error, involved in compiling such a list. I say this because it is a rather easy and ungracious thing to pick holes in one section of a bibliographical manual covering a wide field. An independent survey of Homeric translations, which I undertook in the course of an attempt to trace the history of classical themes in English verse, discloses a number of omissions and some apparent mistakes in Dr. Foster's section on Homer. In presenting this supplement to his work I abide (except in one or two items) by his own principles, and confine myself to literal translations, excluding excerpts, adaptations, paraphrases and the like.

Though Mr. C. E. Whitmore in his paper, “The Field of the Essay” has suggested with exceptional sharpness the full function of the letter in the development of various essay types, he has, like other writers on the essay, failed definitely to relate the two forms. Both types are exceedingly vague and complex. And if Mr. Whitmore decides that “the effort to discover a single continuous ‘essay tradition’ in English is vain” and adds that he “can see no reason to suppose that Lamb's work would have been in the slightest degree altered if Bacon had never written a line;” it is likewise true that the letter throughout its history shows perhaps even more striking irregularities and lack of discipline. Nevertheless, though both essay and letter are inchoate literary identities which have in the past taken on a variety of exteriors, there are undoubtedly points in common between them; there is even, I should like to show, sufficient evidence to argue a definite and deliberate indebtedness on the part of essay writers for elements which belong primarily to the familiar letter and to it alone of all recognized literary forms.

Though of slight intrinsic value, Whig poetry of the eighteenth century constitutes a distinct chapter in the history of English literature. The earlier interest of poetry relating to affairs of state had almost invariably taken the form of personal eulogy, satire, or violent invective—types produced in extraordinary abundance during the Restoration. While such verse continued to flourish indefinitely, the complete development of the party system of government enabled poetry to acquire a much broader and more influential sphere. The great body of Whig verse written in the eighteenth century is devoted to the expression of party ideals; it is concerned with principles rather than personalities. This change of function, deeply significant for the future relation of politics and belles lettres, arose largely from the fact that poets were irresistibly attracted by what Chevrillon calls the psychology of Whiggism. Fortunately for the Whig cause, the versifiers contrived to find in the Whig dogma the political embodiment of the most popular moral sentiments of the age. The advocacy of Whiggism thus became a phase of a sentimental movement which, beginning early in the century, eventually “spread like a mildew over the whole surface of literature.”

Whenever critics have noted an influence of the Platonic dialogues upon Byron, they have assumed that it is practically limited to the passing echo of Shelley's and Wordsworth's Platonism in the third canto of Childe Harold. In this paper I hope to show that, on the contrary, Byron had independent convictions about the Platonic-Socratic philosophy, which underlay most of his mature writing and which were inconsistent with his reflection of Shelley's metaphysics in Childe Harold.

The significance of the historical novel may be summarily suggested by calling the roll of its greatest masters: Scott and Manzoni; Hugo and Dumas; Thackeray, Kingsley, and Reade; Tolstoi, Coster, and Sienkiewicz. Add those who are rivals of the leading masters: Gogol and Jokai, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Jens Peder Jacobsen, Hawthorne and Pater, Blackmore and Stevenson; Merimée, Flaubert, and Anatole France. Here, without mentioning many who, like Dickens and George Eliot, were at their best in other forms of fiction, we have a genre rich in masterpieces,—certainly the only great genre in which the nineteenth century so excelled its predecessors as to cast their experiments of a similar kind into oblivion. The public loves it; great authors devote themselves to it. What do the critics make of it? What is its nature, its function, its value? Is this method, apparently so successful, of narrating an action imagined as occurring in an historic past, really a literary art or is it a temporary aberration? Such questions rang out in the nineteenth century as challenges to critical genius. How did the critics respond?

It was late in life that Sainte-Beuve wrote to a correspondent:

This declaration is often cited as a sort of summary and synthesis of his critical theory and experience, witnessing his fixed and final preference for the Classical manner, a preference which he promptly and constantly declared after his conclusive break with the Romantics in 1838. The interest of the scholar is immediately aroused by two things in the passage: the fact that he calls the group or roll of writers whom he indicates a “school”; and more especially by the names he singles out as representing the “school” to which he declares his allegiance— Horace and Pope.

The subject of the present investigation is the relation between Victor Hugo's Quatrevingt-treize and the following earlier works: Sébastian Mercier's Paris pendant la Révolution (1789-1798) ou le Nouveau Paris, and the Mémoires du Comte Joseph de Puisaye. It will be found that numerous details in Quatrevingt-treize are taken from the work of Sébastien Mercier, while Count de Puisaye's Mémoires are an important source for the character Lantenac.

During the last two and a half years France has lost three great writers, Pierre Loti, Anatole France, and Maurice Barrès. Loti, because of his impressionistic novels of the most artistic kind which record his tireless quest of sensations in all countries of the world, France, because of his epicurean philosophy and Voltairean wit expressed in two-score works of the most finished style, and Barrès, because of his triple rôle of author, politician, and leader of traditionalism in France,—all three have left a profound influence on the contemporary literature of their country. Of these three, Barrès, in spite of the conceit of his early egotism, the narrowness of his nationalism, and the occasional arrogance of his confidence in the superiority of French culture, is by far the most highly endowed and representative; and on this account his work will receive more and more attention from serious students of the political, social, and literary movements of the last thirty years in France. He was one of the first to make his voice heard against the extreme naturalism of Zola and his school; he founded a group of enthusiastic young writers striving toward a new order of things; and, after a period of hesitation, he stood forth as the champion of the best traditions of his country. The purpose of this paper is not, however, to make a comparative study of the relative greatness of these three writers, but rather to trace the struggle between the classical and romantic elements in Barrès' composition, and to show that the latter were not only predominant in his first writings but continued to the end of his life as a strong undercurrent in his novels and books of travel.

That René Boylesve is descended in a direct line from Balzac has for years been a commonplace with critics. As long ago as 1906, Henri Gheon styled Boylesve a “fils direct de Balzac.” Jules Bertaut, after pointing out that Boylesve's characters, like himself, are very “sensibles,” and that the provincials among them, having been forced to suppress their individualities, experience violent emotional crises when, for one reason or another, they tear themselves loose, adds this comment: “Le grand Balzac le savait bien, lui qui a dressé ses plus belles figures de grand passionnés dans d'inertes chefs-lieux de canton!” Pierre Lasserre says of la Becquée that it has “de fortes ressemblances avec un chef-d'œuvre balzacien.” Similarly, Winifred Stephens, in her essay on Boylesve, sees in his work “the minuteness of a Balzac,” and Mme Mary Duclaux, compares Boylesve's Touraine novels to the Scènes de la vie de province of the Comédie humaine. Indeed, the work of Boylesve almost inevitably calls up the name of Balzac. It is the purpose of the present paper to determine whether this resemblance is anything more than a superficial one and, if it is not, to see wherein lies the originality of Boylesve.