In the first scene of Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar the common people are depicted as if they were English mechanics. We are led to wonder whether the contempt expressed in this play for the vile-smelling and fickle-minded Roman mob represents Shakespeare's own attitude toward his humbler fellow-citizens. Indeed, a larger question suggests itself. John Hampden was already of age in 1616, when the dramatist died; in 1649 Charles I was beheaded, and England proclaimed itself a commonwealth. Did Shakespeare appreciate at all the strength of the movement which sought to put limitations upon the king and to increase the power of the people? Where were his sympathies?

Although both Wordsworth and Coleridge were strongly influenced by the popular ballad, they were attracted by this form for very different reasons and affected by it in very different ways. The one point in common is that this influence was in both cases mainly for good. Wordsworth was drawn to the ballad by its directness and simplicity of style, and by the fact that it often treats of the lower classes of men in what Rousseau would have called a natural state of society. Coleridge took up the ballad for a nearly opposite reason; i. e., because of its remoteness from modern life, a remoteness that left him free play for his imagination. Thus, oddly, Wordsworth cultivated the ballad because it had once been close to common life; Coleridge because it was now remote from common life and gave him a form remarkably susceptible of that strangeness which the romantic genius habitually adds to beauty. Wordsworth preferred the domestic, or occasionally the sentimental-romantic, ballad; Coleridge markedly adhered to the supernatural ballad.

The seventh play in the Hegge collection of English mystery plays is unique: in it is to be found a striking, and I believe hitherto unnoted, influence of art. James Orchard Halliwell, in his edition of the Hegge plays, calls this play “The Prophets.” But whatever its superficial likeness to the liturgical Processus Prophetarum, and other prophet plays, it is my conviction that this single English play is directly influenced by — indeed, largely derived from—that pictorial representation of the genealogy of Christ which is known in art as the Tree of Jesse, Stirps Jesse, or Radix Jesse.

In the tenth book of his Historia, Ecclesiastica, Orderic Vital gives an account of Bohemond's surprise and capture by the Turkish Emir, Daliman, and his imprisonment, with other Erench nobles, in one of the Emir's fortresses. Now there happened to live in this particular stronghold the Emir's daughter, Melaz. She had often heard the bravery of the Crusaders praised, and welcomed this opportunity to make the acquaintance of such famous heroes. So she would visit Bohemond and his friends in their dungeon and talk with them. Her favorite topic was the tenets of the Christian faith. Conversation naturally led to a good understanding and assistance on Melaz's part.

In October, 1803, Kleist secretly left Paris and traveled alone and without the customary passports to the northern coast of France, to the vicinity of Boulogne-sur-mer. In and near this city Napoleon I. was assembling a vast army, with munitions and transports, for the ostensible purpose of making a descent upon England. Kleist wished to enter this army and share its fate on English soil, in the hope of a soldier's death.

It has been tacitly assumed that the Mirour de l'Omme lived only in its name (and even in that somewhat equivocally) until the discovery of the single extant manuscript in 1895. To suggest that the poem not only did not die when it was born, but that on the contrary it was well known to Spenser, and that it gave to the Faerie Queene one of its most famous purple patches—such a suggestion, one may readily grant, would occur offhand to no one. Yet there is weighty evidence in support of just this contention, and that evidence it is the object of this paper to present. That the case is one which challenges somewhat sharply our established preconceptions, and that it must rest on firm ground to command assent, I am thoroughly aware.

In Morris's Historical Outlines of English Accidence, § 155, occurs this statement: “…in Old English Ye was always used as a nominative, and you as a dative or accusative. In the English Bible this distinction is very carefully observed, but in the dramatists of the Elizabethan period there is a very loose use of the two forms.” Similarly Lounsbury: “Ye in the language of Chaucer invariably denotes the nominative; you the objective; and this distinction will still be found observed in the Authorized Version of the Bible.” Emerson: “This is the use in Chaucer, and in the English Bible of 1611, the language of which, however, is based on the translations of earlier times.” Smith: “This distinction is preserved in the King James Version of the Bible: Ye in me, and I in you; but not in Shakespeare and later writers.”