The purpose of this article is to further the understanding of the nature and function of dwarves in Old Icelandic belief by an investigation of the names applied to them. I have therefore collected the dwarf-names, supplied meanings and etymologies, and classified the names by form and function. These names are scattered through the Fornaldarsögur, the Younger Edda and in various Eddic poems. Most of the names are in two versified lists; the shorter list in stanzas 10 to 16 of the V$ooluspá, the longer, called Dverga heiti, among the nafnaþulur. These two lists, which are derived from a common source, have a large number of names in common; the V$ooluspá has nine or ten that are not in the þulur, and the latter have a somewhat larger number which are not in the V$ooluspá. The various manuscripts show variant readings. All these readings are of interest to us, for the opinion of a scribe as to what is a suitable name for a dwarf may be just as valuable as the opinion of the man who composed the original.

If One wishes to bother, one may divide mankind into two classes: those who judge their fellows by predetermined laws of conduct, and those who merely observe their fellows for what they are. Bunyan and Tolstoy are typical of the former class; Shakspere and Jane Austen of the second.

Marie de France was a sort of mediaeval Jane Austen. Both women knew their set, they knew their sex, and they knew little more of life. But that little they knew well, and of that little they wrote well, for both had the knack of story-telling. Both steered a sure course between sentimentality and cynicism; their writings reveal a general deftness, a perfect tact—“restraint,” as it is sometimes called—and a nice analysis of motives, from which spring plots that fit the characters as inseparably and yet as flexibly as the skin fits the hand. Jane is dryer, and more steadily ironical, though Chaitivel indicates that Marie could also be ironical; indeed, we might label their chief spiritual difference by saying that Jane is British through and through, but Marie is French.

When we say that an act or a statement is without rime or reason, we mean, I suppose, that the thing said or done was utterly without justification or excuse, that there was no reason or occasion for it. Alliteration makes the phrase emphatic. The appropriateness of “reason” in the formula seems obvious enough; but the meaning of “rime,” in this connection is more obscure. The purpose of this brief discussion is to suggest a plausible origin of the formula and to explain the meaning of “rime” in the phrase—in other words, to show that the formula itself is not “without rime or reason.”

The statement is often made that the Pléiade sang nature with exuberance and freshness. The feeling for nature, which virtually passed out of French literature when the poésie courtoise finally died with Charles d'Orléans, began to reappear early in the sixteenth century with Jean Le Maire de Belges. This re-ëmergence was at first very slow, and the new feeling did not attain its fullest development until the second half of the century. It is perhaps well to say at the outset that the words “a feeling for nature” applied to the poetry of the sixteenth century are not the equivalent of “a nature poetry,” and must not be taken to mean that the century of the Renaissance in France created a genuine poetry of nature. If we define this as consisting essentially in a sincere love and a spontaneous, as opposed to a conventional, treatment of nature; a concern with nature for its own sake instead of using it merely as an ornament in poetry with a primarily human interest; and a sympathetic interpenetration between the soul of man and the soul of things, we shall not find these conditions fulfilled in the French poetry of this period. In the first part of this paper I shall endeavor to trace the origins of the feeling for nature exhibited in sixteenth-century French poetry, to define its limits, and to explain why the Pléiade did not create a true nature poetry; in the second part I propose to show that the interest in nature was diverted in the last quarter of the century into another channel, to assume the form which may be called the solitude and desert motif, its predominant mode of expression in the next century, and to set forth the causes of this deviation.

Detailed study attendant upon the preparation of a critical edition of the Woman Hater has led me to the conclusion that the play is not an unsuccessful juvenilium in the Jonsonian “humour” school, as it has often been described, but is rather indebted to the evil influence of the outlawed satirist, John Marston, and identifies its author as one of a group of daring young comedists who took for their common subject the crimes and follies of the Court of James I. The purpose of the present paper, however, is not to discuss the evidence of this satirical cabal of which Marston was unquestionably the arch-conspirator, but to point out several topical allusions to the King and his court in Marston's Fawn and Beaumont's Woman Hater.

Few readers of Hudibras have escaped the fascination of trying to identify the characters in the poem. Yet after two hundred and fifty years, during which readers have wondered and scholars have pondered, we are little nearer the goal. We do not even know whether Butler intended his titular hero to be the satiric portrait of a particular Puritan or the personified picture of a type.

Of All the decadents in the Spanish drama as it fell away from the glory of the golden age at the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, there are three who most merit the name of disciples of the great Calderón: Bances Cándamo, Vázquez de Zamora, and Cañizares. Taken together, they form a sort of trinity in their support of the Calderonian theory of the drama. But while all wrote, as well as they might, after the manner of their illustrious predecessor and master, it is to Bances Cándamo that one must turn as to the spokesman of a dramatic theory and technique more or less common to his time, a system whose repercussions are to be found not only in the works of the three writers just mentioned, but as well in those of a number of wholly inferior dramatists who, together with the three, form the background of the Spanish stage as it existed from the death of Calderón until, or perhaps slightly beyond the third decade of the eighteenth century; until, indeed, it found opposition and eventual overthrow at the hands of the afrancesados, led, as is generally thought, by Luzán, whose Poética (1737) was for decades the text-book and vade mecum of the neo- or rather pseudoclassicists.

A Lexander Pope as known to his contemporaries is a study in extremes. One group knew him as the satirist, diabolically clever and Papistical, responsible for the Moral Essays and the Dunciad. But another group less frequently commemorated idolized him as the romantic author of the Pastorals, of Windsor Forest, of Eloisa to Abelard and The Dying Christian to his Soul; he satisfied their love of beauty both in external nature and in the soul of man. With something of surprise we see through the eyes of these admirers the figure of the romantic poet usually obscured by that of the satirist of later years. The gradual stages by which the admirers of the younger Pope become the stern judges of his middle age are evidences of changes in the poet himself and not in those romantically-minded readers who turned reluctantly from him to Thomson and Shenstone and Young.

Fashions in literature run not only to theme, form, influence, and diction but also to title and even part of a title. For a century following the Dunciad an extraordinary number of productions had titles ending in -iad (-ead, -ad, -ade). The presence of this suffix denoted that the work dealt with the subject suggested by the name to which those final letters were affixed. The NED gives the English suffix -ad as representing the Greek -άδ-α, forming feminine patronymics and hence used in names of poems. The mere -ad did not often appear but yielded to the more euphonious -iad and sometimes -ead; the -ade was the French spelling.

The circumstances which caused Frances Anna Dunlop to cease corresponding with Robert Burns during the final year and a half of the latter's life have always been a puzzle to biographers. Even Wallace's publication, in 1898, of the Lochryan MSS shed little additional light on the affair, though it may be remarked in passing that Wallace—perhaps from timidity, perhaps from reluctance to express any but favorable opinions of the ancestress of the family by whom the manuscripts had been preserved—hardly made full use of such evidence as was available. Unfortunately some vital links were missing.

Suggestions Concerning the Source of the Poet's Doctrines and the Nature of His Mystical Experience

“. . . . his eyes

Have read the book of wisdom in the sun,

And after dark deciphered it on earth“—E. A. Robinson

To Call Wordsworth a great philosopher would, I suppose, if we put the word to its customary use, be extravagant. For he left the world no synthesis of doctrine that could be called his own. And yet his philosophy is a fascinating study, for although many may have understood with greater acuteness the numerous doctrines that appear in his poems, none could feel with an intensity greater than his, their human significance and value. Wordsworth's interests led him to demand more of philosophy than do most reflective men ; besides seeking a criterion of the good and probing into the problem of human freedom, he looked for an explanation of his own strange communion with Nature. Thus his philosophical life, proving as it did the source of some of the finest metaphysical and religious poetry in literature, was a deep and a rich one. It led him to absorb the teachings of many thinkers and to incorporate their doctrines in his poems.

In the summer of 1790 William Wordsworth and his friend, Robert Jones, spent their summer vacation in France and Switzerland. The record of this memorable journey has been left to us in two of Wordsworth's poems: Descriptive Sketches written in 1792 and The Prelude, Book VI, written probably in 1804. The journey described in each is, of course, the same, yet variations in the accounts are quite marked. The immediate reaction as to the causes of the differences, no doubt, is that Wordsworth had forgotten many of the details of the journey. Yet this explanation cannot be true, as a careful analysis shows. Garrod, in his paragraph concerning Wordsworth's poetical theory that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” hints at the real reason for the discrepancies:

The question [he says] is interesting, not only in connection with Descriptive Sketches, but also as affecting the problem of the essential truthfulness of large parts of The Prelude.

There are four volumes of Balzac's letters: two volumes of miscellaneous letters known as the Correspondance and two very substantial octave volumes containing the master's messages to Madame Hanska during the seventeen years they were engaged. The latter collection has been poetically entitled Lettres à l'Etrangère. All four volumes have always been considered a rich store of biographical information. The Correspondance has been twice edited: in the two-volume edition published by Calmann-Lévy in 1877, and in an octave volume which forms part of what is known as the édition définitive of the Œuvres Complètes (Calmann-Lévy, 1876). The Lettres à l'Etrangère were published by Calmann-Lévy in 1906. None of these volumes contains information as to its editors or their method of procedure.

The writer of the present paper, while engaged recently in editing Tartarin sur les Alpes, was particularly struck by the recurrence of rain, the continual drip from sky and mountainside that accompanies Tartarin in all his adventures. The dampness in the book seemed almost an obsession, as if Daudet had deliberately let loose floods that gushed and gurgled through his pages. Through what a wealth of humid detail, what sprinkles and splashes, wettings and soakings, the author delights in dragging his hero! Upon reflection, Daudet's other works somehow began to seem reminiscently full of weather. Pages resplendent with Midi sunshine mingled in memory with northern damp and fog. The writer was thereupon moved to re-examine the works of Daudet from this point of view. The results of that study, set forth in the following pages, seem to justify fully the impression with which it began; namely, that it is not so much as an author full of meridional sunlight that Daudet should be known, but rather as worker in moisture, a dabbler in damp, a keen observer of the vagaries of mist and rain.

There are perhaps few persons now vitally concerned about American letters who would not concede that Walt Whitman is at least the most outstanding individualist—poet out of the beaten track—of our national literature. And yet a compilation of parallels and relationships of one kind and another which have been suggested as existing between Whitman's writings and the writings of others, would reach astounding proportions. Moreover, these suggestions, so far as I have been able to learn, have usually been reasonably pertinent. They have justified the intuition of Whitman's first brave sympathizer, Emerson, as recorded in the now famous letter of commendation of 1855, in which Emerson declared that Leaves of Grass “must have had a long foreground somewhere.” They have given an element of plausibility to the statement of John Burroughs, his best contemporary interpreter, that Whitman “had looked over the whole field of literature . . . . and absorbed the spirit of the great bards.” And they have tended, as Whitman has been more and more exploited, to confirm the poet's own words, however immodest they may seem: “Immense have been the preparations for me.”