Parallels in poetic device between the Old French epic and the Old Welsh elegy, though numerous, appear to have escaped general notice. A consideration of these parallels can prove suggestive regarding the possible sources of the devices involved.

Many of the remarkable qualities of the Jeu d' Adam have long been recognized and warmly admired: the subtlety of its characterization and motivation, the vivacity and freshness of its dialogue, the skill with which its verse forms have been handled. Yet its author has never been given sufficient credit, it would seem, for the originality of his composition. Here is a play still attached to the church, through its use of the church itself and of church properties, through its incorporaton of liturgical lectiones and responsoria, and through its adaptation and translation of a liturgical Ordo Prophetarum; nevertheless its author has dramatized and visualized for himself, with more spirit and imagination than any of his successors (he had no known predecessors), the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. Surely a man capable of such creative and untrammelled writing needed few “sources” and may be presumed, when proof to the contrary is lacking, to have drawn largely upon his own inspiration.

Oue Chaucer, pour sa traduction de Boèce, se soit servi de celle de J. de Meun est un fait établi. Toutefois notre curiosité va plus loin. Nous aimerions savoir si Chaucer a suivi un certain manuscrit et quel est ce manuscrit. On a suggéré ici même, il y a une vingtaine d'années, que Chaucer qui vérifie sans cesse son texte latin par la traduction de J. de Meun et qui puise indépendamment dans le commentaire de Trivet, a pu s'aider d'un manuscrit combiné de la traduction française, du texte latin et du commentaire de Trivet, tel qu'est p.ex.le ms.latin 18424 de la Bibl. Nat.

The literature of the estates of the world, so clearly developed in medieval France and England, was further enriched for the modern reader by the publication in 1936 of the fifteenth-century satire Mum and the Sothsegger. Discovered in the west country, near the locale of Piers Plowman, to which it bears a number of similarities, it reviews the condition of “all kinds of estates,“ from king to peasant, in the eventful last days of Richard II and the early years of the reign of Henry IV. Though a part of the newly discovered manuscript is a fragment of alliterative verse already published under the title Richard the Redeles, the much larger part concerning the case of Mum and the Truthteller was unknown to modern readers and seems to have been largely neglected since its publication. The question of the relation of the two fragments is unsettled, but since in the sixteenth century they were known as one poem under the title of Mum, Sothsegger, since their language and form are identical, and since certain ideas in the two parts are closely related, there is good reason for considering them here together as parts of a single poem.

It is an odd feature of the greatest of English tragedies that the hero disappears completely from view for a considerable time, and even leaves the country in which the action takes place. Slackening in the dramatic tension is avoided by the introduction of new and startling events—the madness and death of Ophelia, the revolt against Claudius, and the return and threatened vengeance of Laertes, a far more picturesque and dangerous agent of the King's designs than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are at this point disposed of for good and all. The adventures of Hamlet are in the meantime reported by letters, not always an exciting business in the theatre, and briefly recounted to Horatio just before the final tragedy. They are generally little regarded by the audience, who have more absorbing matter for their attention in the coming encounter with the King. In most acting versions the scene on a plain in Denmark, with the fine and important soliloquy “How all occasions do inform against me,” is omitted.

Over the centuries, a varying but persistent interest in magic and the occult sciences has reached, by way of devious paths, the culture and literature of Western Europe. In France, the vigor of this natural human bent was manifest even during the Age of Reason; Swedenborgians, Rosicrucians, martinistes, and Freemasons, together with a host of educated persons with no particular philosophical alliances, became pleasurably entangled in what Diderot disdainfully termed “ce tissu indigeste et ridicule de suppositions.“ “Le culte du merveilleux,” says a historian of that period, Constantin Bila, “n'épargnait aucune classe de la société.” The heightened interest in the marvelous, the supernatural, and the fantastic throughout the Romantic Period and the later nineteenth century is, of course, familiar.

Among the probable sources upon which Swift drew for his Gulliver's Travels, there is one work which has been completely overlooked. This is Edward Tyson's book Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, published under the imprimatur of the Royal Society at London in May or June, 1699. This work consists of two parts, the first dealing with the anatomy of a juvenile chimpanzee, the second with the knowledge of the apes and monkeys possessed by the ancients and their interpretation of it.

Francisco Xavier de Oliveira, also known as “Cavalheiro de Oliveira,” an obscure Portuguese official of the eighteenth century, is to most students of Romance literature a mere name, often confused with other Oliveiras, like Fernâo, the heretical grammarian; Alberto, the Brazilian poet; Olivesaira Martis, the dramatic historian; etc.

On August 18, 1756, acting prudently through an intermediary, Dr. Théodore Tronchin of Geneva, Rousseau sent to Voltaire a long letter in refutation of the latter's pessimistic Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne, which, provoked by the terrible earthquake at Lisbon on November 1, 1755, had been the cause of heated discussion among orthodox and unorthodox at Paris and Geneva during the preceding six months. Rousseau's letter has come to be known as his Lettre sur la Providence.

The indebtedness of our earliest American fiction to old world models has been made plain on numerous occasions. The Power of Sympathy, commonly regarded as our first novel, and the works which immediately followed, obviously owe much to Samuel Richardson; our earliest professional novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, has been branded at once a disciple of Godwin—his Arthur Mervyn a lineal descendent of Caleb Williams—and a member of the Gothic School. Sterne's name, and the influence of his Shandean sensibility this side the water, have been bruited about. Yet, so far, one immediate and important source, the French Heroic Romance—those great folios of Scudéry, Gomberville, La Calprenède, and their compeers, translated, imitated, and avidly read in the mother country—has been almost totally overlooked.

Es ist bekannt, wie es dazu gekommen war, daß Schiller's Leiche nicht in einem besonderen Grab, sondern in einer “standesgemäßen” Massengruft, dem Kassengewölbe auf dem Friedhof vor der Weimarer Jakobskirche beigesetzt wurde. 1826 wollte die Stadtverwaltung diesen Friedhof, der seit einiger Zeit nicht mehr benutzt worden war, räumen lassen. Dabei wäre dann jede Spur von Schiller's Begräbnisort auf immer verschwunden. Der damalige Bürgermeister, Carl Leberecht Schwabe, empfand, was für eine Schande das sein würde. Er erbot sich, die Reliquien ausfindig zu machen und dafür zu sorgen, daß sie auf dem Neuen Friedhof auf eine Art beigesetzt würden, die des großen Toten würdig war. Aber als man daran ging, den Sarg zu bergen, stellte es sich heraus, daß in dem kleinen Gewölbe ein chaotisches Durcheinander von morschen Brettern und modernden Gebeinen herrschte. Keine Inschrift, kein Merkmal wies den Weg zu Schiller's Ueberresten. Der wackere Schwabe mußte sich schliesslich damit begnügen, 23 Schädel zu sammeln und zu versuchen, nach dem Bild des Verstorbenen, wie die Erinnerung es heraufzurufen vermochte, den Schädel des Dichters zu ermitteln. Ein bestimmter Schädel fiel ihm gleich auf, der “durch edle, regelmäßige Gestaltung” ausgezeichnet war. Dies, so war Schwabe überzeugt, müße Schiller's Schädel sein. Er verglich die Maße von Schiller's Totenmaske, von Ludwig Klauer hergestellt. Sie schienen für diesen Schädel genau zu stimmen, und nur für ihn. Die untere Kinnlade fehlte; auch sie wurde noch in der Gruft gefunden. Nun wurden die drei bekanntesten unter den Aerzten Weimars gebeten, die Messungen zu kontrollieren. Sie bestätigten Schwabes Feststellung. Endlich wurden alle Bewohner Weimars und der Umgegend, die Schiller näher gekannt hatten, aufgefordert, den ausgesuchten Schädel zu besichtigen. Sie fanden “ohne eine einzige Ausnahme,” dies müße der echte Schädel sein. Eine Rolle spielte dabei auch der Umstand, “daß Schiller seine trefflichen, vollständig erhaltenen Zähne mit ins Grab genommen hatte.” Bei allen andern Schädeln fehlten die Zähne. Nun war Schwabe seiner Sache gewiß. Er unterrichtete den Großherzog und Goethe über den kostbaren Fund. Schwabe dachte daran, die Reliquien an einer ausgewählten, weithin sichtbaren Stelle des neuen Friedhofs begraben zu lassen und auf öffentliche Kosten ein Denkmal zu errichten. Die Angehörigen Schiller's waren damit einverstanden. Der Großherzog und Goethe entschieden sich schließlich für eine andere Lösung. Die nach Schiller's Tod von Dannecker hergestellte Marmorbüste, die er den Hinterbliebenen geschenkt hatte, sollte erworben und im Saale der Bibliothek aufgestellt werden. In dem Sockel der Büste wollte man den Schädel niederlegen. Das geschah denn auch durch einen feierlichen Akt am 17. September 1826. Die Familie war durch Schiller's Sohn Ernst vertreten. Es erschien als selbstverständlich, daß Goethe teilnehmen würde; war er doch als Freund des Toten und als Aufseher der Bibliothek gleicherweise verpflichtet.

Keats's second ode to Fanny Brawne, the important poem (biographically considered) beginning “What can I do to drive away Remembrance from my eyes,” contains a striking passage which has never been correctly interpreted. The poem as a whole shows Keats in an agitated state of mind. He is so enslaved by his thoughts of Fanny Brawne, he says, that he can neither regain his “old liberty” nor “mount” in his verse “above The reach of fluttering Love.” At this point he writes:

More dismal cares
Seize on me unawares,—
Where shall I learn to get my peace again?
To banish thoughts of that most hateful land,
Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand
Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life;
That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour,
Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore,
Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods;
Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods,
Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind;
Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind,
Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbaged meads
Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds;
There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song,
And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.

In the last letter he is known to have written, John Keats mentions “my sister—who walks about my imagination like a ghost—she is so like Tom.” This sister, Fanny, remained more or less a ghost until Mrs. Adami published an interesting biography of her in 1937.

Arthur Hugh Clough died at the age of forty-two just two years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. The main body of his slender volume of work was done by 1859, and it is barely probable that he knew Darwin's epoch-making study or had even heard of it. But Darwin, one must remember, climaxed a period of continuing scientific research on the results of which speculation had abundantly fed. Clough's adult years coincided with the last twenty years or so of this period. Such circumstances as the appearance of Lyell's Principles of Geology or the impact on English religious thinking of Strauss and German higher criticism, on the one hand, and the emergence of the Oxford Movement with its appeal to the principle of authority, on the other, could not but evoke from sensitive and thoughtful minds some significant response. In the period that produced Tennyson's In Memoriam, Clough's response was equally or more significant. Though their inward struggles were not unlike, the resolution for Clough differs sufficiently from Tennyson's to repay careful study of his thought. I fancy that of the two Clough's mind and the upshot of his speculation are the more congenial to the twentieth century.

One unfortunate result of Charles Dickens's great popularity and of the lack of an international copyright law in his time was that many publications were wrongly attributed to him in the United States. Mr. B. W. Matz in the Dickensian for 1925, gives an excellent account of the articles reprinted in America from Household Words with Dickens's name fraudulently attached; and many other similarly erroneous publications could be added to Mr. Matz's list. The greater number of these appeared during the 1850's, and their style and content are so patently uncharacteristic of Dickens that without question they were merely unscrupulous attempts to trade on his reputation. More plausibly an error was the ascription to Dickens of “Some Passages in the Life of Francis Loose-fish, Esq.,” published with the “Tuggs's at Ramsgate” and other tales by Carey, Lea, and Blanchard in 1837. In reality, “Francis Loosefish” was the first of several sketches about that character by Charles Whitehead, and appeared in the second number of the Library of Fiction* which he edited, and to the first and third numbers of which Dickens contributed. If Carey, Lea, and Blanchard knew only that “Francis Loosefish” was by an unidentified editor, their error in ascribing it to Dickens is conceivable, as the characters' names and the style of many passages are distinctly Dickensian. Whitehead and Dickens were closely associated at this time; the styles of their sketches bear a marked resemblance; and the possibility of their indebtedness to each other has not been adequately considered.

Students of Ruskin have often wondered why Ruskin waited until mid-life before developing his political economy, the subject which engrossed his later life. Saintsbury will have it that the idea merely occurred to Ruskin, and he started writing books, thus exemplifying his “knack of succumbing to any tempting current theory.“ Hobson attributes Ruskin's tardy development to the fact that his early interests excluded definite contact with the inquiry which later became his chief concern. Many commentators have emphasized the influence of Carlyle in causing Ruskin's change of interest from art to social problems, since that change occurred during a period of close association with Carlyle.

The aesthetic movement in England (1870–1900) now seems remote, yet since no history repeats itself more faithfully than that of criticism, the historian of ideas may well inquire what relation the Art for Art's Sake movement has to the mental, moral, and social confusion of today, especially when one hears a reviewer warning us that John Crowe Ransom, like other formal aesthetic critics of today, “often sounds like an aesthete of the 'nineties.“

Thomas Mann hat einmal, ein Wort Adalbert Stifters auf sich anwendend, gesagt: “Ich bin kein Goethe; aber ein wenig, irgendwie, von weither, bin ich . . . von seiner Familie.“ Gerade wenn man sich klar macht, mit welch großem Recht Stifter dies von sich sagen durfte, wird man zunächst zögern, für Thomas Mann denselben Anspruch auf Verwandtschaft zuzugeben. In den großen Rechenschaftsberichten, in denen Thomas Mann sich selbst um Klärung seiner geistigen Abstammung bemüht hat, den “Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen” etwa, oder dem “Lebensabriß,” ist es auch keineswegs der Name Goethes, von dem er seine Herkunft ableitet; es sind drei andere, die beständig wiederkehren: Schopenhauer, Wagner und Nietzsche. Sie dienen ihm als Symbol für seine großen Themen und Leitmotive, für das ihm Angeborene und Mitgegebene, für Substanz und Erbschaft, für seine Natur: die tiefe “Sympathie mit dem Tode” die dionysische Verführung der Musik, die dichterische Kritik des Lebens.

The idiom of a language is the atmosphere of thought which pervades the signification of all its words and governs the architecture of all its sentences. Idiom appears in the structure of the language as an effect; as a cause, it resides in the experiences and predilections of the speakers of the language. Arising in the domain of ideas, belonging to the content communicated rather than to the communicating instrument, idiom is the attitude of mind common to all members of a linguistic community and inherent in all their thinking. This common attitude creates the master pattern, the cardinal orientation of cognition, to which all the phrases of the language must conform.