Comparative philologists have long since recognized that the logical relation of mental concepts need not find expression by means of words. Viewed from the standpoint of pure logic a sentence like “I think he will come” contains a subordination; but the student of historical grammar rightly regards it as exhibiting two independent, if not unrelated, sentences. It is altogether likely that such a method of juxtaposing concepts was the only one that prevailed in remote antiquity and that in the course of time such a loosely connected sequence of clauses developed into one organic whole. The fact of parataxis is now established for all branches of the Indo-European family, and Hermann has proved that grammatical subordination was unknown in the “Ursprache,” being developed in the daughter tongues by means of the specific determinants of the originally independent sentence. Notwithstanding these results, there is still a plentiful lack of agreement among scholars in regard to the definition of the term parataxis and to the degree of extension to be ascribed to it.

Although one of the most interesting of Middle English romances, the Avowing of Arthur has been singularly neglected. The story is told with the gratifying freshness which marks Gawain and the Green Knight and the other poems of the Northern school. The incidents of which the story is composed are fitted into the general framework with rare skill. Even more striking is the vividness of the characterization. The ordinary romance character is a dummy upon which are hung splendid clothes tagged with catalogues of all the virtues. Dealing with these personages is often like handling the bits of cardboard stamped “sugar,” “tea,” “potatoes,” with which students in commercial colleges play. But in this romance there is sharp distinction between Arthur, genial, brave, a practical joker, and Baldwin, a man of few words, cynical without being bitter, nonchalant, a man of deeds; between Kay, impulsive, always getting into scrapes, inclined to jeer at others, a great boy with a boy's love of adventure, and Gawain, the courteous knight, equally ready to aid beauty in distress and to assist a comrade in time of need. The story is crowded with incidents, and the verse is vigorous and effective.

In the following pages the history of the pronunciation in French of accented ai and ei before n, m and ń is to be investigated in detail. The subject naturally falls into two divisions. On the one hand we have ai and ei before n or m, and on the other we have the words in which these diphthongs are followed by ń. Both divisions are closely allied and the development of the one is often identical with that of the other. Yet for the better control of the material it will be advisable to separate the history of ain or aim and ein or eim from that of aign and eign.

We are told that Louis XIV once submitted a sonnet he had written to the judgment of Boileau, who said, after reading it: “Sire, nothing is impossible for your Majesty. You set out to write some bad verses and you have succeeded.” The point of this story for the modern reader lies not so much in the courage of the critic as in the meekness of the king. With the progress of democracy one man's opinion in literature has come to be as good as another's—a deal better too, the Irishman would add—and such words as deference and humility are in a fair way to become obsolete. We can scarcely conceive to what an extent men once allowed their personal impressions to be overawed and held in check by a body of outer prescriptions. Only a century ago an Edinburgh reviewer could write: “Poetry has this much at least in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago by certain inspired writers whose authority it is no longer lawful to question.” Racine tells us that the audience did not dare laugh at the first performance of his comedy Les Plaideurs for fear that “it might not laugh according to the rules.”

This article is merely a contribution toward a record of popular New-Mexican Spanish. It is incomplete and fragmentary; and, doubtless, it has many errors, since most of the words and expressions it contains were received through the ear. By New-Mexican Spanish is here meant the popular Spanish speech of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. This region is only a small part of the southwestern States and Territories where Spanish is spoken, and yet it is as large as Italy. Its population may be roughly estimated at 125,000 Spanish-speaking persons, of whom some 40,000 or 50,000 are in Colorado and the remainder in northern New Mexico.