Das schwache Priteritum ist hinsichtlich seines Ursprungs und seiner Entwicklung in vorhistorischer Zeit vielleicht die am heissesten umstrittene Formengruppe der gennanischen Grammatik. Dass es den Forschern schwer fällt sich vollig miteinander zu verstandigen, daran sind wir ja auch sonst gewohnt. Aber beim schwachen Prateritum scheint der Gegensatz der Ansichten grösser und die Einigung demgemass schwieriger als bei anderen Problemen. Was hilft es, hier von einem dentalen Präteritum zu sprechen, wenn der eine in dem Dental eine idg. Tenuis, der andere darin eine idg. Aspirate oder Spirans sieht? Und wie konnen wir auf Einigung hoffen, wenn wir die Wahl haben, dieses Präteritum mit dem griechischen Passiv-Aorist, dem idg. PassivPartizipium, dem idg. Aktiv-Aorist oder medialen Aorist, dem idg. medialen Perfekt oder gar dem Prasens lateinischer Factitiva zu verbinden? Es wird nicht notig sein, diese Vorschläge bier des Nilhcren vorzuführen und zu priifen. Man findet die Erklärungsversuche, welche bis dahin gemacbt waren, einigermassen vollständig in meiner Monographic Das schwache. Präteritum und seine Berkunft aufgezählt. Das Verzeichnis ist bis auf die Gegenwart weitergeführt von A. W. M. O&t in der Abhandlung “Das schwache Präteritum in den Genmanischen; Sprachen.” Ich kann mir Odé's Urteil über die neueren Theorien in vielen Fallen zu eigen machen. Auch trifft der neue Erklärungsversuch, den er vorlegt, meiner Meinung nach wenigstens bis zu elnem gewissen Grade das Richtige. Aber es bleibt doch ein beträchtlicher Rest von Meinungsverschiedenheit, der zu dem Versuche weiterer Verständigung cintädt.

In his prose writings Dante refers to the Politics of Aristotle in such a way as to make natural the assumption that he was well-acquainted with the work. Further examination, however, suggests that this opinion has but a slight foundation; in fact, it is not impossible that Dante never saw a manuscript of the Politics.

Of this little play two editions have been recorded. Moratin alone, as far as I know, has seen a copy of the earliest known edition, Madrid, 1561. He reproduced the initial stagedirections and gave a short summary of the text, and upon this are apparently based whatever accounts of the play have appeared in later works on the Spanish stage. The second edition, Madrid, 1606, which is here reprinted, has been briefly described by Salvá (nr. 1426), Heredia (nr. 2349) and Gallardo (nr. 3993). When the latter examined it, it was a part of Böhl de Faber's library.

It seems incredible that the analogues and sources for the “gentle bird” of reconciliation between Timias and Belphebe in the Faerie Queene (Bk. IV, 8, 3-12)—one of the loveliest guiding beasts in literature—should have escaped investigation. But, though a few scattered notes have been published on the passage in question, no one, so far as I am aware, has yet pointed out a satisfactory source or parallel.

Daphnaida. An Elegie vpon the death of the noble and vertuous Douglas Howard, Daughter and heire of Henry Lord Howard, Viscount Byndon, and wife of Arthure Gorges Esquier. Dedicated to the Right honorable the Lady Helena, Marquesse of Northampton. (Title to the Daphnaida.)

Recent research into the sources of the philosophical ideas incorporated by Spenser in the Faerie Queene necessitates the re-raising of an old question, never satisfactorily answered: Did Spenser read Bruno? The external evidence—Bruno's residence in England during the years 1583-5, the London publication of his Italian works, the dedication of his Spaccio and his De gl' Heroici Furori to Sir Philip Sidney—has long rendered the supposition initially attractive. Moreover the community of Neoplatonic elements in Bruno and Spenser, together with a certain affinity between the theme of the cantos of Mutability and Bruno's Spaccio, added color to the hypothesis. But in the absence of more specific documentation the suggestion of Bruno's influence upon Spenser has properly retained the status of a mere possibility. It is the primary purpose of this paper to adduce certain further considerations which in my opinion lend a considerable weight of probability to an affirmative answer to the question. Secondarily, my object is to conduct a pacific polemic against Mr. Greenlaw's thesis that certain portions of the Faerie Queene are animated by a spirit of Lucretian scepticism at odds with that Christianized Neoplatonism which has commonly been recognized as Spenser's sole philosophy. My contention is that to a right reading there exists no such antithesis as that which Mr. Greenlaw finds between the main tenor of Spenser's philosophy and the philosophical implications of the passages in question, and that a means of reconciling their apparent incompatibility and saving Spenser from a charge of inconsistency too gross even for poetic license to condone, is the postulate of a Bruno influence.

The following paper, as its title implies, does no more than make a few observations upon Marlowe's possible life as a Government Agent. In other words, it does not set out to prove any point, for the simple reason that probably we shall never find out anything for certain in the life of Marlowe as a spy, or in the life of any other spy, the doings of such people being, in the nature of the case, “wrop in a mistry.”

Two conflicting theories regarding the composition of Timon of Athens have been expounded for many years. The first, argued notably by Professor Delius, asserts that the Folio text represents Shakespere's partial revision of an uninspired old play; the second, espoused by Mr. Fleay and elaborated in recent years by Dr. E. H. Wright, assumes that the play is an unfinished draft by Shakespere filled out by later literary hack-work. The latter theory at present receives more general favour; nevertheless in 1923 Mr. Dugdale Sykes in Notes and Queries, after calling attention to certain internal relationships in the play, has attempted to revive the earlier explanation.

The relation between the first Folio and the first Quarto text of Shakespeare's Henry V has long been a subject of discussion. In 1874, Daniel, in his edition of the play for the New Shakespeare Society, argued that the Quarto is a stage abridgment of the Folio version. Some years later Brinsley Nicholson attempted to refute Daniel. His arguments have not met with much acceptance, perhaps because of an underlying assumption that a fuller and, on the whole, much better text implies revision and expansion from the shorter, poorer one,—an assumption certainly open to challenge with reference to Shakespeare texts.

Two questions are involved in a discussion of “Jewish gaberdine”: First, what was a gaberdine? Second, what was the distinction in dress between Jew and Christian? Modern Shakesperean editors, confronted by the necessity of explaining gaberdine, quote the statements of the New English Dictionary, of previous editors, or of authors of costume books. The editors of the N.E.D. having found no reference to the word earlier than 1520, and none which gave an idea of the garment, fell back on the definitions in seventeenth-century dictionaries, which tell only half the story. Authors of costume books made compilations of quotations given in other costume books, and thus grew a definition which gained weight through sheer repetition. Most of these compilers cite the statements of Planché, but none of them quotes the sentence with which he concludes his discussion after examining the definitions of lexicographers and making deductions from literary references: “But, alas, we are no nearer to identification!” Any attempt at identification requires examination of the etymology of the word; definition and pictorial representation of the garments to which cognate terms in other languages were applied; contemporary evidence concerning materials of which gaberdines were made, and the rank of persons for whom they were made.

In the introduction to his edition of The Book of Sir Thomas More (Malone Society Reprints, 1911, p. xviii) Dr. W. W.Greg makes the following statement: “He [C] revises the stage-directions throughout [the manuscript], both in the original text [written by S] and in the additions [written by A, B, D and £].” Because of this statement certain scholars, not examining the play for themselves, have looked upon the manuscript (BM. Harl. 7368) as a play-house copy or prompt-book and have regarded the presence of revised stage-directions as proof that the play—as we now have it—had actually been performed on the Elizabethan stage. That Dr. Greg's statement is incorrect and is unwarranted by the evidence, and, accordingly, affords no basis for the inferences drawn from it, is shown by the following considerations:

The study of certain metrical problems brought me recently to examine more carefully than hitherto Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesie. In illustrating his points regarding verse writing Campion, it will be recalled, makes use of “diuerse light poems” of his own, and in Chapter vi, devoted to “English Trochaick verse,” he includes one entitled The eight Epigramme. While reading this I was teased by the impression of having heard the scandal there related somewhere else in one of the dramas of the time, but it was not until I had canvassed a large number of Elizabethan plots that the christening scene in A Chaste Maid in Cheapide came to mind.

In an article entitled “A Webster-Middleton Play: Anything for a Quiet Life”1 Mr. Sykes asserts “That this play is partly Middleton's there is no reason to doubt, but most of it is Webster's.”1 The purpose of the present paper is to show that Mr. Sykes has greatly overstated the case for Webster. Whether Webster or Shirley* be regarded as the collaborator or reviser, the work of Thomas Middleton is recognizable to such a considerable extent that the principal share in writing this play may hardly be ascribed to another. Surely there is an important difference between the work of the dramatist who organizes the plot and sketches the characters, and the contribution of another who by means of dialogue more closely individualizes the characters. Such seems to be the differentiation between the shares of Middleton and Webster in writing this play.

The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate on the basis of internal evidence that the anonymous play, The Drinking Academy, or Ike Cheaters' Holiday, which was recently printed for the first time, is in all probability the work of Thomas Randolph. As has long been known, much genuine material was omitted by Randolph's literary executors in the first and subsequent editions of his collected works. At least one lost play is known to us by title, and modern scholars—Hazlitt, Parry, and more recently Professor Moore Smith—have had notable success in recovering authentic poems and fragments from Randolph's pen. Under these circumstances there is nothing essentially unreasonable in proposing, even at this late date, to claim for Randolph a play whose authorship has hitherto been wholly unknown.

Clear distinctions between the genres, relatively unimportant in an historical study of the drama, are, or ought to be, of vital importance in a more absolute criticism. But though the term “tragedy” is loosely applied to some of the crudest as well as some of the greatest productions of the stage, and though for the last hundred and twenty-five years the term “melodrama” has been in current use, no critic has made more than a casual attempt properly to distinguish them. Indeed, such is the power of tradition that ill-formed and sensational productions of the Elizabethans or of the Restoration, because they were styled tragedies by their authors or contemporaries, continue to bear that proud title along with Lear and (Edipus tke King. It would seem obvious that a term so stretched as to include within its limits Hoffman and Hamlet, Lust's Dominion, Tke Revenge and Othello, will not serve for purposes of strict definition.

In the history of the interplay of English and French liberal thought in the eighteenth century, too much attention has been given to the supposed influence of such well-known deists as Bolingbroke and Toland, much too little to Voltaire's definite and direct borrowings from the radical and late deist, Peter Annet, whose method and style were more closely akin to Voltaire's own than were those of any other English deist. Although Voltaire was well acquainted with, and influenced by, certain of Annet's earlier tracts, especially his History of Saint Paul, it is from his Lift of David, the Man after God's own Heart, apparently more than from any other treatise from across the channel, that Voltaire borrowed directly in spirit and in detail, and translated faithfully whatever passages suited his needs. In this work, he found practically all the material for his frequent and varied animadversions on David from the beginning to the end of his Biblical criticism. Indeed, study of his use of Annet's Life of David throws light upon the extent, the nature, and the moment of the influence of the English deistic movement on Voltaire's attacks on the established religion.

In recent years, the value of the newspaper in the study A of literary movements in France is being recognized more than ever before. In such a study the Nain Jaune has its place, voicing as it does the literary and political views of an influential group of writers in the critical period of the early Restoration, an epoch when literary criticism and political expediency went hand in hand. A study of the literary history of such writers as Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël would not be complete without the political and social background furnished by such publications.

Few German men of letters living in the first half of the nineteenth century had more friends than Ludwig Tieck, but of these none was more closely associated with him over a long period of years than Friedrich von Raumer, who was by adoption one of the distinguished Prussians of his day. Raumer was born at Wörlitz, Anhalt, in 1781; he studied law and political science at Halle and Gottingen and then entered the Prussian service as Referendar, Assessor and Rat, successively. In 1809 he became Regierunisrat in Potsdam and in the following year was transferred to the office of Chancellor Hardenberg. In 1811 he was appointed professor of history at Breslau, a post which he held until 1819, when he became professor of political science at Berlin. While a delegate to the German Parliament of 1848, he was sent to Paris as German minister, and on his return to Berlin, he became a member of the First Chamber there. In 1853 he was retired as professor but continued to deliver lectures until shortly before his death in 1873. He is regarded as a pioneer in German historiography, and as one of the leading German historians before Ranke. His two principal works are Geschichte der Hohenslaufen und ihrer Zeit in six volumes (1823-1825) and Geschichte Europas seit dem Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts in eight volumes (1832-1850), both splendid examples of the Romantic attitude toward history. Interest in literature is revealed in his fourvolume Bandbuch tur Geschichte der Literatur (1864-1866), as well as in several No veil en.