The second antistrophe of The Progress of Poesy opens, it will be recalled, with a rather striking allusion to the beneficent visitations of the Muse in the far North:

In climes beyond the solar road,
Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam,
The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom
To chear the shiv'ring Native's dull abode.

Friedrich Schlegel, youngest son of Johann Adolf Schlegel, was born at Hannover on March 10, 1772, just three months after Goethe had finished the first version of his first great work, Götz von Berlichingen. His literary career begins in 1794 with the publication of Von den Schulen der Griechischen Poesie. At this time he is as old as Goethe was when writing the Götz.

The sceptical reconsideration of accepted theories is often of advantage in revealing weak points and establishing strong ones; Professor Jack's paper on Thomas Kyd and the Ur-Hamlet in the last issue of the Publications will no doubt be of service in both these ways; but it does not seem likely that his interpretation of the well known passage from Nash's prefatory epistle to Greene's Menaphon will displace that “all but universally accepted by scholars.” It is, however, ingenious enough to merit careful examination from the conservative point of view. On the broader issue Mr. Jack has raised, it is to be remembered, in the first place, that this passage is by no means the only evidence of an earlier Hamlet. The entry in Henslowe's Diary under date June 9, 1594, and the reference in Lodge's Wit's Miserie (1596) to “the ghost, which cried so miserally at the theator, like an oisterwife, Hamlet revenge” prove conclusively the existence of a play on the subject of Hamlet at a date when Shakspere's tragedy was unknown, if we are to be guided by its omission from the Meres list and the unanimous opinion of Shaksperean critics. The general resemblance of the earlier Hamlet, so far as it can be divined, to the type of revenge-play of which The Spanish Tragedy is the most conspicuous example, must also be borne in mind; but these are considerations familiar to students of the Elizabethan drama, and need not be urged here. Let us turn to the new interpretation of Nash's reference to contemporary literature, and see how far it is borne out by the text.

One feels inclined, like Bédier in Les Fabliaux, to apologize, at the beginning of this discussion, for dealing heavily with a light subject. Andrew Lang, to be sure, has spun the fabric of primitive imagination out of story threads from our simplest fairy tales. But there are no remnants of primitive thought to be discovered in the fabliaux, and few vestiges of ancient myth discernible in their narratives. One's only justification for approaching these contes à rire with anything but laughter must be a desire to search into the qualities which make “lewed peple loven tales olde,” and especially the nature of the humor which preserves those called fabliaux from age to age. But a brief consideration of the nature and origin of the fabliau must precede an attempt to discover the characteristic quality of the English contribution to this literary form.

We are accustomed to associate with the names of the great men of all times and in all lines of activity, certain dominant characteristics and traits of personality, which, though usually merely coincident and contributing factors, serve none the less as the tangible facts whereby the mind is enabled to grasp and gauge their power. It is a criterion whose insufficiency becomes evident only in the isolated instances wherein such natural indices of character are made conspicuous chiefly by their absence. There are characters in history upon which the test of time has set its seal of greatness, but which, considered abstractly and apart from their achievements, seem merely negative and colorless. Their work remains as the tangible evidence of their genius, yet any effort to establish the relation of cause and effect between that work and the intrinsic personality of its author is uniformly unsatisfactory in its results.

Before the revival of Greek learning in the fifteenth century, the Æsopic fables of classical antiquity were known in Europe through Latin collections derived from Phædrus. Two of these collections were particularly well known; one which goes under the name of Romulus, written in prose in the tenth century; and a metrical version of the larger part of Romulus, written in the twelfth century. This metrical collection, called in the Middle Ages Esopus, is now ascribed to Walter of England, but is often called Anonymus Neveleti. Another metrical version of Romulus was made a little later by Alexander Neckam, and the fables of Avianus, also, were known to some extent. These collections, with numerous recensions and derivatives in Latin, and translations into many different languages, form a body of written fable-literature whose development can for the most part be clearly traced. At the same time, beast-fables were extensively employed in school and pulpit, and were continually repeated for entertainment as well as for instruction. Thus there was current all over Europe a great mass of fable-literature in oral tradition. The oral versions came in part from the written fable-books; others originated as folk-tales in medieval Europe; others had descended orally from ancient Greece, or had been brought from the Orient. Many are still current among the people in all parts of Europe, and beyond. From this mass of traditional material, heterogeneous collections of popular stories, including beast-fables, were reduced to writing in Latin and in other languages. An example of this process is found in the Esope of Marie de France, the earliest known fable-book in a modern vernacular, which was translated into French in the twelfth century from an English work which is now lost. Forty of Marie's fables, less than two-fifths of the whole number, came from a recension of the original Romulus called Romulus Nilantii; the others from popular stories of various kinds. Similarly, the important Æsop of Heinrich Steinhöwel contains the Romulus fables in four books, followed by seventeen fables called Extravagantes, others from the recently published Latin version of the Greek fables, from Avianus, from the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus, and from Poggio,—in all, nine books, printed in Latin with a German translation about 1480, and speedily translated into many languages (including English, by Caxton in 1484, from the French version). The Extravagantes, like other collections, and like the episodes of the beast-epic (little known in Italy), came from popular tradition. Many writers show by incidental references that they were familiar with fables, although they may not have regarded them as worthy of serious attention,—writers like Dante, and his commentator Benvenuto da Imola. Moreover, the animal-lore of the bestiaries and of works like the Fiore di Virtù is closely akin to that of the fables. It is evident, then, that the collections descended from Phædrus, important though they were, represented but a fraction of the fable-literature that was current in the Middle Ages.