Defoe's name is indissolubly linked with Stoke Newington. There he lived when he wrote Robinson Crusoe and other important works. There on a Saturday morning in 1713 the agents of Lord Chief Justice Parker ostentatiously seized him and carried him off to a London prison.1 The Stoke Newington Library now displays his statue, and a plaque at No. 95 Church Street, by Defoe Road, marks where his house stood. One may even see the wall along the east side of Oldfield Road which tradition says was his. But all accounts are inaccurate and fragmentary. Among them only two are aware that Defoe lived in two Stoke Newington houses, and none at all that he did not own the “Defoe” house or that, a decade after his death, his poet-naturalist son-in-law, Henry Baker, F.R.S., purchased and held it for twenty-three years. The Official Guide to Stoke Newington (seventh edition, p. 23) tells us that descendants of Defoe lie in Abney Park Cemetery, which (p. 27) dates from 1840.2 The Cemetery officials say they know nothing of such descendants.

Chaucer envisaged the Canterbury Tales as presented on the actual London-Canterbury road at various times during successive days, for he offers about seven allusions to place and at least five to time, scattered throughout eight of the nine Fragments which make up the work. That Chaucer had a definite plan for the order of the Fragments is revealed by various kinds of internal evidence, including the mention of towns on the Pilgrims' way, the reality and precise location of which were clear and obvious to the poet and his audience. The ellesmere (or group a) order of the Tales has long seemed unsatisfactory because it distorts the geographical order of allusions to towns, and Chaucer would not have deliberately alluded to Sittingbourne (Fragment in) before Rochester (Fragment vii) on the way from Southwark and Greenwich to Boughton-under-Blean and Canterbury. Accordingly, Henry Bradshaw suggested to Furnivall, as an improvement on the Ellesmere order, that Fragment vn be lifted up to follow and combine with Fragment ii, the Man of Law's Endlink being used as Prologue to the Shipman's Tale.

Of the seventeen tragedies which Chaucer's Monk bewails, seven (or eight, if Lucifer merits inclusion in the category) have as protagonists characters drawn from the Bible. It has generally been assumed that for the greater part of the Biblical information in The Monk's Tale Chaucer used the Vulgate, while he gleaned a few details from Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum et Feminarum Illustrium, which served as model for the collection of tragedies. There are, however, in Chaucer's work various divergencies from, or augmentations of, the Biblical narratives which can be explained neither by the Vulgate nor by the Boccaccean collection. In an article entitled “Vincent of Beauvais and Chaucer's Monks Tale,” Miss Pauline Aiken has presented her theory that the influence of Vincent's Speculum Eistoriale may be detected in eight of the Monk's tragedies, but that “among the sources of this tale the first place is to be assigned to the Vulgate Bible.” I should like to propose another source for the Biblical portions of The Monk's Tale: a French version of the Scriptures, the Bible Eistoriale of Guyart Desmoulins.

In a recent note on The Double Marriage I suggested that the plot of this tragedy was derived from two declamations (Numbers 48 and 64) in The Orator (1596), Lazarus Pyott's translation of the Epitomes De Cent Histoires Tragicques (Paris, 1581) by Alexandre van den Busche, called Le Sylvain.11 was even tempted by the notion that the form of this collection of speeches influenced Fletcher's dramatic methods. Each “declamation” begins with a brief summary of the circumstances leading up to some extraordinary situation; then follow the speeches of two characters who present exactly opposite views in a formal debate. The emphasis of the book falls, as the title itself indicates, on these speeches. In a foreword to the reader (Sig. A4) Pyott says of them: “In these thou maiest learne Rhethoricke to inforce a good cause, and art to impugne an ill.” The dazzling improbability of The Orator's situations, the irreconcilable oppositions of the chief characters, and the concern with oratorical eloquence correspond so closely with the dramatic technique of the “Beaumont and Fletcher” plays that it would have been easy to imagine Fletcher and his collaborators discovering here the formula which was to be the basis of their success. There was only one inconvenience—a fatal one—to this theory: I had no evidence that Fletcher was familiar with The Orator when he was working with Beaumont on Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, and A King and No King, in which the “Beaumont and Fletcher” genre takes its characteristic shape.

Views concerning the authorship of Beowulf and its place in Old English literature have changed greatly in the last half century. In any account of the poem published in 1900 one might find suggested or stated more or less positively—often practically as facts—such ideas as these: Beowulf was only one of a large body of Old English epics; its subject matter was originally mythical, symbolic of forces of nature; its adventures were at first ascribed to a mythic hero or divinity named Beowa and later transferred to Beowulf, who was probably an actual person (as late as 1908 Brandi still expresses this view); it took shape by a process of natural accretion of popular lays or short heroic poems, or by compilation and interpolation by several hands; its manner and style were indigenous, characteristic of the form which Germanic epic poetry had attained; in origin it was pagan, the Christian passages having been added late by a reviser or interpolator. It is obvious now that all those statements are hypothetical, but they once constituted an orthodox view which was generally accepted.

Ever since 1879, when Arthur Fritzsche in his discussion of the authorship of Andreas suggested that the Old English religious poem was heavily indebted to Beowulf for its military and seafaring elements, scholars have generally assumed that the Andreas poet not only used Beowulf as a model for his life of St. Andrew but also consciously borrowed therefrom numerous phrases in order to adorn his work with the military spirit of the heroic poem. George Philip Krapp, in his edition of Andreas, discusses at some length the general similarities between Andreas and Beowulf, and then gives as evidence of literary indebtedness the impressive number of approximately 145 verbal parallels to Beowulf distributed throughout Andreas. Klaeber, without reservation, agrees with the conclusions of Krapp; he remarks in his edition of Beowulf that “the legend of Andreas exhibits abundant and unmistakable signs of having been written with Beowulf as a model. Wholesale borrowing of phrases, which more than once are forced into a strange context, and various parallelisms in situations and the general heroic conception of the story leave no shadow of a doubt that the author of the religious poem was following in the footsteps of the great secular epic.”

As Though defining the issues for future discussions of progress, Seneca says in one of his epistles: “I differ from Posidonius when he holds that mechanical tools were the invention of wise men .... It was man's ingenuity, not his wisdom, that discovered all these devices. And I also differ from him when he says that wise men discovered our mines of iron and copper .... Nay, the sort of men who discover such things are the sort of men who are busied with them, men whose minds are nimble and keen, but not great or exalted; and the same holds true of any other discovery which can only be made by means of a bent body and of a mind whose gaze is upon the ground.”

It was at the request of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, wife of Piero de' Medici and mother of Lorenzo, that Pulci undertook the writing of the Morgante, the first of the four great Italian epics. For Cantos i–xxiii he followed closely, in general, the plot of the fourteenth-century cantastorie epic Orlando; but in the portion of the poem beginning with Stanza 112 of Canto xviii and ending with Stanza 155 of Canto xix he introduced a famous episode of his own invention, the episode of the picaresque demi-giant Margutte. Lucrezia died on 25 March, 1482. The poem was first published, before her death, in a form consisting of Cantos i–xxiii only. The editions published after her death have five additional cantos.

In the physiological study of speech articulations our most objective information has come, until recently, from radiograms. Now we have, in addition, spectrograms, which, if we learn to interpret them, can also give us very objective information. For the typical phase (portion) of a speech sound, the interest of a spectrogram may be about equal to that of a radiogram; but for the transitional phases, the interest of a spectrogram will probably be much superior; and from the practical viewpoint of availability, the spectrogram will have a marked advantage for it can be had in a few minutes and at low cost. But to the linguist, the usefulness of a spectrogram depends on his ability to interpret it in articulatory terms. We need not stress, therefore, the importance of investigating the relation between formant positions and speech organ positions at this stage of the still young science of sound spectrography.