Balaustion's Adventure was first published in 1871. From that time until the present scholars have differed in opinion as to whether the poem misrepresents the Alcestis of Euripides, which it aims to interpret, and, if so, to what extent. The particular criticisms directed against Browning's interpretation have to do almost exclusively with his treatment of the characters of Admetus and Heracles. He makes Admetus selfish and cowardly; Heracles, essentially noble. Did Euripides think of them so? Professor Richard G. Moulton, writing for the Browning Society Papers in 1891, took exception to Browning's treatment of Admetus. He called Balaustion's Adventure “a beautiful misrepresentation of the original.” “Browning,” he said, “has entirely misread and misinterpreted Euripides' play of Alcestis.” … “The character he has read into the actions of Admetus is opposed to the view of him taken by all the personages of the story, gods, heroes, men; is opposed to the author's own intimations through the mouth of the Chorus; is countenanced only by the one personage whom all the rest including Alcestis hold guilty of the selfishness Browning has ascribed to Admetus.“ Verrall criticises Browning's interpretation of Heracles. He insists that the Heracles of Euripides is not the godlike helper of mankind which Browning would have us believe him to be, but a mere ”drunken athlete adventurer,“ a burlesque figure.

“The probationary period of translation … marks the first stage in the development of prose fiction,” writes Professor J. W. H. Atkins, and inspection of even a few Elizabethan novels will convince one that the type is not indigenous to English soil. The use of the love affair, of realism in the telling, of ordinary people in ordinary surroundings, of the rival and the confidante, of even the minor love affair, and of a plot with well marked stages and characters influenced by events would have been impossible to English novelists without the example of their Italian predecessors. Before Euphues or The Adventures passed by Master F. I. or The Golden Aphroditis can be adequately accounted for, the contribution of Italy must be studied, not alone through such collections as Painter's Pallace of Pleasure (1566-67) and Fenton's Tragicall Discourses (1567), but—and this is of more importance—through single works outside collections, which were of sufficient length and interest to bear the test of printing as separate volumes.

The present paper is intended to form a postscript to the last section of my study of the authorship of the Prick of Conscience, published in 1910. In the earlier article the traditional attribution of the poem to Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole, was attacked, and in conclusion a clue was followed which seemed to lead towards the Speculum Vitae, a similar Middle-English poem still unedited. A connection between the two poems had apparently been built up by J. Ullmann, in an elaborate analysis of similar stylistic peculiarities found in both, and he had used the evidence, thus apparently deduced, to urge the ascription (found in one copy of the Speculum) to Rolle, then always credited with the authorship of the Prick of Conscience. Ullmann's conclusion as to the common authorship of the two poems was used in the discussion as to the authorship of the latter by turning them about: since two other copies of the Speculum gave the work to William of Nassington, it was suggested, when Rolle's authorship of the Prick of Conscience seemed impossible, that the true author might be found in Nassington, who was possibly the author of the very similar Speculum. However, since the latter work was not in print, and had not at the time of writing been accessible to me in manuscript, the discussion as to the connection between the two works could only be incomplete and tentative.

The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds formulate a theory of painting which elevates that art to a kinship with the then more firmly established art of poetry. On the ground that painting is no mere handicraft, the great president of the Royal Academy recommended to his pupils “not the industry of the hands, but of the mind,” and insisted that a successful painter “stands in need of more knowledge than is to be picked off his palette.” This general assertion is then amplified, in one of the most significant passages of the lectures. “Every man,” Reynolds continued, “whose business is description, ought to be tolerably conversant with the poets, … that he may imbibe a poetical spirit, and enlarge his stock of ideas. He ought not to be wholly unacquainted with that part of philosophy which gives an insight into human nature… . He ought to know something concerning the mind, as well as a great deal concerning the body of man.”

It has been the custom of historians of literature to discuss essays as if there were no essential difference between, say the Essays of Bacon and those of Macaulay, or between the Spectator and the Essays in Criticism. In his recent book, The English Essay and Essayists, a work which, however comprehensive, leaves much to be desired on the score of adequacy of treatment, Professor Walker makes a distinction between “essays par excellence” and compositions on scientific, philosophical, historical, or critical subjects, which agree with the former, “only in being comparatively short and in being more or less incomplete.” Lamb's essays he considers the best example of the “literary form;” yet when he comes to discuss the Essays of Elia he does not attempt to show wherein these pieces differ from the compositions of Elia's contemporaries or successors. Every reader is vaguely conscious of a difference of kind between the essays of various writers; for example, between those of Macaulay, Stevenson, Carlyle, etc., and the pieces by Hazlitt or Charles Lamb; and it is part of the intention of the following paper to indicate the nature of this difference. Generally speaking, the secret lies in the fact that Lamb carried on the traditions of the English essay, the tradition that found its first conscious spokesman in Bacon, was afterwards perpetuated in the periodical essays of the eighteenth century, and found its fullest, if not its latest, expressions in the Essays of Elia.

When the reader of to-day considers the English origins of our monthly magazines of light literature, he seldom thinks back beyond the Gentleman's Magazine (1731-). The Tatler (1709-) and Spectator (1711-) he may regard as aside from the direct line of development, as they are not miscellanies. Yet in 1692 appeared in London a monthly periodical that is fairly startling in its resemblance to the Atlantics, the Harper's, the Smart Sets of our day,—the Gentleman's Journal, which is, I believe, the first notable English venture of its kind.

There is a fairly general agreement among the critics that the First Part of Henry the Sixth was not originally written by Shakespeare, but was revised by him, that it is the play which Henslowe recorded as “new” on March 3, 1591/2, and frequently enough thereafter to attest that it was one of the most popular pieces of the day, and that it was this same popular piece to which Nashe referred in the always quoted passage in Pierce Penilesse (1592): “How would it have ioyed braue Talbot (the terror of the French), to think that after he had lyen two hundred yeare in his Toomb, he should triumph againe on the Stage and haue his bones new embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times) who in the Tragedian that represents his person imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.” There seems no sufficient reason for doubting these natural conjectures. The play was included in the First Folio, which indicates that it was at least in part Shakespeare's work; it was not mentioned by Meres, which seems to imply that it was not fundamentally his; it was acted by Lord Strange's company, which would accord with its being revised rather than originally written by Shakespeare. It is such a play as, judging by the other notable successes of the time, would be immensely popular; and it answers perfectly to Nashe's reference.

Stage history has generally been regarded by the student of the arts as a thing apart. It has been assumed that the stage has developed its own art, influenced only by the art of the stage in other lands or in other times. In general, this assumption seems to me unjustified. Rather, the stage should, I believe, be regarded as giving expression in its art to the dominant artistic theory of the time. It is only in its medium of expression that the art of the stage differs from the other arts; its fundamental artistic theory is that held in common with the other arts. Certainly, it seems to me, it is only in this fashion that one can account for the changes in the theory of dramatic presentation that came about within the compass of the eighteenth century. It is my purpose in this paper, therefore, to show the development of the theory of acting in England in the eighteenth century, and to show that in its development the theory of acting followed the general artistic theory of the day.

Viewed from any angle Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is an unattractive play. The heroine is a wanton. Ulysses reads her at a glance and finds

language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.

He sets her down at once as “a daughter of the game,” and at every opportunity the foul-mouthed Thersites corroborates this description. “They say Diomedes keeps a Trojan drab,” he monologizes, “and uses the traitor Calchas his tent. I'll after; ”2 and in the rather awkward scene in which Cressida's perfidy is revealed to Troilus, he gleefully whispers: “Any man may sing her, if he can take her cliff. She's noted.”

There seems to be universal agreement among Schiller's critics that his last drama, Wilhelm Tell, means a serious change of attitude toward the ideal which had guided the poet in its predecessors. Some scholars candidly regret its looseness of form, calling this a mistake which the poet should have avoided. Others endeavor with all possible pains to fit the play into the straight-jacket of the established model, and to justify the poet's willful deviations from the rules he himself had laid down. A third group asserts with much praise that the poet has written a real Volksstück—i. e., in this case, a play for the people—by choosing intentionally a popular style and form, and by making a whole people the hero of his play.

The foregoing paragraph from Miss Alice 0. Fletcher's account of Indian music reads like a travesty of the accepted view of primitive song, its character and authorship. There is the familiar primitive “horde,” engaged in festal singing, without onlookers. Yet instead of collaborative composition, improvisation, and communal ownership of the ensuing “ballad,” we have individual authorship and ownership, and individual singing. This is the testimony of a specialist who has spent many years among the people of whom she writes, studying and recording their songs and their modes of composition. Easily recognizable is the homogeneous primitive group, singing in festal ceremony; but this group does not conduct itself in the way which literary historians have insisted that we should expect.

The theme of Milton's epic, we are told at the beginning of the poem, is man's disobedience, which brought death into the world. If there is a central doctrine in Paradise Lost, it would seem to be that death is the inevitable result of sin. The voice of God declares with severe emphasis that man, once become sinful,

To expiate his treason hath naught left,
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He with his whole posterity must die.

Some time ago in an article on Locrine and Selimus I showed the futility of discussing questions of the authorship and chronology of plays written between 1585 and 1595 on the evidence of parallel passages. I endeavored to show that the occurrence of such parallels is much more likely to be evidence of different authorship than of common authorship. If, now, this kind of evidence, by itself, is to be considered of small value, where shall we look for other evidence that may have more weight and certainty? I believe that something of significance can be found if we search carefully for characteristics of style,—forms of expression more or less rhetorical, peculiar arrangement of terms, favorite collocations of words, devices to “bum-bast out” the blank verse.

Als Vorbedürfnis für das Studium der deutschen Dramaturgie in ihrer historischen Entwicklung erscheint ein Überblick der wichtigsten ästhetischen Anschauungen zuvörderst unentbehrlich. Statt jedoch dazu die Hilfe der historischen Ästhetik einzurufen, wird in dieser Arbeit der Versuch gewagt, den ästhetischen Hintergrund aus den Äusserungen zeitgenössischer Dramatiker herauszuforschen und neu zu beleben. Der Hilferuf an die Ästhetik wäre hier übrigens unbeachtet verklungen, denn die Geschichte der Ästhetik hat bis jetzt fast ausschliesslich das an sich Wertvolle und Interessante, oder das Historisch-bedeutende berücksichtigt. Andererseits zieht die angewandte Ästhetik der litterarischen Kunstform, nämlich die Kritik, meistens nur die Berufskritiker und kaum je das Massenpublikum in ihre Betrachtung hinein. Eine kulturgeschichtliche Ästhetik, ebensosehr bemüht, die pathetisch-nüchternen Ideale des Bürger- oder Volksdramas darzustellen, gibt es bis heute noch nicht. Und doch hätten solche Studien für die Ästhetik, wie für die Litteraturgeschichte, ohne Zweifel ihren Nutz. Deshalb, und mehr noch, weil das Material bei den Vorarbeiten zu einer Geschichte der deutschen Dramaturgie leicht erreichbar war, ist folgender Versuch entstanden.

Brief narrative, at first thought, connotes the abridged fiction of low grade with which American magazines are now saturated; but as soon as the term is used to cover the whole field in modern literature, it calls to mind a genre which, under various names, has risen to a position of dignity in many places in the world and has worthily engaged the attention of literary historians, particularly in America and in Germany.

The chief features in the development of the form in the United States and England have been discussed at length, and there is now a definitive record, with abundant bibliographical apparatus, of its evolution. Poe is looked upon as the pioneer, and his perpetually quoted definition (1842) has set a standard for the majority of the practitioners of the art in the English language. The form suggests, for America, such experts as Hawthorne, Bret Harte, and Henry James; in England it does not gain the attention of writers of the first magnitude until near the end of the century, in the persons of Stevenson and Kipling.

Notwithstanding the pre-eminence of George Henry Boker in our dramatic literature before the Civil War, an eminence not seriously threatened in America except by Robert Montgomery Bird, no accurate account of his life has been published and nowhere is available even a trustworthy statement of the productions of his plays. Several of his dramas remain unpublished in manuscript and even their existence is known apparently to but few. I shall not. attempt here to go into detail concerning his life, but will endeavor to give the facts concerning his plays that have come to light in the course of my examination of the Boker manuscripts kindly placed at my disposal by Mrs. George Boker, the daughter-in-law of the dramatist.