The philosophical poems that Haller wrote during the years 1729-1734 helped to mark a turning toward a better way in German poetry. In the preface to the fourth edition of these poems (1748) he wrote:

Though Mr. C. E. Whitmore in his paper, “The Field of the Essay” has suggested with exceptional sharpness the full function of the letter in the development of various essay types, he has, like other writers on the essay, failed definitely to relate the two forms. Both types are exceedingly vague and complex. And if Mr. Whitmore decides that “the effort to discover a single continuous ‘essay tradition’ in English is vain” and adds that he “can see no reason to suppose that Lamb's work would have been in the slightest degree altered if Bacon had never written a line;” it is likewise true that the letter throughout its history shows perhaps even more striking irregularities and lack of discipline. Nevertheless, though both essay and letter are inchoate literary identities which have in the past taken on a variety of exteriors, there are undoubtedly points in common between them; there is even, I should like to show, sufficient evidence to argue a definite and deliberate indebtedness on the part of essay writers for elements which belong primarily to the familiar letter and to it alone of all recognized literary forms.

The eighteenth century is the century of parody. Its critical attitude of mind accorded with the ungenerous and censorious irreverence of these farces. The wise and witty petit-maître was entirely too frigid and too supercilious not to sneer at the sublime attitudes of tragic stage-heroes, at the tearful Men of Feeling of budding Romanticism, at the dry seriousness of the savant or the metrical enthusiasm of the poet. Moreover, as the number of literates increased and furnished a steadily growing group of readers and theater-goers, the number of the æsthetically obtuse who came into contact with books or the stage, increased proportionally. And, in all times, they form the predestined public of the parodist. Unimaginative and pedestrian, gifted with a sturdy sense of reality, they are not easily beguiled by the illusions created in us by a work of art; they steadily perceive the abyss that gapes between Dream and Fact. From these two groups, the half-lettered bourgeois and the shallow fops, the parodist recruited the main body of his followers: he catered to the æsthetically mediocre. His public was large. As long as he kept his burlesques within the bounds of a rough and ready buffoonery, analogous to the modern Revue de fin d'année or to slap-stick comedy, he could count upon success.

Though of slight intrinsic value, Whig poetry of the eighteenth century constitutes a distinct chapter in the history of English literature. The earlier interest of poetry relating to affairs of state had almost invariably taken the form of personal eulogy, satire, or violent invective—types produced in extraordinary abundance during the Restoration. While such verse continued to flourish indefinitely, the complete development of the party system of government enabled poetry to acquire a much broader and more influential sphere. The great body of Whig verse written in the eighteenth century is devoted to the expression of party ideals; it is concerned with principles rather than personalities. This change of function, deeply significant for the future relation of politics and belles lettres, arose largely from the fact that poets were irresistibly attracted by what Chevrillon calls the psychology of Whiggism. Fortunately for the Whig cause, the versifiers contrived to find in the Whig dogma the political embodiment of the most popular moral sentiments of the age. The advocacy of Whiggism thus became a phase of a sentimental movement which, beginning early in the century, eventually “spread like a mildew over the whole surface of literature.”

Several bibliographies have been compiled, during the last fifty years, of those altered versions of Shakespeare's plays which form so illuminating a chapter in the history of the Restoration stage, and indeed of the English theatre in general. Unfortunately, the most scholarly of these lists have usually been minor appendices to works of wider scope, and are not unnaturally here and there inaccurate in detail. Perhaps the best is the most recent, Miss Bartlett's, in her handy bibliography, Mr. William Shakespeare; but there is no entirely trustworthy list, since all of them neglect to include at least one important item, the altered Hamlet, and most of them do include several plays which are either not adaptations of Shakespeare or not adaptations at all. I propose, therefore, to supply a more accurate bibliography, preceding it by a list of those now available, and supplementing it with a statement of the reasons for not counting as Shakespeare adaptations certain dramas which have long held their places in this inglorious roll of theatrical ineptitude.

The relationship between Emerson and Wordsworth, or rather the influence of Wordsworth upon Emerson, needs to be defined. There is a nebulous impression of close kinship between the two, particularly in their views concerning nature. Since Wordsworth's more original and potent verse had been written before 1820, while Emerson's earliest significant address was delivered in 1837 and his earliest significant essay was printed in 1836, we are apt to assume that Wordsworth exerted an important influence upon the young Emerson in the 1830's. The assumption does not appear to be well founded as I shall attempt to demonstrate. During the years that followed his first efforts, Emerson's attitude grew successively friendly, enthusiastic, confident toward the Wordsworth he had formerly found interesting but blundering, admirable in intention but ludicrously incapable. It is not difficult to mark the very year in which the transition from very considerable disapproval to almost unbroken approval was completed.

One could not desire a better instance of the need of defining critical terms than is afforded by a comparison of Poe's and of Emerson's definition of art. Since Poe defined poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” he would necessarily have defined art in general as “the creation of beauty.” Now, although Emerson's view of art is in striking contrast with Poe's, he begins with these very words. In his first book, Nature, he says, “The creation of beauty is Art.” What does he mean?

Whenever critics have noted an influence of the Platonic dialogues upon Byron, they have assumed that it is practically limited to the passing echo of Shelley's and Wordsworth's Platonism in the third canto of Childe Harold. In this paper I hope to show that, on the contrary, Byron had independent convictions about the Platonic-Socratic philosophy, which underlay most of his mature writing and which were inconsistent with his reflection of Shelley's metaphysics in Childe Harold.

Daniel Mornet vient de nous donner son édition monumentale de La Nouvelle Héloïse, en quatre volumes, dans la collection des ‘Grands Écrivains de la France’ (Paris, 1925): c'est un travail de Bénédictins, résultat de longues années d'études, et accompli au milieu d'un nombre prodigieux d'autres occupations.

The years 1799 to 1801 in Kleist's life may, with certain reservations, be characterized as Lehrjahre. In the early spring of 1799, at latest, his resolve to leave the army was definitely established. Before the end of the year 1801 the Wanderjahre had begun with work on Die Familie Schroffenstein. The period includes Kleist's betrothal with Wilhelmine von Zenge, his time of study in Frankfurt an der Oder and in Berlin up to and including his Zusammenbruch über Kant—or Fichte, the much discussed trip to Würzburg, the poet's conflict within himself and with his family concerning his right to reject a civil office, and the more or less voluntary trip with his sister Ulrike to Paris. Then came his final break with the past, and the synchronous break with Wilhelmine, when Kleist fled, we may say without exaggeration, to Switzerland, ostensibly to become a peasant. He became a poet.

Few literary critics have received such differing evaluation as James Russell Lowell. On the one hand are those who refuse to recognize in his criticism any permanent value. Professor J. J. Reilly concludes his three hundred page study of Lowell as follows:

The significance of the historical novel may be summarily suggested by calling the roll of its greatest masters: Scott and Manzoni; Hugo and Dumas; Thackeray, Kingsley, and Reade; Tolstoi, Coster, and Sienkiewicz. Add those who are rivals of the leading masters: Gogol and Jokai, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Jens Peder Jacobsen, Hawthorne and Pater, Blackmore and Stevenson; Merimée, Flaubert, and Anatole France. Here, without mentioning many who, like Dickens and George Eliot, were at their best in other forms of fiction, we have a genre rich in masterpieces,—certainly the only great genre in which the nineteenth century so excelled its predecessors as to cast their experiments of a similar kind into oblivion. The public loves it; great authors devote themselves to it. What do the critics make of it? What is its nature, its function, its value? Is this method, apparently so successful, of narrating an action imagined as occurring in an historic past, really a literary art or is it a temporary aberration? Such questions rang out in the nineteenth century as challenges to critical genius. How did the critics respond?

Of all German romanticists few have been so widely read and none so extensively imitated as E. Th. A. Hoffmann. He was in France the most popular of all foreign novelists, and exerted a strong and lasting influence upon French writers of the nineteenth century. His popularity and influence in his fatherland has been by no means so steady as in France. To be sure, at the time of his death in 1822, his books were the best sellers in Germany. But he soon lost favor with German readers, partly because the majority of literary men were hostile to him. Still worse did he fare in England, where he became known much earlier than in France, but never succeeded in gaining the favor of critics or public.

It was late in life that Sainte-Beuve wrote to a correspondent:

This declaration is often cited as a sort of summary and synthesis of his critical theory and experience, witnessing his fixed and final preference for the Classical manner, a preference which he promptly and constantly declared after his conclusive break with the Romantics in 1838. The interest of the scholar is immediately aroused by two things in the passage: the fact that he calls the group or roll of writers whom he indicates a “school”; and more especially by the names he singles out as representing the “school” to which he declares his allegiance— Horace and Pope.

The subject of the present investigation is the relation between Victor Hugo's Quatrevingt-treize and the following earlier works: Sébastian Mercier's Paris pendant la Révolution (1789-1798) ou le Nouveau Paris, and the Mémoires du Comte Joseph de Puisaye. It will be found that numerous details in Quatrevingt-treize are taken from the work of Sébastien Mercier, while Count de Puisaye's Mémoires are an important source for the character Lantenac.

The history of rime reveals an interesting coincidence. Rime was practically unknown to the ancients. It probably originated in the early mediaeval Latin of the age of Tertullian (155-222) in connection with the choral singing in the Christian churches, and came to prominence in the poetry of troubadours, precisely at the time when the modern European music came into existence. It is well known that the troubadours produced the first learned musicians in Europe. In the thirteenth century Adam de la Halle wrote his celebrated play, “Jeu de Robin et Marion,” which is considered as the first example of pastoral play and comic opera in France, and is—according to Suchier—the oldest musical play in Europe. At the same time it is one of the first dramatic experiments in which rime is extensively used. It was not before the fifteenth century, however, that rime was universally accepted throughout Northern Europe as a powerful device of literary expression. And at the same time, i.e., in the first half of the fifteenth century, John Dunsdale, an Englishman, invented counterpoint, and through his musical compositions acquired an international reputation. Thus our European sense for rime appears to have been trained in the great school of music. The origin of rime coincides with the origin of modern harmony.