When Fielding advanced his theory of the comic prose epic, he took particular occasion to denounce “those voluminous works, commonly called romances, namely Clelia, Cleopatra, Astrea, Cassandra, the Grand Cyrus, and innumerable others, which contain, as I apprehend, very little instruction or entertainment.”1 He was quite explicit in drawing a sharp distinction between such narratives and his own works. Yet, although he frequently referred to the heroic romances, he made no mention whatsoever of the rather elaborate theory of prose fiction which the writers of these romances had set forth during the preceding century. This omission is somewhat surprising, not only because the principles of the heroic romance constituted the most detailed theory of prose fiction prior to his own day, but also because those principles were in many instances strikingly similar to the theories which Fielding himself advanced. In view of the tremendous difference between Clelia and Tom Jones, one would hardly expect to find much resemblance between the critical theories upon which the two works were based; yet as a matter of fact, the two theories had quite a number of points in common; and it is rather strange that neither Fielding nor his modern critics should have noted the fact.2

The Induction to Every Man out of his Humour, which contains Jonson's most significant statement about humorous characterization, has been universally interpreted by critics as follows: Jonson rebelled against the “abuse of this word Humour,” which had come to be used popularly to denote whim, affectation, or eccentricity. That spectators and readers of his comedies might understand the basis of his own comic characterization, he carefully defined humour in the strictly psychological sense:

As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a Humour.

Auch dem oberflächlichen Leser muß es aufgefallen sein, daß Faust an entscheidenden Wendepunkten seines Lebens die Flucht in die Natur ergreift, um in ernster Zwiesprache mit ihr über sich selbst, sein Wollen und Tun klar zu werden. Ist doch die Natur für Faust wie für Goethe selbst ein geheimnisvoll lebendiges Wesen, das er wie ein Liebender in immer neuen Formen umwirbt. Im Gegensatz aber zur menschlichen Geliebten, welche die Schwächen des Mannes nur allzu gern übersieht, ist die Natur eine strenge Göttin, die alle seine Gebrechen schonungslos aufdeckt und jeden Versuch, sich ihrer Wahrheitsforderung zu entziehen, unbarmherzig bestraft. Der Mensch, der bei ihr Rat und Hilfe sucht, muß sich also bewußt sein, daß er eine richterliche Instanz anruft, gegen deren Urteilsspruch es keine irdische Berufung gibt. Die Bereitschaft, sich diesem Urteil zu unterwerfen und sein Leben in dessen Sinn auszurichten, ist dann der Gradmesser seines menschlichen Wertes, seiner reinen Menschlichkeit.

Studies on romanticism are numerous and exhaustive, and yet one problem of this literary upheaval has scarcely been touched by scholars—the conflicting aesthetic theories of the period from 1800-1815. Marsan has given us the history of romanticism's battle; other historians have treated problems of style, rules, and foreign influences; but, as Souriau has pointed out, an important question has been neglected: the classic versus the new liberal theory of imitation in art, a question which strikes at the very core of the classic-romantic dispute.

William Lisle Bowles said of the anecdotist Joseph Spence, “He seems to have opened his mouth and his ears to every thing Pope told him.” This sneer implied that Pope was a liar and Spence a gull, but the splenetic Bowles inadvertently implied something else that, if true, is of significance to English literary history: that Spence was an omnivorous snapper-up of trifles who did not judge or discriminate but merely recorded. For if Spence, gull or no gull, was an accurate and veracious recorder, his notes on the conversation of Pope and other literary figures possess great value; if he was not, they are nearly worthless. Without Spence's records our knowledge of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers would be considerably less than it is, and the biographers of Pope in particular would cut a sorry figure. Only if Spence's manuscripts had lain unknown for a century and a half, if neither Warburton nor Johnson nor anyone else had been granted a look at them, if not one of the anecdotes had ever found its way to the light, and then if a modern discoverer had published his find—then only would the ensuing sensation have brought a realization of the importance of Spence's labors and the magnitude of the debt which the world has been none too ready to pay him.

In the memoirs, diaries, journals, and reviews of the first half of the nineteenth century, Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) has an importance which is in sharp contrast to his present obscurity. It is no fault of the modern reader that he cannot remember one of Rogers' poems. Even before Rogers' death, his contemporaries had judged his work as essentially worthless, but they continued to speak with admiration of the “bard, beau, and banker” of St. James's Place. They remembered always the little house which he had made one of the great sights of London, of cultured society in the western world. Here above all was revealed Rogers the man of taste, arbiter elegantiarum, a rôle which he played with a curious combination of modesty, pleasure, and pride. Since his was the first small home to become a great museum, comparable to the Bache Collection today, No. 22 St. James's Place is worth reconstructing in detail and considering as an influence on its time.

In the Advertisement to the volume of his collected sonnets, published in 1838, Wordsworth wrote:

That graphic illustrations have value as criticism through the illumination they throw on the interpretation of a literary work at various periods of its history is an idea which, though not new by any means, has been somewhat neglected by scholars and critics. To those interested in such study it is apparent that the closer the relationship between author and illustrator, the greater the chance of a pictorial interpretation of the work acceptable to the author. For this reason Edward Burney's rare and almost forgotten illustration for Evelina is herewith reproduced.

Mary Wollstonecraft was not born a feminist. However much she may have chafed under the tyranny of men, she kept silence until she had served her apprenticeship as a writer. In 1786, while she was teaching school at Newington Green, she wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, a collection of innocuous platitudes which any maiden schoolmistress then might have approved; in 1787, while serving as governess in an Irish family, she wrote Mary, a semi-autobiographical novel of sensibility about a virtuous and long-suffering heroine.1 Then in 1790, at the age of 31, she emerged suddenly as a second Mrs. Macaulay, a female champion of human emancipation, when she published her Vindication of the Rights of Men in answer to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. And early in 1792 she eclipsed even Mrs. Macaulay by urging, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that her own sex be included in the general emancipation. She who had been an obscure schoolma'am dabbling in fiction became for many of her contemporaries the symbol of women's potentialities—and for others, a shameless vixen.

Keats had many and intense literary admirations. Some of these were seasonal and passed away with maturity: such were his youthful fondness for Beattie and Mrs. Tighe. Others were permanent and deepened with time: among these were his affection for Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and Chaucer and his continued love for Homer and Dante. Keats's attitudes toward important writers of his day were varied. Toward a considerable group of them he appears to have been more or less neutral, at least non-committal; for others early admiration was later wholly or partially reversed, with Hazlitt, among those he first esteemed, virtually the sole exception to a modified estimate. Thus, his early devotion to Leigh Hunt gave way to critical coolness as he began to see through the fellow's weakness; and though he once read Byron with pleasure and praised his poetry in a sonnet, he later learned to despise him for what he regarded as insincerity and perverted taste. He sometimes praised Moore and on occasion imitated his verse, but in a more final judgment he classed him with Southey and Rogers as poets he did not like. His feeling for Wordsworth alternated between almost reverential acceptance and modified rejection. Keats owed much to Wordsworth and was, perhaps, in one way or another influenced by him to the end; but after meeting the poet in London in the winter of 1817-1818, he began to see traits in him not to his taste and was thereafter inclined to speak of him and of some of his work with reservations.

Byron wrote of Manfred that he is “… a kind of magician, who is tormented by a species of remorse, the cause of which is left half unexplained.” It will perhaps be agreed that after much scholarship the cause remains in fact somewhat more than half unexplained, unless all is referred to Byron's anguish over the relationship with Augusta Leigh.

With characteristic impatience the poet repudiated the guesses of his contemporaries as to the sources of Manfred, which, he said, he wrote “for the sake of introducing the Alpine scenery in description.” To Wilson's suggestion in the Edinburgh Magazine that “the origin of this dreadful story” might be found in Marlowe's Faustus, Byron replied that “the conjecturer is out, and knows nothing of the matter.” When Goethe, reviewing the play, stated that “this singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself,” Byron retorted that he had never read Faust, “for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it, viva voce, and I was naturally much struck with it.” Earlier he had written, “An American who came the other day from Germany told Mr. Hobhouse that Manfred was taken from Goethe's Faust. The devil may take both the Faustuses, German and English,—I have taken neither.” He was receptive only to Jeffrey's suggestion of an Aeschylean influence. Prometheus, he confessed, “has always been so much in my head, that I can easily conceive its influence over all or anything that I have written.”

To people interested in the history of English pronunciation, the names of John Walker and Thomas Sheridan are not unfamiliar. Of these two men, the more important from the point of view of modern pronunciation, in particular American pronunciation, is unquestionably Walker; for almost invariably, where these two men disagreed, it has been Walker's decisions which have prevailed—especially in America, until today many of our pronunciations of individual words, as well as our ideas about proper pronunciation are traceable to Walker, not Sheridan. Walker's influence was made possible by the constant republication of his works in the nineteenth century and—more indirectly, but perhaps more pervasively—by his tremendous effect on succeeding dictionary writers.

In the well-known passage from Rasselas Johnson made Imlac say that the poet must “neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may-have remarked, and another neglected, for those characteristics which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness”; but twenty-two years later in the Lives of the Poets, Johnson praised Thomson as a poet who “thinks always as a man of genius,” who looks on Nature and Life “with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet; the eye that distinguishes, in every thing presented to its view, whatever there is on which imagination can delight to be detained, and with a mind that at once comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute. The reader of the Seasons wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shows him.” The Seasons, then, was good poetry because Thomson did not neglect the minuter discriminations which one may have remarked and another neglected, and because he presented characteristics which had not been “alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness.” Whether these two critical remarks are inconsistent, and if they are, to what degree, are questions to be answered only when we are sure of the meaning of the famous passage in Rasselas. What, precisely, did Johnson mean by the rather unfortunate metaphor of the tulip? What is the background of the conflict in literary criticism between the grandeur of generality and the power of particularity? And where did Johnson stand in that conflict?

Through the years detailed attention has been given to the lyric, epic, short-story, drama, novel, and other literary forms, but comparatively few references have been made to the dramatic monologue. A beginning towards the understanding of this neglected form was made by Stopford A. Brooke, who devoted one chapter to a discussion of Tennyson's use of the dramatic monologue in his Tennyson, His Art and Relation to Modern Life. S.S. Curry in his Browning and the Dramatic Monologue made a study of three characteristics of the form: speaker, audience, and occasion. He likewise gave a short history of the genre, and analyzed the methods for presenting examples of the form orally. R. H. Fletcher classified Browning's dramatic monologues. Claud Howard traced the development of the type in his pamphlet The Dramatic Monologue: Its Origin and Development. Phelps devoted one chapter to analyzing the content of Browning's dramatic monologues. Bliss Perry defined the type, mentioned the same characteristics Curry had enumerated, and stated that the form is somewhat akin to the lyric. The present writer stressed the necessity for definiteness of each of the aforementioned characteristics and suggested that continuous interplay between speaker and audience be added as a clear-cut, fourth characteristic. Examples in both American and continental literature were grouped as follows: typical, formal, and approximate.

This paper announces no great discovery, but it contains fresh material of interest to students of Coleridge, of David Hartley and the philosophical tradition which he represents, and of Anglo-German literary relations. Our starting-point is lines 35-45 of Religious Musings, where Coleridge declares that the life and death of Christ freed the human soul from the bonds of idolatrous fear:

The fragmentary essay On Life is so significant a piece of writing, and its connection with Shelley's mental development and with some of his poems so obvious, that its comparative neglect by commentators and biographers is rather remarkable. This essay (1) is the prose basis for the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, (2) is saturated with the influence of Wordsworth, whose Ode: Intimations of Immortality served as a model for Shelley's Hymn, and (3) not only contains Shelley's first definite announcement of his rejection of a materialistic philosophy and adoption of a spiritual “intellectual system,” but also marks an important point in his mental growth.