Current assumptions of scholars in the field indicate little argument against the view of Georg Bondi that the philosophy of the poems of Albrecht von Haller is taken from the philosophy of Shaftesbury. My own examination of the evidence convinces me that this opinion is fallacious. In an effort to indicate the sources of Haller's philosophical poems I shall make a fresh survey of the situation.

Our first reference to the acting of Macbeth on the Restoration stage is to be found in a list of plays drawn up by Sir Henry Herbert, the master of the revels, and dated November 3, 1663. The list includes the following item: “Revived Play. Mackbethe …. [£]1.” This reference agrees with Downes's assertion that before its presentation at Dorset Garden with “new Cloath's, new Scenes, Machines, as flyings for the Witches; with all the Singing and Dancing in it,” the play had been acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields. There, in the first house directed by D'Avenant, Samuel Pepys saw it on November 5, 1664, December 28, 1666, January 7, 1667, April 19, 1667, October 16, 1667, November 6, 1667, August 12, 1668, December 21, 1668, and January 15, 1669.

An even half-century ago, Moritz Heydrich, in giving to the world the posthumous writings of Otto Ludwig, expressed his belief that Ludwig was more closely akin to Heinrich von Kleist than to any other German dramatist, and that this kinship was based principally on an inner relationship of both poets to the German “Sturm und Drang.”1 In the years that have intervened, no one has proceeded further than to a brief and sporadic reference in the direction suggested by Heydrich. And yet Ludwig, no less than Hebbel,2 may claim poetic consanguinity with Kleist; if Hebbel is primarily the heir and continuator of Kleist's dramatic art,3 Ludwig may be said to share with Kleist a tragic idiosyncrasy of genius. In the internal as well as the external fate of their lives, they represent a phase of the tragedy of greatness which has been described as peculiarly German.

The attack of the Puritans and of the city authorities upon the amusements of London under Charles I and the Interregnum was directed primarily against plays and playhouses. The sport of bear-baiting—one of the favorite entertainments of the Londoners—was allowed to continue almost without interruption throughout the Commonwealth.

Scholarship has always delighted to render unto Shakspere and Milton individually the tribute which is their natural due. Strangely enough, however, it has neglected the relationships between them. Specifically, no one hitherto, I believe, has undertaken a systematic investigation of the range and quantity of Shaksperian recollection in Milton, much less of the quality thereof. The present paper attempts such an investigation.

In her note appended to Shelley's Mask of Anarchy, Mrs Shelley remarks on the attitude of her husband to the current political theories of the time:

Though Shelley's first eager desire to excite his countrymen to resist openly the oppressions existent during the “good old times” had faded with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He was a republican and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our nature; the necessaries of life when fairly earned by labor, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism that looked upon the people as not to be consulted, or protected from want and ignorance, was intense … the news of the Manchester Massacre … roused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion.

The “villain-hero,” as he developed in the plays of Marlowe and in those of some later Elizabethans, is a distinct and important type of character. Moreover, he did not make his final exit with the ending of the Elizabethan period, but has reappeared at various times since, especially during the Romantic Revival at the end of the eighteenth century. This “Romantic Movement,” as we are accustomed to call it, was in many ways a revival of the earlier Romantic spirit which we call Elizabethanism. Nothing shows the resemblance between the two periods more strikingly than this habit of taking for the dominating figure in the story a man of great power, stained with crime.

Much has been said about Balzac's interior descriptions and their intrinsic value in his character portraitures, of his “oyster-and-its-shell” theory, as it is called, but very little exact analysis has been given them. Monsieur H. Clouzot's interesting article, L'Ameublement dans la Comédie Humaine d'Honoré de Balzac, is the only one which treats the subject at any length. Even here the author does not show how Balzac worked to obtain his effects, nor does he succeed in proving that a particular setting is as nearly indispensable to a complete rendering of the characterization as Balzac hoped and as his admirers have supposed.

The aim of the following paper is two-fold. First, its endeavor is to point out the probable source of Christopher Marlowe's posthumously published pastoral poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and to trace the direct influence of this set of verses through English literature down to the present time. Second, the article strives to demonstrate the fact that, initiated by Marlowe's poem and its frequent imitation, a literary device, “the invitation to love,” became established in English literature and has persisted in it down to our own time. My design, therefore, may be briefly given as a discussion of “The Passionate Shepherd” and its influence, with an incidental history of the invitation to love so far as it is related to Marlowe's poem.

But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
“That portion of the river of my mind
Came from that fountain?“ (The Prelude, II, 203ff).

To what extent, it may profitably be asked, did German literature exert an influence, direct or indirect, upon the life and writings of Wordsworth?

Late in 1817, while residing at Great Marlow, Shelley wrote out the fragment known as Prince Athanase, presenting the characteristically Shelleyan hero, imbibing “philosophic wisdom, clear and mild” from an old hermit named Zonoras.

In the year 1793, James Lawrence, an Englishman living on the Continent, contributed to Wieland's Deutsche Merkur an essay on what he called the “Nair system of gallantry and inheritance.” The system was highly Utopian. Its main ideas were so distinctly different from those of even the radical philosophers and theorists, that the essay must have attracted considerable attention. We know from Wieland's footnotes in the Merkur that he was interested.

The respectable number of books and articles about Shelley within recent years have concerned themselves mainly with the review of a puzzling personality and an inspiring, if not altogether acceptable “message.” At one of those times, the aftermath of a centennial, when authors may be assayed anew, we have contented ourselves with reaffirming, somewhat indifferently, the opinions of the last seventy-five years. This fact seems to argue that the poet's reputation has become stabilized. Although scholars and critics will no doubt continue to add minutiae, it is probably true that our main body of information and opinions concerning Shelley is definitely fixed, for some time to come. And yet in the case of Shelley's principal poem, Prometheus Unbound, there are considerations which indicate that the generally accepted view needs to be revised. These considerations hardly affect the value or the essential meaning of the poem, but they do fundamentally affect the method by which it is commonly approached.

The poet Wordsworth has been for a century the synonym of wholesomeness and piety. It is only within the past decade that it has become the fashion to regard him as a dangerous influence. There is a school of critics at the present moment who go about sadly shaking their heads over Wordsworth's case. They think it a pity that, like Shelley, he should have devoted so fine a talent to the propagation of a subtly vicious teaching.

In no other novel of Dickens is there presented so sinister a picture of evil as in Oliver Twist. It was Dickens' first and last excursion into that underworld which he describes with such psychological truth and objective unreality. His other novels do, indeed, contain villains and murderers but they become less and less melodramatic and more realistic until we have a Mademoiselle Hortense and Julius Slinkton drawn from life. The prototype of Fagin in Oliver Twist may have been Ikey Solomons, a celebrated fence of Dickens' own day. Had Dickens followed the same method in depicting Solomons as he used in drawing Mrs. Manning, the original of Mademoiselle Hortense, the result would have been a realistic presentation of a criminal. But he has invested Fagin, Bill Sikes, the Artful Dodger, and their companions in crime, with a quality of horror which Mr. Pugh says lends them “something of the hectic effect of leering, grinning devils in red torment. Fagin, the arch-devil, though he is limned in the fewest possible words, stands forth lurid and malignant as the figure of Satan in medieval pageantry.”1 It is this satanic quality which particulary distinguishes the villains in Oliver Twist from those in Dickens' other works.

I

In 1833 a precocious seventeen-year-old boy, Philip James Bailey, came from Nottingham to London; and thus reached, in time and space, the very centre of the nascent Victorianism which he was destined so curiously to illustrate. Initiated by his father into liberal politics and theology, and by his own youthful reading into the spirit of romanticism, he set himself to writing endless verses that should be at once theology and romantic poetry. Bailey's Festus has been known to three generations of readers who have scarcely thought, perhaps, of the position of the work in literature or of the poet himself. The present paper is concerned with the poem Festus rather than with Philip James Bailey, although documents recently come to hand make it possible for us to follow his life in the thirties with some detail. And yet there is surprisingly little about London in Bailey's early letters. He did not, like Browning in the same decade, make his way into literary and theatrical circles; almost his only literary acquaintance seems to have been John Robertson, the editor who preserved himself like a fly in amber by telling Carlyle that “he meant to do Cromwell himself.” Although Bailey occasionally submitted his verses to the London editor as well as to his father, he seems not to have been open to suggestions.