It WAS Josephine Miles's “Eras in English Poetry,” published in this journal in September 1955 (LXX, 853-875), that stimulated me to study her method, to appraise her findings, and, finally, to endeavor to carry farther and perhaps to sharpen her approach. This paper reports such findings and such conclusions as have, thus far, eventuated from this endeavor.

The dates assigned to Milton's two sonnets on his blindness have depended upon our dating of the time when blindness became “total.” It is the purpose of this essay to qualify this premise, to propose revision of all the dates now usually accepted, and, not incidentally, to urge a possibly new interpretation of a passage in one of the sonnets.

The literary register of the German-speaking peoples begins with awkward eighth-century attempts at glossing Latin texts and dictionaries, followed by sundry pieces of translation of mostly catechumenal character, culminating toward the end of the century in the OHG Isidor. For previous generations of German philologists these earliest writing efforts in the German vernacular were of interest and value primarily as attestations of an early period of the language. Twentieth-century research, however, under the vigorous leadership of Georg Baesecke, has tried to assess their import for the history of German literature as the first manifestations of an indigenous literary culture, modest in its beginnings, tortuous in its course, but of a potential vitality that failed of realization only because of unfavorable external circumstances.

George Gascoigne was more than “the first conscious purist in his art.” With wit and energy he sought to solve a wide range of urgent Elizabethan literary problems. To his credit stand the first English prose comedy, translation of the first tragedy from the Italian, the first mask and regular English satire, the first critical English treatment of prosody.

When An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland was written in 1650, its readers were puzzled by the praise given to King Charles I. And readers ever since have been puzzled by Marvell's ability to deal with the burning issues of the Civil War without making his political position clear. The best-known explanation is that offered by H. M. Margoliouth:

When Dryden wrote that love and valor ought to be the subjects of a heroic play, he did not define his conception of love. He, and presumably his readers, knew what he meant. During the past seventy-five years, however, the nature of his heroic love has severely exercised those who have tried to describe Restoration heroic drama. All have agreed that this love is of primary importance, but no one has offered a consistent or completely satisfactory analysis of it. The commonest view is that it reflects the sentimental, casuistical, metaphysical Platonic cultism—especially the doctrine of the uplifting power of love—fashionable in seventeenth-century heroic romances and Caroline drama. In the belief that this theory has been overemphasized and that it is not an adequate explanation of Dryden's heroic love, I propose to attack the problem from a different point of view in the hope of finding a clear and consistent pattern in his treatment of love.

Moses Mendelssohn wrote to Lessing on 29 November 1770, informing him that he was finally sending him “the Ferguson” which Lessing had been so anxious to read. Before receiving an answer, Mendelssohn wrote Lessing a second time, in mid-December, apologizing for his failure to send “the Ferguson.” Gleim, who was to have brought the book to Wolfenbüttel, had slipped out of Berlin with J. G. Jacobi without a word to Mendelssohn, and now Moses was sending the book by mail. In a postscript Mendelssohn asks Lessing if he has seen in the Jenaische Zeitung von gelehrten Sachen what J. C. Lavater read from the diary of his travels before the Consistory in Zurich. Mendelssohn tells Lessing that he has been unable to pass the matter over in silence. He has asked Lavater for an explanation, and if this does not prove satisfactory, he will be obliged to say certain things which both parties will find unpleasant.

There have been two different interpretations of Dryden's attitude toward church and state in his writings after the Revolution of 1688–89. Some have held that he would gladly have changed with the times but was unacceptable to the new regime because he was too notorious an offender; others, that he chose with silent dignity a relatively obscure place among the defeated minority.

My Purpose in this paper is to understand the allegory of The Faerie Queene more fully by examining the relation between the first two books. It has been commonly observed that these books are parallel in structure. In each, the Knight who represents a particular virtue (Holiness, Temperance) leaves the court of the Faery Queen with a guide (Una, the Palmer), and later defeats two chief antagonists (Sansfoy and Sans-joy, Pyrochles and Cymochles); upon being separated from his guide, he enters a place of temptation (the house of Pride, the cave of Mammon), and later falls. Then being rescued by Arthur and united with his guide, he enters a place of instruction (the house of Holiness, the castle of Alma) and finally fulfills his adventure (killing the Dragon, destroying the Bower of Bliss). Such paralleling has been considered part of Spenser's design expressed in the Letter to Ralegh, to write twelve books in which twelve knights, as patrons of the twelve virtues, undertake parallel adventures assigned by the Faery Queen. That the later books do not follow this repetitive structure has been variously explained as the need to avoid monotony, to modify the design according to the virtue being treated, or simply—all too simply—as a change of plan. It was left to A. S. P. Woodhouse to explain for the first time the basis of the parallel structure of the first two books. He suggests that the two orders of nature and grace which were universally accepted as a frame of reference in the Renaissance are here carefully differentiated: “what touches the Redcross Knight bears primarily upon revealed religion, or belongs to the order of grace; whatever touches Guyon bears upon natural ethics, or belongs to the order of nature” (p. 204). It follows that the parallel structure is designed to bring into relief differences which depend upon these two orders. He finds that this difference leaves its mark chiefly upon the education received by the two knights: the Redcross knight shows the bankruptcy of natural man who must utterly depend upon heavenly grace whereas Guyon shows how natural man realizes the potentialities of his nature by ruling his passions through reason (pp. 205-206). At times, he insists more strongly than does Spenser upon an absolute separation of the two orders: Guyon's reference to “the sacred badge of my Redeemers death” confuses the separation, as does the Palmer's benediction: “God guide thee, Guyon, well to end thy warke.” Even more confusing is Guyon's invocation to Christ for His Mercy at the moment when, like Longinus, he levels his spear against the Cross: “Mercie Sir knight, and mercie Lord, / For mine offence and heedlesse hardiment, / That had almost committed crime abhord” (ii.i.27). However, thanks to Woodhouse's article, there seems no doubt now that the distinction between the two orders of nature and grace provides a necessary frame of reference for understanding the parallel structure of the first two books.

On 29 May 1736, Doctor Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, presented to Mistress Mary Harrison a copy of Medulla Historiae Anglicanae: The Ancient and Present State of England. Being a Compendious History of All Its Monarchs,from the Time of Julius Caesar. Written by Dr. Howell. And continued by an Impartial Hand to the Death of His late Majesty King George I (9th ed., London, 1734), in order to “encourage her to read usefull and improving Books.” Such high sententiousness is probably a suitable pose for a man almost seventy to assume when formally endowing a girl in her mid-twenties with an epitome of English history. Yet even at seventy Swift would have enjoyed placing an ironic inscription on the flyleaf of a book, especially one like Howell's, biased by Whiggery; and if Mistress Harrison ever read this improving volume, she would have discovered some of Swift's characteristic marginal vituperation. Since these notes have never been printed, few people besides Mary Harrison have had the opportunity these past two hundred years of reading Swift's animadversions on certain aspects of English history.

Dr. Johnson's twenty-five-year friendship with the historian, antiquary, and clubman, Thomas Birch (1705-66), is significant for several reasons. First, it covers Johnson's earliest and most obscure years in London; second, it shows him in a curious association with a man of nearly the same age whose contemporary eminence and excellent social and intellectual connections contrasted remarkably with his own during the years before the Dictionary; and third, it gave rise to a large number of little-known Johnsonian passages in Birch's various correspondences. The Birch papers in the British Museum reveal their compiler as, among many other things, a voluminous if unsystematic and usually noncommittal chronicler of Johnson's career between 1738 and 1765. As a Whig with predominant Whig connections, Birch sometimes dealt harshly with Johnson. As a weathervane of taste, he was as often content to report current gossip or the progress of Johnson's projects as he learned of them through the newspapers, or in conversation with other friends or with Johnson himself. Once, by request, he wrote a short but extremely laudatory letter concerning Johnson's Dictionary. But the few well-known documents on the Birch-Johnson friendship suggest that relations were somehow disordered. Johnson's ten known letters to Birch are peremptory, cold, and without friendly expressions; his review of Birch's History of the Royal Society, published in 1756, was distinctly unfavorable; and his rumored final verdict on Birch (“a dull writer” [Boswell, i, 159]) is perhaps more widely known than Birch's services to English historiography. Johnson was content to remember Birch for a single talent: “he had more anecdotes than any man”—they flowed “like the river Thames” (Boswell, v, 255). Sir John Hawkins quoted Johnson on Birch, and the characterization, adapted by Boswell, has been endlessly repeated at Birch's expense: “Tom is a lively rogue; he remembers a great deal, and can tell many pleasant stories; but a pen is to Tom a torpedo, the touch of it benumbs his hand and his brain: Tom can talk; but he is no writer.”

There are few scholars who have not despaired of settling the controversies that relate to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Well known during his lifetime, these disputes have become legends which obscure the real ambiguities of his existence and achievement. In this respect, Rousseau belongs to the family of Montaigne and Gide, whose lengthy confessions have rarely been judged in an unbiased manner. It is, to be sure, the very purpose of such avowals to preclude indifference, and, in the case of Rousseau, there is little sense in trying to evade the haunting and problematical implications of his autobiography. The man and artist must first be approached not only for the sake of their respective importance, but also because the Discourses, the Social Contract, and the Emile are transpositions and solutions of their inner conflicts. At present, there is agreement on at least this one point, and many philosophers and critics have sought to find the principle which would reveal the true motives of a man who swore to tell the truth. However, few of their commentaries on the Confessions and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire envisage the fundamental question of the autobiographical genre itself, namely: How does the great autobiographer succeed in making credible and convincing the story of his life, and what are the stylistic means by which he imposes this vision on others?