In meiner Abhandlung, Die Doppeldrucke in ihrer Bedeutung für die Textgeschichte von Wielands Werken, habe ich nachgewiesen, dasz von den verschiedenen Bänden der Wielandschen Oktav-Ausgabe letzter Hand, Leipzig 1794 ff., je drei bis sechs Drucke vorliegen, die zum Teil nicht im angeblichen Erscheinungsjahre, sondern erst später veranstaltet wurden. Diese dem Dichter gänzlich unbekannten Doppeldrucke legen nicht nur ein beredtes Zeugnis ab für Wielands Beliebtheit bei seinen Zeitgenossen— ihre Feststellung und Absonderung von dem echten Originaldrucke ist höchst wichtig für die Geschichte des Textes. Ich habe damals schon die überzeugung ausgesprochen, dasz sich im Laufe der Zeit noch weitere Drucke entdecken würden: an dieser Stelle sollen nun die seither entdeckten Doppeldrucke beschrieben und eingereiht werden. Sämtliche Exemplare sind in meinem Besitz.

The relation between the first Folio and the first Quarto text of Shakespeare's Henry V has long been a subject of discussion. In 1874, Daniel, in his edition of the play for the New Shakespeare Society, argued that the Quarto is a stage abridgment of the Folio version. Some years later Brinsley Nicholson attempted to refute Daniel. His arguments have not met with much acceptance, perhaps because of an underlying assumption that a fuller and, on the whole, much better text implies revision and expansion from the shorter, poorer one,—an assumption certainly open to challenge with reference to Shakespeare texts.

In 1816 The Quarterly Review issued its number for October 1815, and among the articles was a review of Miss Austen's most recent novel Emma. This was the review, universally attributed ever since to Sir Walter Scott, and consistently spoken of as “that magnanimous article”. Biographers of both Scott and Jane Austen point to it with pleasure as a signal example of one genius recognizing another. In view of the prominence accorded to this review in the literary histories it is remarkable that no one has taken pains to enquire into the truth of its ascription to such a distinguished pen, especially since a discrepancy exists between the date of this review and the dates of Scott's recorded utterances on Jane Austen, and further since the review itself is unlike Scott's known critical work.

The victory of neo-classicism in England was won only after a struggle against forces which are sometimes called romantic but which are more accurately described as anti-classical. These forces were partly survivals of the past and partly tendencies that pointed forward to nineteenth century romanticism. The latter, so far as they were merely germinal, fall outside the scope of the present discussion, which deals with actual obstacles interfering with the complete dominance of the neo-classical movement after 1660.

After science in the modern sense of the term began to infiltrate the public consciousness in the second half of the seventeenth century, and men were stirred by the new concept of the universe revealed by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, the lesser poets seized joyfully on this inexhaustible source of fresh material and combined pedestrian exposition with ecstatic praise in setting forth the new vision of God's handiwork afforded by the discoveries of science. Among those who thus undertook to interpret the results of science in verse were Young, Akenside, Thomson, and Richard Savage, as well as many lesser writes.

The existence of voluminous Brontë juvenilia has long been known. Anyone who has read Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë must remember the astonishing list of twenty-two ‘books’ therein enumerated as having been completed by August 3, 1830, near the end of Charlotte's fourteenth year. Mr. Clement K. Shorter continues the list through 1839, bringing the number of titles up to forty. To these may be added from sources not included in his list an almost equal number of sketches and fragments, making a total which in volume approximates the author's published works.

Two questions are involved in a discussion of “Jewish gaberdine”: First, what was a gaberdine? Second, what was the distinction in dress between Jew and Christian? Modern Shakesperean editors, confronted by the necessity of explaining gaberdine, quote the statements of the New English Dictionary, of previous editors, or of authors of costume books. The editors of the N.E.D. having found no reference to the word earlier than 1520, and none which gave an idea of the garment, fell back on the definitions in seventeenth-century dictionaries, which tell only half the story. Authors of costume books made compilations of quotations given in other costume books, and thus grew a definition which gained weight through sheer repetition. Most of these compilers cite the statements of Planché, but none of them quotes the sentence with which he concludes his discussion after examining the definitions of lexicographers and making deductions from literary references: “But, alas, we are no nearer to identification!” Any attempt at identification requires examination of the etymology of the word; definition and pictorial representation of the garments to which cognate terms in other languages were applied; contemporary evidence concerning materials of which gaberdines were made, and the rank of persons for whom they were made.

In the development of Ludwig Tieck 1795 and 1796 were decisive years. For several years previous to 1795 Tieck had been giver to a pessimistic and rather negative view of life, according to which human existence seemed to have but little meaning, and poetry, art, and idealism appeared to him to be delusions. While this nihilistic tendency held sway over Tieck's mind not even the works of Goethe, Shakespeare, or Cervantes, which he had read eagerly ever since early boyhood, or his friendship with Wackenroder represented saving forces in his life. William Lovell, Tieck's novel of almost seven hundred pages, adequately reflects the distressed state of his mind during this early period of his life, although the work was written for the most part after the worst throes of his pessimism and despair had spent their force.

In Putnam's Monthly Magazine for October, 1855, appeared the first installment of a sea story entitled Benito Cereno, which was continued and concluded in the November and December numbers. Following the established custom of that periodical, the story was printed without signature: and it remained unacknowledged until the following year, when it was included in The Piazza Tales, a volume of short stories by Herman Melville. Lost for half a century in the oblivion which engulfed all that Melville wrote, it did not again appear in type until its inclusion in the Standard Edition of Constable and Company in 1924. This year it has been republished separately in a limited edition by the Nonesuch Press.

In the first chapter of L'Influence Allemande en France, M. Reynaud states that Germany, in the early eighteenth century, being dissatisfied with the indifference with which France viewed her literature, determined to send out propagandists to take up the campaign. In his opinion the instigator of this battle for recognition was Gottsched.

In the introduction to his edition of The Book of Sir Thomas More (Malone Society Reprints, 1911, p. xviii) Dr. W. W.Greg makes the following statement: “He [C] revises the stage-directions throughout [the manuscript], both in the original text [written by S] and in the additions [written by A, B, D and £].” Because of this statement certain scholars, not examining the play for themselves, have looked upon the manuscript (BM. Harl. 7368) as a play-house copy or prompt-book and have regarded the presence of revised stage-directions as proof that the play—as we now have it—had actually been performed on the Elizabethan stage. That Dr. Greg's statement is incorrect and is unwarranted by the evidence, and, accordingly, affords no basis for the inferences drawn from it, is shown by the following considerations:

A recent critic declares of John Donne: “He had none of that enthusiasm for Greek culture which distinguished More, Colet, and Ascham. He appears to have studied certain Greek authors in Latin translations. . . . . His learning was chiefly of the Mediaeval type.” No evidence, it is true, comes forward to establish Donne's acquaintance at first hand with Greek authors. At the same time, an examination of the allusions to Greek mythology in the poetry of Donne makes it clear that he had part in the all-but-universal interest of the Elizabethans in classical material, and that he uses this material with characteristic independence and originality.

It is well known that a heated controversy took place during the eighteen-nineties over the inclusion of fact, brutal fact, in fiction. It is likewise well known that the controversy ended with a partial victory for the “New Realists.” The chief literary historians of the period—W. G. Blaikie-Murdock, Holbrook Jackson, Harold Williams, and Oscar Burdett—agree in dating the change during the early years of the decade. Of these writers, however, Holbrook Jackson alone has indicated—and then only in romantic generalizations—the turbulent clash of ideas which accompanied the transition. In Emile Zola, Novelist and Reformer 1904, Ernest Vizetelly describes with strong partisan feeling the outcry against his father's published translations of Zola's works. But Vizetelly takes us no further than the year 1889, when his father was imprisoned, and he does not deal with the subsequent reaction in England toward tolerance and even sympathy. Accordingly, Vizetelly's account fails to give an adequate appreciation of the important results which followed the controversy over realism, in fixing the chief line of development which English fiction was to take for at least thirty-five years.

In the Journal Étranger, December, 1761, appeared an anonymous review of Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson which, since the middle of the last century, has been the subject of recurrent conjectures. Discussion has confined itself for the most part to the question whether or not this review was written by Diderot, to whom, in turn, it has been categorically assigned, tentatively imputed, categorically denied, and re-imputed. However, although the question has attracted, more or less incidentally, the attention of various prominent critics, no one, as far as I have been able to determine, has undertaken to investigate the available evidence. Following is a brief bibliographical survey of the discussion.

If any part of Robert Burns' extensive correspondence would seem to have been thoroughly edited, it is the series of letters he wrote to George Thomson in the course of his contributions to that worthy's Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs. Unlike the rest of the correspondence, this series was never dispersed. Though one letter somehow found its way into the Pickering Collection, and so into the British Museum, the remaining fifty-five continued in Thomson's possession until his death in 1851. In the following year they were bought by Lord Dalhousie, in whose collection they remained until they were acquired by Mr. J. P. Morgan. Thomson had placed the letters in the hands of Dr. Currie, the poet's first biographer, who selected mangled fragments for publication, and during their half-century at Brechin Castle they were freely accessible to Burns scholars, among them Scott Douglas and William Wallace. The former of these declared in his 1877 edition of the Complete Works that the letters to Thomson “are here for the first time printed exactly as they appear in the original manuscripts” —a claim which with true editorial amenity is balanced by Wallace's statement that “an examination of the letters written by Burns to George Thomson . has enabled me to reproduce this correspondence accurately for the first time.”

As a direct result of the widespread discussion of Evolution during the third quarter of the nineteenth century and the new interest aroused in the doctrine of heredity, there appeared toward the end of the century a new genre of the novel. The genealogical novel is in itself an interesting phenomenon, marking the introduction of a new type of fiction ruled by science. Additional interest is given to the investigation through the remarkable circumstance that this new type of novel was projected contemporaneously and independently by two writers, Emile Zola and Samuel Butler, one in France and one in England.

In searching for the source of Sheridan's Rivals, a critic ventures upon literary quicksand. Professor Nettleton in his edition of the comedies is inclined to minimize the persistent charges of plagiarism made against Sheridan by his biographers.

The mystical philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) tendencies of the English romantic movement probably owed a good deal to Thomas Taylor. From the publication of Cowper's Task and Burns' Kilmarnock poems to the death of Shelley and Byron, Taylor poured out an unceasing stream of commentaries and translations elucidating for England the doctrines of Plato and the Neo-Platonists. To be sure, his works had very limited sale, and most of one edition was locked up for a lifetime in the archives of the rich nobleman who financed its publication. But no man could print so much and receive as many comments as he did without having a definite effect.