What the Widsith-poet's profession was, and what his purpose in writing, have long been matters of conjecture. Without stopping just here to scrutinize previous proposals, I wish to bring forward another in which some of the items inconvenient and rebellious to other theories may find a place.

By his detailed account of his journey through Hell, Dante invited close attention from his readers. Factual-minded ones of a mathematical bias have become fascinated with the working out of the details as in a puzzle. In their zeal they have made diagrams to illustrate their views, such as appear in Giovanni Agnelli's Topo-Cronografia del Viaggio Dantesco. These and other charts have been widely circulated. For instance, Dinsmore's Aids to the Study of Dante gives those of Il Duca Michelangelo Caetani di Sermoneta. Having seen such diagrams from our earliest knowledge of Dante, we take them for granted as showing his plan of the lower world. Even Croce, in La Poesia di Dante, admits some use in making charts of the physical topography of the poem, on the ground that “quella struttura Dante la volle ed esegui, ed esiste nel suo libro” (p. 61). If it is in the book, it should be made clear. But what if it is not?

Although more than thirty years have passed since the publication of Nitze's fundamental study of Chrétien's Erec, Arthurian scholarship has still to make full use of the implications he has given toward a better understanding both of details and of the unifying principle of this first French Arthurian romance. Basing itself, then, upon Nitze's contribution, and drawing upon other more recent studies, the present article proposes as its end the presentation of the many episodes of this romance as concordant elements in a great psychological novel.

The battle of Cenn Abrat forms part of the story known as The Battle of Mag Mucrama and is told in §§ 10-14 of Stokes' edition (RC 13, 440). It is recorded in the Annals of Tigernach (RC 17, 10) and by the Four Masters, A.D. 186. There is, however, a longer account which appears as a separate story and is preserved in two manuscripts, The Book of Lecan (15th century) and RIA C i 2 (15th-16th centuries.) The occasion of the battle is not mentioned here, but according to the tradition of the Battle of Mag Mucrama, a dispute arose between Lugaid Mac Con and his foster brother Éogan son of Oilill Ólom, king of Munster, about a fairy musician they had found, each of them claiming the musician for himself. The king decided in favour of Éogan, and Lugaid said that it was a false judgement.

In his excellent study of the Latin and Italian sources of Joachim du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome, M. Joseph Vianey indicates a number of passages that derive in some way from Lucan's Pharsalia. To the best of my knowledge, no one has pointed out any further borrowings, or made any kind of detailed study of du Bellay's debt to Lucan, which is, however, considerably more extensive than M. Vianey's mentions would lead one to believe. In this paper, therefore, I propose to quote all those passages in the two works which are so similar in expression or in thought as to suggest that du Bellay had Lucan in mind, or actually before him, when he wrote the Antiquitez. After this comparison of details, it will perhaps be possible to show that du Bellay owed to Lucan something much more important than these imitations and translations.

Professor Tatlock's analysis of the date at which the Knight's Tale was adapted for its place in the Canterbury collection and the amount of alteration which Chaucer effected when placing it there has been accepted by all scholars who have concerned themselves with Chaucerian chronology. Tatlock suggested that the second paragraph and the last line of the Tale (i.e., lines 875–892 and 3108) were inserted to fit the story into its context, but maintained that elsewhere he found “not the least indication of adaptation or alteration.” Then he concluded—because of the belief that the General Prologue was composed in 1387—that the Knight's Tale was put into its present position “about 1388–90.” So widely accepted has Tatlock's theory become that in their editions of Chaucer both Professor Manly and Professor Robinson record it as a common belief that the “Palamon and Arcite” (mentioned in the Prologue to the LGW) is substantially the same as the Knight's Tale as we now have it. I wish to present some evidence, however, which suggests that the Knight's Tale was revised for the Canterbury collection not earlier than the middle of 1390, and to suggest that there was more revision made in the poem than has heretofore been supposed.

Farman's Mercian glosses to certain parts of the Rushworth Gospels have occupied the attention of scholars for more than a century. It would be difficult to find an aspect of the priest or his work which has not, at some time, been investigated. Yet there remain numerous controversial questions, some of them of a very fundamental nature. One of the most difficult concerns Farman's apparently irrational uses of the symbols e and æ. It will be found that many of the larger conflicts over the position of Rushworth in the general scheme of English phonology are essentially disagreements as to just what values these two letters had in Farman's orthography.

Du Bellay had a very fair grasp of the significance of choreography in ancient Greek poetry. In his Hymne de la Santé,“ addressed to Robert de La Haye upon the latter's recovery from a severe illness, he tells us that when Death had beckoned to his friend with her pale hand, the laurel had bowed her tresses by the riverside, and the fountain of Hippocrene had ceased to flow—

N'oyant plus la voix sacree, Qui agree
Aux boys, qui sont tousjours verds,
Et la nombreuse cadance De la danse
Qui s'animoit soubs tes vers.

Like my predecessors on this annual occasion, I have had to make a choice between offering you a paper on a subject in my special field of study or discussing some of the general professional problems that concern us all. Other presidents have settled this question in different ways. In the somewhat similar period after the first World War, I remember, President Armstrong told us that our proper course as scholars was to cultiver nos jardins, and it might have been wisest for me this evening to have undertaken some intensive horticulture in the Celtic or mediaeval field. But I have myself been so pre-occupied with the present situation in humanistic education and research, the subject has been so constantly forced upon my attention in my reading and in my association with other scholars, that I have found it hard not to discuss the matter here. After all, the political and economic upheaval of the war has been accompanied by a disturbance hardly less profound in the republic of letters and learning. The time seems to call for a kind of speech from the throne. And though we have no throne or monarch—only a very transitory president—I am going to ask you to listen to a few considerations on the “state of the realm.”

The reading habits of the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Purity, and Patience remain a fascinating and fruitful field of study. Much has been written about the books the poet read, or may have read, but it is unlikely that the catalogue of books owned or read by him has by any means been completely reconstructed. Of the books he certainly knew, the Vulgate is of first importance for its influence upon the poet's thought and style. Certain, but less important, are the Romance of the Rose and the French text of Mandeville. Of the books very probably read by him the Divine Comedy stands first, followed by the Vita Nuova and the Convivio, Boccaccio's Olympia, and the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius. Less probable is his reading of Tertullian's De Patentia and De Jona et Ninive, the Travels of Marco Polo, Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica, the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, the French lapidaries, and a few others still less certain.

In the Palatine Anthology were preserved two inscriptions of Bacchylides. One of them, the dedication of a shrine to the southwest wind, was written in behalf of a farmer named Eudemus:

No less a scholar than Jacob Grimm over a century ago called attention to the inherent value of the German Weistiimer, particularly as outstanding monuments of old local laws. Two decades later, F. I. Mone in a study of these documents emphasized their great age and their connections with the provisions of the Roman law. While these Weistümer (also known as Banntaiding, Ehehafttaiding, Fischtaiding etc.) are common to most parts of the German-speaking territory, relatively only a few of those once extant have come down to us; of these the greatest number by far were originally written in Austria and the Alpine provinces. For this reason the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien set itself the task of publishing all the available local laws for the districts of Salzburg, Tyrol, Styria, Carinthia, Upper and Lower Austria. From the point of view of date, the earliest of these belong to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, though no more than a handful of them have survived. The number of extant Weistümer increases greatly in the fifteenth century, achieves its greatest total in the following century and then gradually declines, till after 1800 the Weistümer disappear entirely.

Some doubt has always been felt regarding the textual purity of the printed sermons of Bishop Hugh Latimer. The recent discovery of two hitherto unnoticed mid-sixteenth century manuscripts, each of a famous sermon, provides the first opportunity to test the printed versions. One of these, MS. Corpus Christi College Cambridge 104, fols. 339-360, is a Latin translation of the first sermon preached by Latimer before Edward VI in 1549; the other, MS. Sloane 1460, is an English version of the last sermon (two parts), preached by Latimer before Edward VI in 1550.

I warn you that I am going to make a plea for something quite old fashioned, the tradition of humane letters. We have lost sight of it so completely that we almost never use the phrase any more and it seems to survive only in the title of an honorary degree which we sometimes bestow upon elderly dodos when we call them doctors of litterae humaniores, doctors of more humane letters. I believe we should be rendering a considerable service to higher education if we could turn out annually in regular course at least a handful of bachelors of humane letters. I say this because today even when the undergraduate throws himself upon our mercy and majors in English, or French, or Spanish, or German, or in American civilization, we turn him out not as a bachelor of humane letters (to say nothing of more humane letters) but usually as a bachelor of nationalistic history.