It has long been recognized that Spenser made numerous borrowings from the Revelation of St. John in Book i of the Faerie Queene. The Variorum edition conveniently lists those observed by Upton and other commentators. In a recent study, Mrs. Josephine Waters Bennett has suggested that the Revelation not only furnished Spenser with particular passages but largely determined the structure of Book I. Her important contribution is not the discovery of new borrowings, though she observes several, but her exposition of the Revelation from the Protestant point of view. From several English commentaries and from glosses in the Geneva Bible, she shows that the latter half of the Revelation was interpreted in the sixteenth century as an allegory of the Protestant conflict with the Roman church, and concludes that this fact has an important bearing on Book I, which is now generally believed to involve a similar allegory.

On February 23, 1804, shortly after he had settled in the lake country, Southey wrote John May:

In almost all the plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists one finds an abundance of astrological jargon used metaphorically and as sheer literary garnish, showing no particular knowledge of the complex technicalities of astrology. Occasionally, however, a Jacobean dramatist's delineation of a horoscope involves such astrological technicalities that he and his audience must have fully appreciated the various manifestations of horoscopy. Such is the case in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. My purpose in this paper is to present an adequate explanation of the horoscope employed at one of the critical moments in this play.

The rarity of manuscript versions of Lovelace's poems gives considerable significance to the discovery of an early text of the Sonnet beginning, “When I by thy faire shape did sweare.” The lyric was set to music by William Lawes, and is found on folio 2056 (meaning 256) of John Gamble's manuscript collection of songs in the New York City Public Library. The text has never been printed nor collated in print; and the variants reveal that Lovelace was not—as his editors and critics have maintained—careless in revision.

Since many years of threshing the same old straw have not determined the ancestry of William Shakespeare, investigation in a new direction seems wise. Genealogists, confronted with a gap they cannot cross, examine the history of families known to be related to the subject of their search but not how. Shakespearean students have long known of Thomas Greene, the solicitor, steward, and town clerk of Stratford-on-Avon from 1603 to 1617, who in his private diary called Shakespeare cousin, but they have not known much about him or his exact relationship to the poet. Since the word cousin occurs in such private and personal writing as a diary, it is more likely a term of real kinship than of friendly courtesy. This article presents the data gathered during an investigation—halted by the present war—into the ancestry of Thomas Greene. They do not reveal the ancestry of Shakespeare, but they show a chain of family connections of better economic and social status than some writers have granted the Stratford Shakespeares. Since the matter is genealogical, a fair presentation demands the inclusion of minute details of slight interest to the general reader but of possible great value to a specialist who may undertake to carry the investigation forward after the war, for in genealogy a seemingly insignificant detail may prove to be the clue to the ultimate solution.

Although some of Shelley's Victorian critics—notably Forman—believed The Cenci to be an acting play, it now seems to have become a settled dictum of Shelley scholarship that it is a closet drama. Woodberry in his edition of the play and Bates in his study of it both conclude that it is unsuitable for stage production, Bates summarizing his views as follows:

I propose the hypothesis that this shift in primary modification which took place a little more than two hundred years ago represents, in connection with objects modified and specific contexts, a fundamental change in poetic reference, a new idea of the poetic medium which is still very close to us, and which has strongly pervaded the poetry of our ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’ predecessors. I propose, then, to demonstrate the representative nature of this primary modification by tracing more closely, and qualitatively as well as quantitatively, the developing relation of the standards epithets good and bad to the qualities epithets bright and dark through the work and the concordance listings of four or five poets on either side of 1740.

So reactionary was Lord Liverpool, whose Cabinet was formed in 1812 and lasted until 1827, that a French critic remarked that had Lord Liverpool been present on the first day of creation he would have cried out, “Mon Dieu, conservons le chaos.” Though this remark was aimed at one man, quite as appropriately it could have been directed at most of the gentlemen of the periodical press between 1798 and 1820; for this period, like many another era in time of national crisis, made literary criticism the handmaiden of politics, religion, and morality. During few periods have the review and literary departments of the magazines been so full of banal religious and political cant as during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The ink might scarcely have been dry on Lyrical Ballads and the Preface, but so disturbed was the national state that everything conspired to bring about a thoroughly uncritical outlook and to make the age a most unpropitious one for launching a new literary system. In this short study the fortunes of Wordsworth and the “new poets” cannot be examined, but some of the forces of reaction with which they had to contend, at least as reflected in the periodicals, can be made clear.

The earliest known musical setting for Shakespeare's lyric “Harke Harke ye Larke,” suggests new aspects of the dramatist's craft, and contributes an interesting variant of the song-text. The score, acquired by the Bodleian in 1937 and subsequently printed with modern notation in 1941, is here printed in facsimile by permission of the Bodleian Library Authorities. The following is a transcription of the words:

Harke Harke Harke Harke Harke yo Larke
at heauen gate sings
at heauen gate sings
& Phoebus ‘gins to rise
The winking mary buds begin to ope theire golden eyes wth ev'ry thing yt pretty is my Lady sweet arise
arise arise
my Lady sweet Arise

In the history of the English language in the seventeenth century Milton occupies an anomalous position. In his general outlook on the character and problems of the language and in his efforts for linguistic regularity he suggests the rationalizing and standardizing tendencies of the eighteenth century. But in his actual practice in the matters of vocabulary, sentence structure, and syntax, he displays a versatility and extravagance which is characteristically Elizabethan. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate one of these aspects of Milton's English, namely, the chief features of his prose vocabulary, especially as illustrated in his own lexical innovations, and to draw certain conclusions from them in regard to his position as a great enricher of the English language.

In the rich but little known manuscript collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania are six letters by or to the David Garricks which, as far as I have been able to discover, have not been published. Three are signed-autograph letters of David Garrick; one is written by Mrs. Garrick to her friend Hannah More; and two are addressed to Garrick by acquaintances. While the group adds little to the Garrick biography, the letters themselves are interesting and should find their proper place in the Correspondence. The original spelling and punctuation are reproduced, with due allowance for typographical limitations.

Als ich im vergangenen Sommer Karl Vietor für die freundliche Zusendung des Sonderdrucks seiner gehaltvollen Arbeit über “Goethes Gedicht auf Schillers Schädel” im Märzheft von PMLA meinen Dank aussprach, verhehlte ich nicht, daß die Begründung seiner Hypothese von Zugehörigkeit und Sinn des dem Gedicht im Druck der “Wanderjahre” von 1829 hinzugefügten Vermerks “Ist fortzusetzen” mich nicht überzeugt hätte. Als er daraufhin mir vorschlug, mich an einem für das Juniheft 1945 der PMLA geplanten Symposium zu beteiligen, für das die Herren Feise und Mautner Beiträge zugesagt hätten und fùr das er selbst einen weitern Nachtrag zu seinem Aufsatz in Aussicht stelle, nahm ich diesen Vorschlag gern an. Damals wußte ich nicht, daß er u.a. vorhatte, die Hypothese, daß der Vermerk sich auf den Roman beziehen könne, als “erledigt” abzulehnen, noch wußte er, daß ich an dieser Interpretation festhielt und mich dafür einzusetzen gewillt war. Als ich mich dann im Oktober bei PMLA erkundigte, bis wann mein Manuskript würde müssen eingesandt werden, erfuhr ich, daß die betreffenden Arbeiten bereits im Dezemberheft erscheinen würden und schon im Druck wären. Dieses zur Erklärung, weshalb die folgenden Ausführungen erst jetzt als verspätete Nachzügler erscheinen.

Writers on Keats, when discussing the central problem of the effects upon the poet of the contemptuous criticism directed against Endymion and against Keats personally, have presented various and often contradictory opinions. The two extreme views, namely, that Keats was killed by this criticism, or, on the other hand, that he was scarcely touched by it, are no longer regarded as tenable. The current opinion was first stated, I believe, by Sir Sidney Colvin when he wrote: