When a poet has been convicted of sin against fact, we poor pedantic critics incline, merely on that account, to question his literary power. The chance, or the need, to display some superiority in knowledge to a writer whose work we undertake to discuss, is apt to inflate us with such an undue sense of our own importance that we unfairly minimize his merit.

It is well known that when Isaac Bickerstaff began his lucubrations in 1709, he projected a periodical which, in accordance with the Quicquid agunt homines… nostri farrago libelli that so frequently served as the motto of its earlier numbers, should include various departments, of which one was to be the department of foreign and domestic news. It is also well known that this department was virtually abandoned before the Tatler had half run its course, and absolutely given over long before January 2, 1711, on which day Steele bade goodbye to his readers. But the precise rate at which the department of news diminished in importance, and the causes which probably governed the change, have been the subject of some very inaccurate statements and conjectures, although not all references to the matter have been wide of the mark.

At the end of a somewhat severe criticism of Evangeline, Theodore Parker said, “American readers may well thank the author for a poem, so wholly American in its incidents, its geography, and its setting.” The careful reader of the poem today naturally wonders at the poet's sources for all this knowledge of American geography and scenery, especially of that part of the country called “the west”; for, although he had visited only one of the places pictured, namely Philadelphia, he has shown a remarkably accurate knowledge of the details of the various regions. A great deal has been written concerning the historical basis of Part One, but little attention has been paid to the underlying sources of Part Two. The purpose of this paper is to point out some of the material which was used by Longfellow in this second Part.

William Congreve is undeniably the most polished of our dramatic writers and probably the most witty. Of his four comedies, The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, Love for Love, and The Way of the World, the first is one of the most scurrilous plays in English, and the last one of the most exquisite. If this were all that is to be said of him, one might be content to leave him to the scholars and the connoisseurs who at present seem to be his only earnest readers. But there is another and a greater claim to be made for Congreve. There is the claim not merely that he should be regarded as a classic—an empty and neglectful honor—but also that he should have that loving perusal by a younger generation which is the rightful prerogative of a classic. A reputation for indecency, a suspicion that he is one of those “to be read for style only,” most of all, ignorance or a misunderstanding of the real quality of his plays, have made his immortality an immortality on shelves, bookcases, and desks, dusty altars for his brilliance. This is of little moment for Congreve, who professed to despise literary fame in his lifetime, and would ask for no popularity now, but it is of some importance for readers of our generation who have revived the old interest in published plays, and should not be frightened or discouraged from the best.

As there is abundant evidence, reliable though anonymous, that scholarly circles are not without special interest just now in the ballet, it may be the proper time to consider that form of art in some of its historical relations to the theater. A recent book by Henry Prunières, le Ballet de cour en France avant Benserade et Lully, gives us for the first time a thorough treatment of the ballet during one of its great periods, the first half of the seventeenth century. It is only now, therefore, that the relations which then existed between the ballets and the plays of France can be adequately discussed. A full treatment of the subject would require and may attract the labors of a doctor's dissertation, but the general relationships can be established from material we already possess and special cases can be pointed out in which one genre borrowed directly and indisputably from the other.

It is not easy to form an adequate conception of the course of Italian lyric poetry in the fourteenth century; partly because not all the relevant material has been published, partly because the admitted faults of the period have been held to justify a neglect of most of its representatives in favor of a concentrating of attention on the great names of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Such an attitude, however, involves the disregard of much that is needed for an accurate view of the time, and the neglect of many poets who, while not uniformly inspired, give us much of genuine beauty and significance. It is accordingly my design to set forth, in broad but not unfaithful fashion, the main causes which gave this large body of verse not only its easily noted defects, but also its real, tho not always recognized, merits.

Unusual interest attaches to the ballad of Judas, not only because the manuscript in which it is found antedates by two centuries the manuscript of any other English popular ballad, but also because the story it tells is very nearly unique. The manuscript, Trinity College, Cambridge, B. 14. 39, was written in the 13th century; just where is uncertain. The ballad has been frequently printed, but not correctly until 1904, in the Cambridge Edition of the Ballads. It was Professor Child who first recognized the Judas poem as a ballad; but no one has questioned his judgment.

By the term ‘sepulehrum’ is designated that device or structure employed in churches—especially in the middle ages—to symbolize, or in more complete manner to represent, the tomb of Christ. This sepulchrum, so named in the liturgy, first appears in connection with the ancient office of the Depositio Crucis, or burial of the cross, which after mass on Good Friday typified the burial of Christ. Complementing and completing the Depositio was another office, privately celebrated by the priest and clergy before matins on Easter Sunday, typifying the resurrection, and called the Elevatio Crucis. When, after the tenth century, troping of the Introit for Easter morning—the famous Quem Quaeritis—developed into a little liturgical play with the impersonation of the angel or angels, and of the three Maries coming to anoint the body of the Lord, there was naturally a development of the heretofore symbolic sepulchrum in the altar, into what resulted finally in a separate structure.

Henry Crabb Robinson occupies a unique position in the history of literary relations between England and Germany. He exerted influence in both directions, tho his greatest service consisted in making Englishmen acquainted with German literature. While a student in Germany from 1800 to 1805, he interpreted English ideas diplomatically among the Germans, whenever the opportunity presented itself; and, after his return to England, he labored incessantly for the rest of his life, over sixty years, to create a more general taste for German works of art, especially for the works of Goethe, among his own countrymen. Indeed, he came to be considered by many literary men and women, both in England and on the Continent, as an oracle, well worth consulting on matters English or German, even on European affairs in general. It was Crabb Robinson who taught Madame de Staël her first lessons in German philosophy; and this same Robinson, during his third visit to Germany in 1829, astonished Goethe by his extraordinary knowledge of modern German literature and life. On the other hand, Goethe was glad to hear him read Byron, Milton, and Coleridge in the original. In England his position was much the same. Not only many minor writers sought and obtained his aid, but both Coleridge and Carlyle, in their studies of German literature, obtained many helpful suggestions from Crabb Robinson. He was always ready to lend a helping hand to all who wanted it, and sometimes to those who did not. Robinson's influence was chiefly personal, to be sure; but the personal influence of a man who loved his subject was needed under the circumstances, and was salutary, even tho the man was somewhat importunate.

The ensuing paper seeks to trace for the first time one of the most important formative influences on the poet Spenser's youth; to make clear that it was at work in his schooldays at the Merchant Taylors' School, during his years at Pembroke College, and thereafter; to show that it shaped no inconsiderable part of The Shepheardes Calendar and Mother Hubberds Tale; and that to this influence is due whatever disfavor he encountered before his so-called “exile” into Ireland. I allude to Spenser's relations with the Bishop of Rochester.

Estimates of the work of the Goncourts have varied considerably. While the majority of critics have treated the inseparable brothers as one man, a few writers such as Jules Lemaître and A. de Pontmartin have insisted on drawing a distinction between these literary Siamese twins. To the minds of these critics, the novels due to the pen of Edmond alone were vastly inferior to those produced in collaboration with Jules. Among the host of critics who do not feel that a difference is discernible in the talents of the two brothers, there is further diversity of opinion. Sainte-Beuve, a friend of the Goncourts, freely recognizes their merits as collectors of notes, books, and engravings, and would grant at least that their novel Sœur Philomène appears to be drawn from life. For Emile Zola, the authors are admirable in their descriptions of human beings as related to environment. Ferdinand Brunetière finds that the Goncourts, while pretending to follow nature in the minutest detail, unconsciously illustrate the excesses of Romanticism, in their exclusive attention to the abnormalities of human nature. Paul Bourget would emphasize their determinism, which has exerted a noteworthy influence upon Alphonse Daudet and Emile Zola. A large number of critics have, of course, given special consideration to that obvious lack of organization in the work of the Goncourts which is due to their use of note-books.

Jeremy Bentham in his iconoclastic Defence of Usury offers this plausible if somewhat cynical explanation of the well-nigh universal unpopularity of the money lender: “Those who have the resolution to sacrifice the present to the future, are natural objects of envy to those who have sacrificed the future to the present. The children who have eaten their cake, are the natural enemies of the children who have theirs.” And similarly he explains the unhappy rôle that is almost as universally meted out to the money lender of drama. “It is the business of the dramatist,” he says, “to study and to conform to, the humors and passions of those on the pleasing of whom he depends for his success… Now I question whether, among all the instances in which a borrower and a lender of money have been brought together upon the stage, from the days of Thespis to the present, there ever was one, in which the former was not recommended to favour in some shape or other—either to admiration, or to love, or to pity, or to all three;—and the other, the man of thrift, consigned to infamy.”

One of the chief abuses urged against plays by the puritans of the sixteenth century was their immoral language. At all periods of the dispute this offence of plays was the puritans' “floodgate which let in the most, or the most substantial of all their arguments.” Writing at the beginning of the dispute, Stephen Gosson particularly denounces this corruption in English comedies cut by the Italian pattern; and following Gosson other critics of plays increased the severity of their denunciations on this account. In fact no “abuse” of plays received a more continued, severe, or unanimous denunciation than that of their immoral speeches.

The life of Walt Whitman may be divided roughly into two parts. The first extends from his birth on Long Island in 1819 to that “transparent summer morning” when be and his soul lay together on the grass and the sudden revelation came with its surpassing peace and knowledge; the second embraces the rest of his life, when he lived under the “potent, felt, interior command” and set forth his propaganda to America.

Except incidentally, a treatment of pastoral does not form a considerable part of discussions upon eighteenth-century literature. No doubt this is because the eighteenth century, for all the artificiality and futility that the term connotes, still is for us the period of revolutions; we desire to see in it first of all the beginning of the new order of social ideas; it is only natural that these ideas should be sought in those writings that would appear to be the farthest removed from literary tradition. But it is hardly reasonable to expect by this method to form a correct idea of the time; not only what a priori represents reaction, but also that which continues traditions soon to be entirely abondoned, must be studied, if we would form the right estimate, not only of the period as a whole, but even of those very ideas posited as representative of the trend of the time.

The puys were pious literary societies in the north of France from the thirteenth century till modern times. Most of them were in honor of the Virgin. The one at Dieppe was dedicated to her assumption, the one at Amiens to her purification, the one at Rouen to her immaculate conception. At first the puys were more religious than literary. Later they became more literary than religious. Some became wholly secular literary academies. The puys encouraged the art of poetry by crowning the victors in poetic contests held according to their rules. The contests were arranged and conducted by a president chosen for one year and called prince or less often maistre. The membership was drawn from the clergy, the officials, and the bourgeois. The puys interest us on account of their acknowledged influence upon the German meistersänger and the French rhétoriqueurs, especially in the development of ballad poetry.