The poet of the Roman de la Rose dreamed one May morning that he came to a park wall decorated with allegorical representations of vices and defects. And when he entered the park he found there a company of dancers, whose individual members also represented different human attributes. With this company was the God of Love, and his attendant who carried his bows and arrows. So that when the dances had ended and the poet went on to explore the park, the god and his squire followed him. They soon found a spring, bubbling up under a pine, with a curb on which was written: “Here the beautiful Narcissus died.” In the spring's depths they could see two stones, like crystal, that changed their color under the sun's rays and reflected all the park round about. This was the water where Cupid had sowed the seeds of love, the famous Fountain of Love,

Dont plusors ont en maint endroit
Parlé, en romans et en livre. (Il. 1606, 1607)

In using satire to ridicule the vices and follies of his contemporaries, Fielding is the direct successor of the last member of that “Triumvirate of Wit,” Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift, to which he so often refers in his works. In his novels and in his periodical essays Fielding often refers to the luxury of the times and the consequent general moral corruption among all classes of society. He ridicules especially the affectation of his contemporaries—their vanity and hypocrisy, the twin roots of affectation—and assails with direct invective their spiritual and moral degeneration. Believing that example is stronger than precept in reforming human conduct, he likes to place before them examples, ridiculous or odious, of what they are to avoid; but his satire is more kindly than Swift's.

It is the purpose of this paper to make a critical inquiry into the actual use of the term Miracle Play in England from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The present state of opinion among most historians of the English drama is that the term there during that period came to include all religious plays. The trend of this view during the last sixty or seventy years, as it develops from conservative statement to absolute, sweeping generalization, forms an interesting chapter in the history of critical nomenclature.

The Episode of Finn presents perhaps greater difficulties to the critic than any other passage in Beowulf. The manuscript text is lacking in clearness and the narrative teems with obscure allusions. The complication is further increased by the fact that of the five extant epic monuments in Anglo-Saxon three contain references to the “matter of Finn” in a virtually discrepant form. In Widsith we find mention of the two principal antagonists of the saga, and the Finnsburg Fragment clearly pertains to the subject-matter of the lay which the court minstrel chants at King Hrothgar's banquet and which the poet of Beowulf interpolates in what would seem to be a form of “headings.”

Am 8. Februar 1916 ist Gustav Falke in Grossborstel bei Hamburg gestorben. Die Nachricht von seinem Fortgang ist in Deutschlands zweitem Kriegsjahr fast unhörbar verhallt. Im Deutschen Reich war er wohl hochangesehen, ja verehrt, aber doch nicht in aller Munde wie so mancher andere, der es weniger verdiente. Denn still war sein Erfolg wie sein Leben und Wirken. Er ist nur sehr selten vor die Öffentlichkeit getreten, weil ihm, wie er selbst sagte, alle lauten Worte und Gebärden peinlich waren. Er wollte auch kein Neuerer sein. Daher ist er nach einem kurzen Sturm und Drang abseits auf seinem Felde und still unentwegt bei seinem Dichten geblieben. Und wenn man ihn besuchte, so konnte man bald merken, dass seine gleichmässige Liebenswürdigkeit ein reiches Geistesleben umfriedete. Er wusste nicht nur allgemein über das moderne Deutschland gut Bescheid, er hatte auch besonders seine eigenen sicheren Ansichten über Kunst und Literatur. Sein “Abseitssein” war demnach nichts anderes als die stete stille Selbstzucht des Einsamen, von der Friedrich Lienhard einmal sagt: “Wer es mit seinem Volke und dessen Kultur und Literatur ernst meint, der muss sich vor allen Dingen zu einer gewissen… . Einsamkeit erziehen, anders ist ein Beherrschen und Überschauen nicht möglich!” Oder wie Falke es in seinem Gedicht Der Alte ausdrückt:

Und bin nun über Leid und Zeit
Und meinen Sternen näher
Und schaue in die Ewigkeit,
Ein stillgemuter Späher.

In a debate, December 22, 1819, in the House of Commons on the Newspaper Stamp Duties Bill, Sir James Mackintosh, speaking of the passage of the original act of 1712, said: “Swift—being then a distinguished Tory, suggested the first idea of a stamp duty for the avowed purpose of preventing publications against the government,—Swift, that parricide who endeavored to destroy that very press to which he owed so much, to which he owed all his fame, and at that very moment all his preferment.”

Most readers of Spenser's Muiopotmos will recall Professor Palgrave's comments upon the poem in his essays on The Minor Poem of Spenser. He said in part: “The lyric regarded from this point of view, is as light and fanciful, as winged and ethereal, as Clarion himself: the sunshine of the Summer's day which it describes glitters through it: the musical ripple of rhyme and metre is unbroken.” Then, finding but a fantastically slight connection between the episodes of the tapestries and the story of Clarion, Mr. Palgrave further summed up his comment upon the poem: “The tale hence seems even more inconsecutive than Mother Hubbard's; it neither is a whole as a story, an allegory, nor a moralization; and one asks in what humour a poet so sage and serious as Spenser, an artist so finished, can have painted this picture?—a question for sufficient answer to which he might have pointed triumphantly to the exquisiteness with which the fairy web is wrought and embroidered; to the poet's right, now and then, to be fancy free.”

The relationship of the manuscripts of the Middle-English poem Ipotis has been studied in detail by Dr. Hugo Gruber on the basis of the nine mss. known to him. In addition to these there are five others, four of which are printed for the first time below. One of these, unfortunately a fragment, is of the greatest importance, since it carries back the date of the poem at least fifty years. On the basis of the earliest manuscript known to him—ms. Vernon, written about 1385—Gruber assigned the Ipotis to the second half of the fourteenth century. But in the light of the new evidence, the composition of the poem is pushed back to the very beginning of the century.

The legendary Life of Judas the Betrayer, based, it is usually said, on the Greek myth of Œdipus, is found in almost every language and country of mediæval Europe. It was written down in Latin as early as the twelfth century. By the end of the thirteenth century it was turned into the vernacular in lands as far apart as Wales, Catalonia, and Bohemia. At the close of the Middle Ages it had become the possession of the folk, and since that period—to some extent even during the fifteenth century—it has spread northward and eastward into Scandinavia, Finland, Russia, and Bulgaria. It was related in Greek, probably in the Middle Ages, although the manuscripts are of a much later date. It was still told orally in Galicia at the end of the last century. As a regular part of the ecclesiastical literature of the West it received canonization, so to say, late in the thirteenth century, in the great legendary of Jacopo da Voragine; but, on the other hand, it is a remarkable fact that in the Middle Ages, so far as I have been able to learn, none of the reputable church writers (with the exception of Jacopo) recognized or even mentioned it. And furthermore, mediaeval sculptors and carvers of wood and ivory, who gave themselves with so much zeal to the plastic representation of legendary matter, completely eschewed or overlooked the ‘early life’ of Judas. Not indeed that either the church writers or artists sought to avoid contact with such a wicked character; on the contrary, they devoted considerable space to him, rejecting only his apocryphal career. However this omission may be explained, the fact must be recognized as of some interest.

One of the notable changes in English literature during the eighteenth century is a growth in altruism. It is a change which involves not only a breaking down of the old aristocratic indifference to the lower classes of society during the Restoration, but the establishment of a new ethical theory; literature displayed a broader human interest and assigned a new reason for its sympathy. It is usually assumed that the difference is due principally to the influx of French philosophy. This assumption at least minimizes the importance of a development which had taken place in the literature of England itself before the general interest in Rousseau. (The change, especially in poetry, is to be traced largely, I think, to the Characteristics (1711) of Lord Shaftesbury, whose importance as a literary influence in England has never been duly recognized. It has long since been established that his system of philosophy constitutes a turning-point in the history of pure speculation, especially in ethics; it has more recently been shown also that he is responsible for many of the moral ideas which inform the popular literature of Germany from Haller to Herder. But his influence upon the popular writers of his own country has received scant notice.

F. G. Fleay presented to the New Shakspere Society in 1874 his epoch-making paper On Metrical Tests as Applied to Dramatic Poetry. Many early investigations of authorship had been excellent, and some scholars looked askance at the utilization of cold statistics in literary criticism; but Fleay's methods, followed later by Boyle and others, have been vindicated. To Fleay and Boyle the fundamental idea of this paper, namely, that the work of the collaborating dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Massinger and Shakespeare in the case of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, may be tested by a consideration of colloquial contractions or elisions in words used by the authors, must acknowledge inspiration. The test will involve the use of statistical tables of colloquialisms which bear some resemblance to the metrical tables of Fleay and Boyle.