The idea of the possibilities of human action in the Middle English Patience rests on a strictly providential view of history. Jonah's mission to the Ninevites is part of a larger scheme, invisible to him, in which he has little confidence. The irony of the prophet's failure to understand or trust God's moral and historical purposes is deepened by the fact that he is a figure of Christ. Jonah's blindness to God's immediate purpose—salvation for the Ninevites—is foolish, but his ignorance of his own typological significance is inevitable, for that significance cannot be realized until the incarnation of Christ. Thus patience, the virtue in which Jonah fails so badly, is not simply a dull acquiescence in present necessity, but a sure faith in an eternal order not merely obscure but unimagined except by God. A brief reading of the poem shows that the contours of this faith are defined by those three of God's attributes which characterize the moral quality of events in the world he orders: his power, justice, and mercy.

The virtues of L'Allegro are incorporated into II Penseroso, and both mirth and melancholy serve the progress of the soul. The activities of II Penseroso complement those of L'Allegro, but at each point they are nearer to the contemplation of God. The progress of the poems culminates in the final section of II Penseroso, which has no parallel in L'Allegro. This vertical structure encompasses image patterns that range from humor psychology to music, and from hermeticism to topology. These patterns are further organized into parallel thematic units. Chief among these are the education of a superior mind, the subordination of flesh to mind and of mind to spirit, the syncretic nature of Christian vision, and the progress of the mind and soul through the complementary disorders of black melancholy and vain deluding joy. The delights of L'Allegro are real and valued, but they cannot stand against the ecstasy of Christian contemplation.

The meaning that attaches to the title Correspondances suggests a likely but overlooked source of Baudelaire's sonnet, the occult science of animal magnetism. Baudelaire's interest in the subject goes back to June 1838 when he discusses it in a letter to his mother. His first Poe translation, in 1848, was Révélation magnétique. In addition, allusions to animal magnetism are found in such poems as La Voix, Bénédiction, and La Mort des pauvres. Baudelaire was probably aware of, and may have attended, a series of lectures on animal magnetism given in 1844 or 1845 by a certain Alphonse Teste. In the printed text of these lectures the word correspondance is used in a sense closer to Baudelaire's than one finds in any other known source of the sonnet. Evidence of the influence of animal magnetism on Baudelaire's works tends to confirm Jean Pommier's belief that Correspondances was composed during the period 1845-46. (In French)

In Tristram Shandy, Sterne forces us to recognize the limiting and distorting effects of the preconceptions which we may habitually impose upon new experience. This instructive confrontation with our own limits is accomplished by three central methods. Most frequently, we cannot resist judging situations that are under consideration by characters in the novel; then the processes that uncover their deluded prejudices lay bare ours as well. Through what amounts to a technique of parable, we are shown our own limitations as we discover those of Sterne's characters. Second, we are made to participate in the double meanings of words, with the effect that we recognize the tendency of our minds to make reductive assumptions on the basis of unreliable evidence. Finally, the narrator repeatedly manipulates us by deliberately disappointing expectations of narrative form developed through earlier reading. By arbitrarily departing from narrative convention, Sterne shows that arbitrariness lies in the conventions themselves and that our allegiance to them is a sign of a preference for convenient artifice over inconvenient reality. Such reevaluations of ourselves and our habitual responses persuade us of our need for the more complex perceptions of experience that Tristram Shandy demonstrates.

Like Hegel, Pater often uses images of death and rebirth to describe the historical process. This imagery reflects Hegel's principle that later stages of artistic and spiritual development annul earlier phases and yet also conserve them. The series of rebirth images by which Pater describes the process of historical development is the firmest proof that Hegelés thought was a sustained and creative influence on his work. In the strongly Hegelian Winckelmann essay, Pater represents the Renaissance as a cultural affirmation achieved through negation, while others of the Studies in the Renaissance define the idea of cultural rebirth through the images of metempsychosis and the afterlife of the pagan gods. The original version of the Winckelmann essay also mentions Hegel in connection with the myth of Demeter, which, in his essays on Demeter and Persephone, Pater treats as still another image of cultural continuity. The principal source for these studies was Ludwig Preller's Demeter und Persephone. Pater also borrowed Preller's theory of a primitive religion of the earth, connected it with the Christian imagery of death and rebirth, and employed it again in Marius the Epicurean, his most ambitious treatment of the historical dialectic.

An annotated transcription, with commentary, of the texts of two letters (21 July 1762 and 3 October 1765) in Baretti's recently discovered commonplace book. The letters offer autobiographical insight into Baretti's various disappointments and persecutions on the continent. The first one provides the original to which Johnson's letter of 21 December 1762 (Chapman, No. 147), one of his best known, is the reply.

An important and currently relevant statement about the role of methodological discourse in literary criticism is contained in the writings of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's relationship to the mainstream of western methodology is examined with particular reference to one of his main sources, Sir Isaac Newton's account of the method of analysis and synthesis. Central concepts of the tradition Johnson received are illustrated from various other writers who shaped the discourse he adapted to the purposes of his literary investigations. It was Johnson's achievement to bring the fruits of this discourse about method in science and philosophy into the arena of literary criticism and to show as no other English critic before him had the importance of rigorous attention to the complicated relationship between phenomena and received opinion in literary inquiry and what the requirements were for knowing something in critical discourse.

The tendency in modern literary specialization for all authors to be boosted, sometimes at the expense of the truly great, is a serious threat to literary standards already undermined by scholarly mass production. One must therefore protest when a Carlyle is raised above a Matthew Arnold by responsible people, as he seems to have been raised by David J. DeLaura in “Arnold and Carlyle” (PMLA, 79, 1964, 104-29). Carlyle's crude, propagandist message is not the same as a cool scholarly abstract of his ideas. The manner colors all the matter. Carlyle's main weaknesses are that he exaggerates, that he oversimplifies life, is aggressive, egotistical, that he blurs religion (epitomizing a decay in faith), uses the rhetorical tricks of the advertiser, and in imposing upon his readers (whom he scorns and bullies) is insincere. To complain that Arnold accepted Carlyle's influence and yet rejected the man and the manner is to complain about what had to be. Scholars should beware of mistaking our common cultural inheritance for specific borrowing. No doubt Arnold partly concealed his debt, and was ungenerous, but his not being a saint does not canonize Carlyle. Literary justice requires the placing of writers in true critical and historical perspective.

Despite the well-established critical opinion that the Defence is a polite, straightforward manifesto of a literary theory with little apparent value as literature, Sidney's treatise is a complexly imaginative work, informed with the same dramatic conflicts between author, persona, and subject matter that characterize Astrophil and Stella. The persona exonerates poetry and energizes his oration by creating two “dramas” : he persuades his listeners to live up to certain expectations by playing the carefully defined role of his confidantes, and, at the same time, speaker-as-energetic-defender distances himself from the process of persuasion through irony and self-mockery. Thus, the speaker “beguiles” his listeners through audience psychology, rich imagery, and rhythmic prose while simultaneously warning sensitive auditors to beware of his fervor and seeming guilelessness.

Interpretations of Wuthering Heights often focus upon the grand passions of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and the striking bond between them. But full and detailed consideration of the novel discourages the assumption that Emily Brontë is wholeheartedly endorsing their point of view, or any other. She consistently presents all her characters, Heathcliff and Catherine included, as blind to the world as others see it, and consequently as holding views that do not do justice to the fullness of things. Largely because of their myopia, all are ever at odds with one another, often physically, but usually conceptually, engaging in indecisive wars of words, benighted battles of too limited views. The battles occur as well within Catherine and Heathcliff, whose divided hearts reflect the confused divisions in the world at large. And the reader is fully implicated in the inconclusive conflicts, for his formulations and sympathies are repeatedly betrayed. Wuthering Heights provides him with no standard of judgment that comprehends the restricted ones of the characters, no privileged point of view to relieve his uncertainties. Whatever her intentions, Emily Brontë is clearly not just throwing her being vicariously into the lives of Heathcliff and Catherine. She possesses strong critical impulses and many contrary views, only one of them being that of Heathcliff.

Readers often mistakenly treat Romantic poetry as a poetry of doctrine. It is predominantly a poetry of question, asking rather than telling. Like Descartes in his Meditations, the Romantic poet searches for certainty, employing the test of doubt, submitting supposed certainties to question. As with Descartes, the search leads into the realm of mental activity. But unlike Descartes, the Romantic poet finds further questions here: Cogito, but in what ways does man think? Romantic poetry has two main movements. First, the poetry works in several ways to expose doctrine to question, suspending a reader's sense of certainty. Next, the poetry explores what underlies doctrine, the basic data of mental experience from which doctrine is constructed. These movements establish a number of patterns in the poetry. The Romantic poet does not find certainty, but this failure is the poetry's success: it challenges man's ability to construct doctrine out of the data of experience.

As my colleagues and I who constitute the MLA Committee on Bibliography complete our work on the Bibliography for 1970, we approach a significant milestone in the history and development of the MLA bibliographical system. The appearance in print in the summer of 1971 of the bibliography we have just compiled will mark the 50th year of publication of this annual service to scholarship in the modern languages and literatures.

Wordsworth's answer to Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode” is fuller than has been recognized. In “Resolution and Independence,” Wordsworth indirectly suggests to his friend that he turn to God for the comfort he formerly found in natural objects and that he discover through God the extraordinary strength within himself to master sorrow. He reminds Coleridge, who laments the loss of Joy, of the visionary power of pain and of the spiritual insight and trust that may come from suffering itself. In addition, he asks Coleridge to remember that while storm may follow calm, sunshine may also follow storm. In “Stanzas Written in My Pocket-Copy of Thomson's ‘Castle of Indolence,’” written immediately after “Resolution and Independence,” comic innuendo and affectionate solicitude replace sober teaching as means of arguing against Coleridge's dejection. Alluding to Thomson's satiric portrait of a poet's melancholy companion, Wordsworth suggests to Coleridge that he is unlike this morose and speechless figure who thanks heaven the day is done. Wordsworth reminds Coleridge of his unusual capacity for delight in common things and of their mutual good fortune in being able to devote themselves to friendship and to art: like Thomson's pilgrims they have been dwelling in the “happy Castle.”

John Hall-Stevenson (1718-85), friend and college mate of Laurence Sterne and the “Eugenius” of Tristram Shandy, was galvanized into writing and publication by the meteoric success of Sterne. His second impetus was his friendship for John Wilkes and his admiration for Wilkes s most important satellite, Charles Churchill. From 1760 to 1783 he attempted to keep in the public eye with fables and fabliaux, verse epistles and satires, translations and imitations. Best known for Crazy Tales (1762), fabliaux ostensibly told by members of the “Demoniac” brotherhood at his own Skelton Castle, he developed a reputation for eccentricity and bawdry. Nevertheless, he was a man not only of a curious but also of a sound reading background, he was a classicist of some competence, and he could on occasion be an effective satirist. Though most often misdirected, his persistent efforts to interpret Sterne offer important comment on the milieu in which Tristram Shandy developed; and as a Wilkesite he was frequently able to make pungent comment on the personalities and issues of his era. (Includes as an appendix a bibliography of the works of Hall-Stevenson.)