Throughout his prose works Milton shows familiarity with the theological literature of his time. In particular, he shows, by citation and reference, that he used on occasion, especially in the divorce pamphlets, certain commentaries on Genesis written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He mentions by name the commentaries of four authors: John Calvin, Paulus Fagius, Andreus Rivetus,and David Pareus. Because he knew their other theological works, he may also have been familiar with the commentaries on Genesis of Wolfgang Musculus, Peter Martyr (Pietro Martiro Vermigli), and Hieronymus Zanchius. He almost certainly knew the commentaries on the Old Testament, including Genesis, of Hugo Grotius and John Diodati.

Benjamin Franklin was always, to quote Carl Van Doren, “an avid, powerful reader of many books. There were always books in his inner life, books in his business, books in his friendships.” His effective initiative in the organization and development of the Junto's subscription library, later the Philadelphia Library, is one conspicuous illustration of this life-long habit of his mind and heart; but every reader of the Autobiography knows that, besides providing books for others, Franklin used them in his own writing, early and late. Witness the memorable passages in which he recalls his self-imposed “exercises” in “improving my language”—not to mention Alexander Pope's—by “imitating” The Spectator or the Essay on Criticism, and digesting Locke, Shaftesbury, and others. In this note I wish to call particular attention to a hitherto unnoticed by-product of Franklin's “bookish inclination,” a recollection from a notable Elizabethan poet.

The story of Landor's relations with the Yescombes, and the background of the libel suit which caused him to fly from England showered with the abuse of respectable Englishmen, has never been told. It was shunned by those of his friends who might best have told it, John Forster and Mrs. Lynn Linton, and we are left to reconstruct the tale principally from Landor's three pamphlets on the subject, now quite rare and never reprinted, and from contemporary newspapers.

For the persistence, since 1924, of contrasting opinions as to Jeffrey's treatment of the text of Carlyle's “Burns,” David Alec Wilson is in no small measure responsible. First, Wilson's violent partisanship apparently has led some critics of Carlyle to assume that they may disregard the Wilson Life without discrediting themselves. Second, Wilson's inadequate handling of the “Burns” episode itself has permitted continued divergences of opinion among those students of Carlyle who seem directly acquainted with the pertinent Jeffrey-Carlyle correspondence in the second volume of the Life. For, though Wilson quotes generously from this correspondence, and though he makes frequent references to details in it, he nowhere explicitly gives the conclusion to which his own fresh examination of the evidence may have led him. Wilson's inadequacy is reflected both in popular digests of his account of the Carlyle-Jeffrey clashes concerning the “Burns” and in Isaac Watson Dyer's bibliographical summary of this account.

During a recent exchange of notes regarding our separate studies of Christopher Smart, Professor E. G. Ainsworth, Jr., of the University of Missouri, has called my attention in a query to an unsigned poem entitled “The Benedicite Paraphrased,” which appeared in Dodsley's The Museum, or Literary and Historical Register on December 6, 1746 (ii, 182). A detailed study of the poem has convinced me that it is Smart's work. If this attribution be accepted, the poem is of the first importance, for it must alter rather completely our view of Smart's career.

Mary Shelley, in the note she supplied to the poem, properly characterizes The Witch of Atlas as “wildly fanciful, full of brilliant imagery,” and burgeoning with “fantastic ideas.” Rather misleading is her further statement that its source materials were borrowed “from sunrise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine, or paly twilight,” a kind of emotional garner from Shelley's rambles “in the sunny land he so much loved.” For The Witch is as literary a poem in its origins as Shelley ever wrote. It teems with images which suggest Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare, as well as Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Herodotus, and Pliny. A recent article by Professor Lowes indicates that Keats's Endymion should be added to the list of sources, with what justification Professor Clark's ensuing article makes clear.

When the asterisks in the following passage of Byron's diary are replaced by the correct name, light is shed on the practically unexplored problem of Byron's political connections and ambitions during his life in London—and on the question, crucial to an understanding of the later Byron, of what was going on in the poet's mind in his twenty-fifth year.

A new manuscript of Walter Savage Landor's pamphlet, Mr. Landor's Remarks on a Suit Preferred against Him (London [George Jacob Holyoake], 1859), has recently been found in the Charles A. Brown Collection of Autographs and Manuscripts in the University of Rochester Library. A study of this new material led to the writing of Dr. Super's article, and a description of the document is included here in order to give details which were not strictly germane to the broader treatment. The manuscript, which bears the title, “Mr. Landor's Remarks on his Trial for Libel,” is of importance in that it is revised by Landor and contains unprinted passages of his private defence.

To read Browning's Sordello and then, concurrently, Jung's expositions of his psycho-therapeutic theories is to be struck by the close similarity of many of the ideas both men have expressed. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung has described the spiritual malaise of the modern “civilized” world, its causes and cure. In Sordello, begun about one hundred years before Modem Man in Search of a Soul (1933), Browning anticipated Jung in describing minutely, albeit poetically, the same illness and in prescribing a similar cure. Furthermore, he wrote this poem not unconscious of its practical application to his fellow-man, for in Book iii, he speaks personally to the reader, telling him that Sordello may be he and that his creator, Browning, is a Moses to the People, prepared to lead them out of the spiritual desert they are wandering in.

The influence of Count Volney's Les Ruines upon Queen Mab has long been known to Shelley scholars, but it has apparently been assumed that Shelley's interest in the work ceased shortly afterwards. Such, however, was not the case. The Ruins had made so deep an impression upon Shelley that he derived from it much of the central pattern of The Revolt of Islam, some four years later than Mab, and echoes of it are to be found in Prometheus Unbound, some six years later. In fact, Shelley's debt to the work in The Revolt of Islam is of so extensive a nature that it is clear he must have reread it shortly before, or even during, the composition of that poem. It is the purpose of this paper to indicate the nature of this debt.

We resort to many expedients in order to maintain the arbitrary character of English spelling. We ask that our children be drilled endlessly in school, we do homage to “the dictionary” as an arbiter of linguistic matters, and we cast a supercilious smile that cuts deep upon anyone who deviates from conventional orthography. Also among these mechanisms for maintaining our spelling is the spelling bee, and the tracing of its development—from its background in schools, through its flowering as a rural entertainment in New England and later as the principal literary exercise on the frontier, to its revival on the radio—forms a necessary chapter in American linguistic history.

Le problème fondamental que les réalistes se sont efforcés de résoudre, c'est celui de l'imitation dans les arts. Dès le début du dix-neuvième siècle, tout un groupe d'artistes s‘éloignent résolument des procédés de l'esthétique classique. Au lieu de prendrepour modèle un idéal abstrait, universel, ils se bornent à imiter un être individuel et concret. C'est ce qu'on a appelé l‘école du modèle. En 1805, Emeric David publie son fameux mémoire intitulé Recherches sur l'art statuaire. Ce mémoire, couronné par l'Institut, non seulement prône l'imitation de la nature, mais recommande aux artistes de ne copier que ce qu'ils voient. “Peut-être vous a-t-on dit qu'il ne faut pas copier servilement la Nature, qu'il faut l'ennoblir. Copiez, au contraire, ce que vous voyez; ne faites maintenant rien de plus.”

The writer of the following letters was George Keats, the brother of the poet. He was born on February 28, 1797, the son of Thomas and Frances (Jennings) Keats. At an early age he had been left an orphan with his two brothers, Thomas and John, and had been placed at a private boarding school in Enfield. After leaving school George worked for a short while in the counting-room of his guardian, Richard Abbey. After a quarrel with Hodgkinson, the junior partner, he left and at the end of May, 1818, married Georgiana Augusta Wylie. At the age of twenty-one he journeyed with her to America, planning to reside in Morris Birkbeck's settlement. Keats travelled by horse and carriage from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and thence descended the Ohio in a keelboat. For several months the poet's brother resided at the home of Audubon, the naturalist, in Henderson, Kentucky, where he lost his money in a boat speculation. Keats finally became managing partner in a flour and saw-mill concern in which he accumulated a fortune, and settled as a merchant in Louisville. There, with the exception of a few journeys, he remained until his death on December 24, 1841.

Research concerning the various aspects of the life and work of Washington Irving has found its final expression in Professor Williams' monumental biography. In these volumes and in a subsequent Journal much light is shed upon Irving's acquaintance with the family of John Foster of Bedford, residing in Dresden when Irving arrived there in the autumn of 1822. Among his intimate friends of this time, none has remained so completely unknown as the oft-mentioned Colonel Livius, a cousin of the Fosters. Irving's constant association with him in Dresden and their continued friendship in Paris are indicated by many entries in his notebooks, but these reveal little beyond Livius' relationship to the Fosters and his passion for the theatre. Livius as a minor dramatist, whose Freyschütz is an adaptation in which Irving collaborated, is not completely unknown, though some confusion arises from variations in his name. In fact, some doubt is even cast upon its authenticity because of a reference to him as Barham Surás in Flora Foster Dawson's biographical interpolation. If not for his own connection with the English theatre, then because of his intimate association with Washington Irving, Barham Livius deserves further study. The following biographical sketch, supplemented by a recently discovered personal letter, assembles isolated bits of information from documentary sources in America, England, and Germany, and attempts to summarize the career of an interesting though long-forgotten devotee of the Green Room.

The reader who turns to Herman Melville's works for the first time is likely to be struck by his many strange words and strange usages. This strangeness is not only because they come from the vocabularies of seamen and life in the southern Pacific, but also because many of them are forgotten Americanisms or revivals of Elizabethan and seventeenthcentury English terms. Melville seems to have had a notable memory for words. I have no doubt that if a comparison were made it would be found that he possessed one of the most individualized vocabularies among American writers of the nineteenth century, and that his influence has tended to preserve or revive many words which otherwise might have disappeared from American, and even English, usage. Such obvious Americanisms as “not to prick the buffalo” (i.e., “let sleeping dogs lie”) the revival of sea-beef (“pickled beef”), pitched (meaning “chosen”), bower (“to dwell”), and the creation of “Logan of the Woods” (“grizzly bear”), bedarned, carasposa, curios, and bosky, are typical of Melville's effort to seize upon every striking word or phrase that came his way.

Suggestions for the primary source of Poe's Tamerlane have been either indefinite or improbable. Killis Campbell suggested that while Poe was at school in London he may have learned something of the part played by Tamerlane in history, and that either then or after his return to Richmond in 1820 he may have become acquainted with some of the literary versions of the story. He considered the possibility of Poe's having seen one of the Tamerlane plays on the stage, and noted that Timour the Tartar was acted in Baltimore as late as 1829. Mary E. Phillips advanced the possibility that Poe may have come across a copy of the play Tamerlane in the library of Rector Bransby, since the rôle of Dervish in Tamerlane at Drury Lane was taken by a Mr. Bransby who might have been a relative of Rector Bransby.