The second antistrophe of The Progress of Poesy opens, it will be recalled, with a rather striking allusion to the beneficent visitations of the Muse in the far North:

In climes beyond the solar road,
Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam,
The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom
To chear the shiv'ring Native's dull abode.

Three-quarters of a century has elapsed since the mediæval epic literature of France first attracted the attention of scholars. This interval has been marked by an uninterrupted succession of texts discovered and edited. The value of these texts to the student of language is great; their value to the historian of politics and society is considerable; but their literary bearing has not been sufficiently emphasized. To this day the general public has but a vague idea of the character and significance of that national epic of which the Chanson de Roland is the highest expression and which Léon Gautier strove so bravely to render popular. The mediæval literature of France has not yet completely recovered from the reputation of vulgarity given to it by the Renaissance.

Comparative philologists have long since recognized that the logical relation of mental concepts need not find expression by means of words. Viewed from the standpoint of pure logic a sentence like “I think he will come” contains a subordination; but the student of historical grammar rightly regards it as exhibiting two independent, if not unrelated, sentences. It is altogether likely that such a method of juxtaposing concepts was the only one that prevailed in remote antiquity and that in the course of time such a loosely connected sequence of clauses developed into one organic whole. The fact of parataxis is now established for all branches of the Indo-European family, and Hermann has proved that grammatical subordination was unknown in the “Ursprache,” being developed in the daughter tongues by means of the specific determinants of the originally independent sentence. Notwithstanding these results, there is still a plentiful lack of agreement among scholars in regard to the definition of the term parataxis and to the degree of extension to be ascribed to it.

In the course of his insistence upon the necessity of a continued recognition of the popular ballad as a distinct literary type, Professor Gummere points out the value of a collection of Professor Child's critical remarks on the ballad and an attempt to determine their general drift. Such is the purpose of the present paper. Aside from the article in the Universal Cyclopædia, Professor Child's comments are mere obiter dicta, based upon no underlying principle and forming no part of a set purpose. They are, therefore, not easy to classify; the attempt to reduce them to order can be only partially successful, and any arrangement must appear more or less arbitrary. Yet some arrangement has seemed advisable and they have been roughly grouped under the following headings: (1) Authorship and Transmission; (2) Subject-Matter; (3) Technique; (4) A Comparison of the Ballads of 1857–1859 and The English and Scottish Popular Ballads of 1882–1898; (5) A Collection of General Comments upon Specific Ballads; (6) Summary.

Friedrich Schlegel, youngest son of Johann Adolf Schlegel, was born at Hannover on March 10, 1772, just three months after Goethe had finished the first version of his first great work, Götz von Berlichingen. His literary career begins in 1794 with the publication of Von den Schulen der Griechischen Poesie. At this time he is as old as Goethe was when writing the Götz.

Witchcraft in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a subject upon which the dramatists from Marlowe to Shadwell seized with the greatest avidity. There was material of the most pliable sort; it could be moulded into a magnificent tragedy or distorted into the wildest buffoonery. In the sixteenth century it was the darker side of magic which we find in the drama, and though we note as early as 1604 the effort to brighten up Marlowe's tragedy of Doctor Faustus by the introduction of broadly comic scenes taken from the prose tale, yet one can well believe that the theatre audiences from 1590 to 1610 remembered too vividly the cruelties of the witch trials in 1590 to appreciate the buffoonery of Ralph in the comic scenes as deeply as they felt the dark despair of the protagonist Faustus.

This tragedy was presented before Queen Elizabeth by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple in 1567–8. In its original shape it remained in ms. until published a few years ago in Brandl's Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England; but a recast by Robert Wilmot was printed in 1591 under the title Tancred and Gismunda and included in Dodsley's Collection of Old English Plays. From the initials appended to each act in this later version it has been concluded that Henry Noel wrote Act II, Christopher Hatton Act IV, and Robert Wilmot Act V; the authors of Act I (Rod. Staf.) and Act III (G. Al.) are as yet unidentified. Before examining the play it will be well to glance at the literary and dramatic influences under which it was produced. A notable beginning in English classical tragedy had been made at the Grand Christmas of the Inner Temple in 1561–2 by the performance of Gorboduc, which was repeated before the Queen at Whitehall a few weeks later: an unauthorized edition of the play was printed in 1565. In 1564 the Queen saw at King's College, Cambridge, “a Tragedie named Dido, in hexametre verse, without anie chorus,” and “an English play called Ezechias, made by Mr. Udall.” At Christmas, 1564, a tragedy by Richard Edwards (probably Damon and Pythias) was acted at Whitehall, and in 1566 his Palamon and Arcyte was presented before the Queen in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, as well as a Latin play, called Marcus Geminus. At Gray's Inn the same year Gascoigne's Supposes (translated from Ariosto) and the Jocasta were performed: the last purported to be taken from Euripides, but was really a translation of Lodovico Dolce's adaptation, itself made probably not from the Greek but from the Latin. Dolce adhered in the main to the model of Seneca, whose tragedies he had translated: English translations of eight out of the ten had also been published during the ten years before 1566, so that Elizabethan tragedy came under Senecan influence at first, second, and third hand. The learned dramatists of the Inner Temple no doubt had recourse to the original text, but like their fellows of Gray's Inn of a year or two before, they turned to Dolce as their immediate model, and they made an important step in advance by taking their plot from Boccaccio. It is true that Arthur Brooke in the preface to The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562) said that he had seen the same argument “lately set foorth on stage,” but the play referred to is now to be found only at second-hand in a Dutch version, Romeo en Juliette, written about 1630. Gismond of Salerne is the earliest extant English tragedy founded upon an Italian novel.

Although one of the most interesting of Middle English romances, the Avowing of Arthur has been singularly neglected. The story is told with the gratifying freshness which marks Gawain and the Green Knight and the other poems of the Northern school. The incidents of which the story is composed are fitted into the general framework with rare skill. Even more striking is the vividness of the characterization. The ordinary romance character is a dummy upon which are hung splendid clothes tagged with catalogues of all the virtues. Dealing with these personages is often like handling the bits of cardboard stamped “sugar,” “tea,” “potatoes,” with which students in commercial colleges play. But in this romance there is sharp distinction between Arthur, genial, brave, a practical joker, and Baldwin, a man of few words, cynical without being bitter, nonchalant, a man of deeds; between Kay, impulsive, always getting into scrapes, inclined to jeer at others, a great boy with a boy's love of adventure, and Gawain, the courteous knight, equally ready to aid beauty in distress and to assist a comrade in time of need. The story is crowded with incidents, and the verse is vigorous and effective.

In the following pages the history of the pronunciation in French of accented ai and ei before n, m and ń is to be investigated in detail. The subject naturally falls into two divisions. On the one hand we have ai and ei before n or m, and on the other we have the words in which these diphthongs are followed by ń. Both divisions are closely allied and the development of the one is often identical with that of the other. Yet for the better control of the material it will be advisable to separate the history of ain or aim and ein or eim from that of aign and eign.

The sceptical reconsideration of accepted theories is often of advantage in revealing weak points and establishing strong ones; Professor Jack's paper on Thomas Kyd and the Ur-Hamlet in the last issue of the Publications will no doubt be of service in both these ways; but it does not seem likely that his interpretation of the well known passage from Nash's prefatory epistle to Greene's Menaphon will displace that “all but universally accepted by scholars.” It is, however, ingenious enough to merit careful examination from the conservative point of view. On the broader issue Mr. Jack has raised, it is to be remembered, in the first place, that this passage is by no means the only evidence of an earlier Hamlet. The entry in Henslowe's Diary under date June 9, 1594, and the reference in Lodge's Wit's Miserie (1596) to “the ghost, which cried so miserally at the theator, like an oisterwife, Hamlet revenge” prove conclusively the existence of a play on the subject of Hamlet at a date when Shakspere's tragedy was unknown, if we are to be guided by its omission from the Meres list and the unanimous opinion of Shaksperean critics. The general resemblance of the earlier Hamlet, so far as it can be divined, to the type of revenge-play of which The Spanish Tragedy is the most conspicuous example, must also be borne in mind; but these are considerations familiar to students of the Elizabethan drama, and need not be urged here. Let us turn to the new interpretation of Nash's reference to contemporary literature, and see how far it is borne out by the text.

Within certain limits the date of composition of Shakspere's tragedy of King Lear is well defined. It must have been written no earlier than 1603, when Harsnet's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures was published, and no later than December, 1606, when the play was presented before “the kinges maiestie at Whitehall.”

An examination, some time since, of scattered notes on allusions to Cain in our literature showed that there was still room for a somewhat more thorough investigation of the subject. The results of such leisure as could be given from time to time are here presented. They cover, it is hoped, the main features of the Cain story, though not unlikely some allusions have been missed. Many more references might also be given to notes on various phases of the subject, but I have preferred not to overload the footnotes with comparatively unimportant ones. In general I have intended to give the more important, preferring earlier to later, and original to derived sources when possible. Lack of time to pursue the matter further at present is the excuse for publishing the paper in this form.

The question as to how many days Chaucer conceived his Canterbury pilgrimage as occupying is of interest for a number of reasons. The consideration of it takes us more familiarly into the time and place where we may behold

One feels inclined, like Bédier in Les Fabliaux, to apologize, at the beginning of this discussion, for dealing heavily with a light subject. Andrew Lang, to be sure, has spun the fabric of primitive imagination out of story threads from our simplest fairy tales. But there are no remnants of primitive thought to be discovered in the fabliaux, and few vestiges of ancient myth discernible in their narratives. One's only justification for approaching these contes à rire with anything but laughter must be a desire to search into the qualities which make “lewed peple loven tales olde,” and especially the nature of the humor which preserves those called fabliaux from age to age. But a brief consideration of the nature and origin of the fabliau must precede an attempt to discover the characteristic quality of the English contribution to this literary form.

We are told that Louis XIV once submitted a sonnet he had written to the judgment of Boileau, who said, after reading it: “Sire, nothing is impossible for your Majesty. You set out to write some bad verses and you have succeeded.” The point of this story for the modern reader lies not so much in the courage of the critic as in the meekness of the king. With the progress of democracy one man's opinion in literature has come to be as good as another's—a deal better too, the Irishman would add—and such words as deference and humility are in a fair way to become obsolete. We can scarcely conceive to what an extent men once allowed their personal impressions to be overawed and held in check by a body of outer prescriptions. Only a century ago an Edinburgh reviewer could write: “Poetry has this much at least in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago by certain inspired writers whose authority it is no longer lawful to question.” Racine tells us that the audience did not dare laugh at the first performance of his comedy Les Plaideurs for fear that “it might not laugh according to the rules.”

During the year 1906 the four hundredth anniversary of the finding of the marble group of Laocoön and his sons in Rome—“opus omnibus et picturae et statuariae artis praeferendum”—has been duly celebrated. The most conspicuous act in this celebration was undoubtedly Dr. Ludwig Pollak's announcement at a meeting of the German Archeological Institute that he had discovered an ancient copy of the missing right arm of Laocoön, bent backward so that the hand must have been near the head, as has long been supposed. Hardly less noteworthy, however, was the effect of recent additional discoveries of inscriptions in Rhodes that seem to fix the date of the sculptors in the middle of the first century b. c., and Richard Foerster's comprehensive article in the Jahrbuch des archäologischen Instituts—the latest and most authoritative exposition of facts and expression of opinions about the statue.