It would be difficult, even if it were wise, to isolate the music of the craft cycles from that which preceded it in liturgical drama. In some ways the sources and antecedents of craft cycle music are more important than the subject itself. Let us, then, begin with the place of music in liturgical drama. Every student of the liturgy is aware of its large musical content; in fact, almost all of the liturgy which is intended to be heard by the congregation is sung. This music is called plainchant or plainsong. One obvious reason why most of the liturgy has always been sung is to be found in the very ancient and genuine reliance upon a union of words and music to express in sound the highest and most profound emotions. To the Protestant and modern ear this union will often seem no more than an eccentric way of speaking the words. Yet even Protestants sing hymns and psalms; they do not say them. And it was not so very long ago that a great deal of English lyric poetry was regarded as inseparable from the melodies which accompanied it. One also recalls Greek drama and its superb unification of the three arts of poetry, music, and the dance. No one is surprised, therefore, to find that when drama came out of the liturgy the melodies came along with the words. Indeed, here was somewhat the same inter-dependence and union that had been in Greek drama. Liturgical drama was truly musical drama.

The description of the marble reliefs which depict examples of humility, in the tenth canto of Purgatory,—the Annunciation, David and the Ark, Trajan and the widow—has been universally admired, and often studied and discussed. But it seems to me, for several reasons, that the specific matter of the order in which their details are presented may certainly be considered further with interest, and perhaps with profit—although the fact of their orderly sequence is, in at least a general way, obvious to every reader.

Dante's interest in the mystic significance of numbers is never again so obtrusive as in the Vita Nuova. But it is quite as pervasive, in his Divine Comedy; and he uses them—and geometrical forms, their related concepts—continually, not only for purposes of exposition and illustration, but also to give the illusion of reality to his Vision. Among the almost innumerable instances of this last use of numerical determinatives, the most striking—from their baldly prosaic injection, in the terms of pure mathematics, outside of any æsthetic qualities—are probably the two cases in Inf., xxix, 9 and xxx, 86, in which the diameters of two circles are given, respectively, as twenty-two, and eleven, miles. The advantages, in the direction of vividness, of this method—although it seems almost to flirt with poetic disaster at times—are great; and its peril is obviated, in the otherwise physically impossible journey within the time limits set, by recourse, sparingly and cannily, in the early cantos of the descent to Hell's apex, to swoons during which the pilgrim poet is advanced indeterminate distances toward his goal; and in the arduous ascent of the Moutain of Purgatory an unspecified but very considerable space is surmounted by the supernatural aid of Lucia.

A salient point of interest in The Owl and the Nightingale is the amount of knowledge, expressed or implied in the poem, concerning animal life which is correct and possibly due to direct personal observation. Master Nicholas of Guildford, whom, here as elsewhere, I assume to be the author, was not writing a scientific treatise, and is at no particular pains to avoid the acceptance of popular delusion. For example, from a literary point of view, the long account of how the hooting of the owl portends disaster is one of the most effective passages in the whole poem. Such scientific interest as the poem possesses is a byproduct of his purpose to enter into bird-life and set it before the reader. Indeed, had he purposed to write a scientific treatise it is quite conceivable that he would have busied himself collecting misinformation, whether from books or from word of mouth, and would have thought his own personal observations of too little moment to be worth recording. And we should have been tempted to regard him as a man of almost no observation at all, very much as the reader is apt to regard Alexander Neckam, or would regard Neckam but for that writer's remarks about the magnetic needle. Art is older than science, and was highly developed when science was still in its infancy. Master Nicholas, our poet, writing as an artist, was sometimes contented to tell us what he had himself seen and heard. Whether he was or was not a man of uncommon observation cannot, perhaps, be determined. What is incontestably true is that in an age when writers of natural history were blind leaders of the blind, he did some justice to such powers of observation as he possessed.

Are any of the early Dutch or Flemish analogues to tales in the Decameron derived from Boccaccio? Even a hasty survey of the narrative literature of mediæval Belgium and Netherlands raises the question, for we do not possess more than thirty-five or forty fabliaux, and yet in this group—such a small group compared to the French Recueil of Montaiglon and Raynaud—we find five or six close analogues to Decameron stories. The possibility of derivation from the Italian is by no means excluded by dates; for whereas the French fabliaux were all written before the Decameron, the genre flourished in Belgium and Holland all through the fourteenth century.

Amid the controversial winds that blow about the region of Arthurian studies it is agreeable to have a few solid rocks of irrefutable argument. Professor Kittredge in his Study of Gawain and the Green Knight has demonstrated beyond all question two highly important points: first, that the theme of the Beheading Test, which occurs in Arthurian romances, French, English, and German, from about 1180 to about 1380, is derived from an Irish tradition actually existent in a MS. written before 1106; secondly, that the latest of these romances in date of composition is closer in many ways to the original Celtic form than is the earliest. It is well for students to ponder these facts when the authority of Foerster and Bruce is invoked to deny the presence of a strong Celtic element in Arthurian romance, and when some scholars seem to accept as an axiom the principle that if the same motif occurs in two romances, the later borrowed it from the earlier. Indeed, a whole history of the Grail legend has been constructed on this simple but often delusive formula.

In PMLA for December, 1926, Professor Oscar Cargill advanced ingeniously the theory first, that one, Gilbert Pilkington, was the author of the Northern Passion, the Turnament of Totenham, and the Tale of a Basyn in Cambridge University MS. Ff. 5. 48, and second, that, as the author of the Turnament he must also have been the author of the Secunda Pastorum, being thus none other than the “Wakefield Master” as Professor Gayley has taught us all to speak of the great playwright of the Towneley Cycle of mystery plays.

The practice has established itself among literary historians and anthologists of associating the English and Scottish ballads primarily with the fifteenth century, sometimes with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One of the best and most popular of the histories of English literature now used in schools and colleges states in its revised editions: “These ballads appear to have flourished luxuriantly among the folk in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, after which their composition ceased. Over three hundred of them, in 1,300 versions, have survived, and have been collected and printed.” The now widely used History of English Literature by M. Emile Legouis, the most ambitious among recent histories of our literature, remarks of the ballads: “They cannot all be claimed for the fifteenth century, for poems of this sort must have had an earlier beginning and certainly were produced until a later time, but the impulse to make them seems to have been particularly active in this century, to which, moreover, the oldest extant specimens belong.” A recent excellent poetical anthology has: “Ballad is the name applied to a simple form of narrative poetry which in England and Scotland flourished between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.” Statements like these leave with readers the definite impression that the fifteenth century was the heyday of ballad production, and that the bulk of the three hundred ballads in Professor Child's collection emerged from this century, or from an even earlier period.

Since our last meeting, Professor Marden, president of the Modern Language Association and one of its most loyal and active members, has passed away. At the time of his death, Mr. Marden was preëminent among American hispanists, one of the noble band of philologists whose scholarly work had won recognition at home and abroad. For Mr. Marden philology was primarily a means to an end, the establishment of critical texts of medieval authors. He had made himself master of antiquarian literature, linguistic science, and the apparatus which the modern investigator is called upon to possess. The acribia of a true scholar he had in a marked degree. Because of the keenness of insight that characterized all that he accomplished, his intellectual integrity and fine judgment in weighing textual relations, his publications will have permanent value. As a teacher he impressed on his generation a love for learning, and as a man, very human and very humble, he will long be remembered for his gentle ways and unselfishness. In the September number of the Publications of our Association, there appeared an extended tribute to his memory, but it is proper that on the present occasion we should place on record our appreciation of his character and service, and express our deep sense of loss.

The question of how far the Middle English metrical romances and their continental prototypes went in portraying realistically the life and times in which they were written and how much of the detail in them is merely literary convention has long been a moot one. W. P. Ker wrote: “The longer romances are really modern novels—studies of contemporary life, characters and emotions, mixed up with adventures more or less surprising,” but added in another place, “the romance writers of the twelfth century did much to make romance into a mechanic art, … reduced the game to a system and left the different romantic combinations and conventions within the reach of almost any 'prentice hand. …” M. L. Clédat wrote: “Les peintures de mœurs chevaleresques, les descriptions de fêtes, de tournois et de combats, nous plaisent encore par elles mêmes lorsqu'elles sont vives et légères, mais elles valent surtout par les renseignements précieux qu'elles nous fournissent sur la vie réelle et sur l'idéal du monde chevaleresque.” There is obviously some vagueness here, and it becomes desirable to separate the realistic from the conventional material in the Middle English metrical romances in order to determine where the art of the romance writers was merely “mechanic” and where they were actually attempting to give “renseignements précieux … sur la vie réelle et sur l'idéal du monde chevaleresque.”

The two short religious plays, Tres Pasos de la Pasión and Egloga de la Resurrección, are preserved in a probably unique copy, now in the Biblioteca Menéndez y Pelayo, in Santander. It forms part of a “recueil factice” in quarto, and in black letter throughout, containing, first, a treatise on confession; the Scala Coeli of Johannes Climacus; a Vida de San Amaro, Toledo, Juan de Villaquirán, 1520; another religious treatise; a translation by Diego Gumiel of St. Bernard's epistle to a relative, and a life of Barlaam and Josafat. These are followed by the little dramas reprinted below. The volume concludes with Juan de Mena's Coplas de vicios y virtudes, continued by Fray Jerónimo de Olivares and the Farsa sacramental of Hernán López de Yanguas. The upper right-hand corner of the whole volume has been pierced by a cord, or thong, which in certain places has damaged the text.

The Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis has come down to us in complete form only in the quarto edition printed by Robert Charteris at Edinburgh in 1602. There is no manuscript of the complete play. Several of the “interludes” were copied by George Bannatyne and are to be found in the Bannatyne Manuscript (1568), preceded by a proclamation of the play which does not appear in the early printed edition.

The impresa portrait of Sir Philip Sidney which hangs in the Tudor section of the National Portrait Gallery (no. 1862) in London, shows a strikingly handsome young man. (See Figure 1.) The warm gold of his hair is repeated in the braidings and buttons of his white satin dress, in sword-belt, and in the figures which make up the design of headgear and shield. A somewhat bungling painter has caught the sweet gravity of the poet who in the words of his friend was from childhood up never “other than a man.” But sunniness and glow are dominant. Inevitably one recalls Sir Henry's apt characterization of this son of his as Lumen familiae suae. As a matter of fact, the warmth of coloration is part of a general consonance. For the impresa in the upper left-hand corner is of a fire thrusting red and yellow points of life through crossed green boughs, with the “word,” Inveniam Viam Aut Faciam. And the design of the shield celebrates Apollo, the god of Fire and Light, of the golden sun and the tawny flame which like Youth itself must make or find a way.

One may learn from the notes of Foulché-Delbosc that the Orígenes del teatro español of the younger Moratín has not been published in complete form, and that those who prepared or censored the 1830 edition of Moratín's works caused several passages to be altered. Let us look then at the manuscript, which is easily available in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, and see for ourselves the changes that have been introduced. At the beginning is an unsigned statement, in a hand different from that of the manuscript, which declares that the first edition of the Orígenes was printed, not from Moratín's original, but from a copy thereof (now in the Library of the former Royal Palace). This copy is practically identical with the manuscript of the Biblioteca Nacional except that it lacks the six hojas which contain the Indice de las piezas contenidas en el siguiente catalogo. The six sheets follow page 130 of the latter manuscript and are not numbered.

Attempts to name the author of Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the two homiletic poems found in MS. Cotton Nero A x. have so far failed. Neither the Scottish Huchown of the Awle Ryale, nor the Londoner Ralph Strode, can well be accepted on the strength of any evidence yet available. But though the name of the poet has escaped detection, much has been learned about him. The thoughtful reader of his works will recognize a man intimate with the Bible and with the writings of the Church Fathers, and one concerned with the theological problems that occupied men's minds in the late fourteenth century. To a strong religious and moral bent there is added a love of romance and the pomp and brilliance of the life in a noble household. The poet's skill in argument and his familiarity with the life and manners of the nobility have led Professor Osgood to the belief that he was a clerk who had studied at Oxford or Paris. Professor Gollancz draws a charming picture of the young man listening to the romantic tales of the minstrels in a great hall, and himself eager to emulate them. The man we seek, then, is an unusual combination of theologian and minstrel, a student of sacred and profane literature, and a close observer of the religious and secular life of the time. Such a man I propose to name as the probable author of the poems before us.

Spenser's conception of the organization of the universe, as it is set forth in the allegory of the garden of Adonis, and in the Mutability cantos, has recently been given considerable attention. Professor Edwin Greenlaw opened the subject with the suggestion that the poet owed part of the ideas developed in these two passages to Lucretius. Several objections have been made to his theory. M. Denis Saurat points out some inconsistencies in Professor Greenlaw's interpretation, and prefers to regard the passage on the garden of Adonis as lyrical and without serious or sustained philosophic content. Professor Ronald B. Levinson finds Spenser's theory of form and matter in Bruno's Spaccio. Miss Evelyn Albright draws attention to the inconsistency between the Platonic idealism of The Fowre Hymnes (together with certain passages in Colin Clout's Come Home A gaine) and any Lucretian materialism in The Faerie Queene. To these critics Professor Greenlaw replied, in effect, that no one had disproved his contention of Lucretian influence in the passage on the garden of Adonis, and that the well-known eclecticism of the Renaissance accounts for the mixture of Platonic and Lucretian philosophy in Spenser.

Students of Elizabethan drama have practically agreed that James IV is one of Robert Greene's last undoubted plays, if not the very last in point of composition. They have, for the most part, assigned it to a date in or near 1590, and Professor C. M. Gayley has gone far enough to suggest that its composition belongs to the month of July, 1590. Arguments hitherto given for dating the play rest upon certain qualities of its style and structure that indicate the maturity of the dramatist's workmanship, similarities between lines of the play and Peele's The Hunting of Cupid (entered in the Stationers' Register, July 26, 1591), and possible allusions to events which transpired in Ireland and France in or near the year 1590.