Professor H. S. V. Jones in his recently published Spenser Handbook (New York, 1930) has an interesting and valuable chapter on Book vi of The Faerie Queene. Much of his discussion is concerned with the so-called courtesy literature of the Renaissance, which offers striking parallels to Spenser's illustration of the virtue of courtesy. According to Professor Jones, Spenser's object in Book vi is “to exhibit in his allegory certain articles in that familiar creed of courtesy which had been stated and expounded in many doctrinal treatises of the Renaissance, and to oppose to the ideal of the gentleman the forces which were hostile to its realization.”

Although the Epître à Uranie is the first work of Voltaire with which the student becomes familiar, it is still one about which very little is known. In 1924, Professor Lanson wrote:

A rapid reading of Spenser's Veue will show that here is no allegory and little narrative; for the Veue is an exposition of the present condition of Ireland with proposals of what must be done to correct the manifold evils, to establish Ireland as a loyal colony of England, and to insure a flow of money from west to east, reversing the deep drain from the exchequer of England to the bogs of Ireland.

Sébastien Mercier, who in his Tableau de Paris covered a tremendously wide range of subjects and who was himself a dramatist of sorts (if not of parts), protested against the common practice of representing on the stage young unmarried ladies to whom young men made love. There is nothing more false, says he, in the picture of French manners than contemporary comedy, in which men make love to young ladies (demoiselles); for they are kept in convents until their wedding day, and it is absolutely impossible to make them a declaration of love. They are never seen alone, and it is shameful to employ any means resembling seduction. Girls of the upper bourgeoisie are also in convents; those of the “second étage” are constantly with their mothers; and girls of the other classes have in general no sort of freedom or of familiar communication with men before their marriage. Therefore, Mercier concludes, authors of comedy, in making all their amoureuses ladies of quality, are really portraying only the love-affairs of grisettes. And the dramatists, “s'ils ne veulent pas aller directement contre les usages,” should henceforth admit as heroines only young widows.

An anonymous MS. play, Anna Bullen, now at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery [HM973] and hitherto unnoticed, offers, upon examination, interesting similarities to the play upon the same subject by John Banks, Vertue Betray'd: Or, Anna Bullen. The MS. is written upon paper bearing an eighteenth-century watermark, and is written in an eighteenth-century hand. The MS. seems to be, not an original play, but either a copy or an adaptation of some other play, as is shown: (1) by the careful noting of an hiatus of one or two lines in the first speech by Northumberland in Act i, Scene 2 [verso leaf 5]; (2) by the scratching out of occasional words and the substitution of the proper synonym, as

Expos'd and naked to the probing light [verso leaf 25];

and (3) by the frequent complete or incomplete erasure of errors in wording, orthography, and chirography.

The modern reader is wont to take with quiet enjoyment the mild irony implied in the delightful spirit of camaraderie with which the Eagle addresses “Geffrey” in Chaucer's The Hous of Fame:

“A ha!” quod he, “lo, so I can
Lewedly to a lewed man
Speke.“

Depuis qu'a été publiée, par les soins de miss E. K. Armstrong, la lettre de recommandation confiée au chevalier de Combourg pour le général Washington, toute une partie du Voyage en Amérique a repris une vraisemblance que lui avaient fait perdre les exagérations de l'illustre touriste et la défiance de ses adversaires. En particulier l'horaire, distendu à l'excès, qui avait été proposé pour la première partie du trajet pouvait être ramené à de moins amples proportions: dès lors, les récits de Chateaubriand avant la gloire semblent de plus en plus admissibles pour cette exploration dont le Niagara fut bien pour lui, quoique à son corps défendant, le point extrême, mais qu'il eut tout le temps d'exécuter dans l'espace de peu de mois.

According to Grosart, in the D.N.B., Thomas Bancroft flourished from 1633 to 1658. A native of Swarston, Derbyshire, he attended St. Catherine's at Cambridge in 1613, and was there a friend and contemporary of James Shirley. When his oldest brother died in 1639 the family property was broken up. Grosart lists four works of the poet: The Glutton's Feaver (1633), Two Bookes of Epigrammes and Epitaphs (1639), a poem to the memory of Lord Hastings in Brome's Lachrymae Musarum (1649), and The Heroicall Lover, or Antheon and Fidelta (1658). In 1658 he was living at Bradley. He was known traditionally in Derbyshire as “the small poet.”

Having sketched, in the opening lines of the Hous of Fame, the medieval system of dream lore, Chaucer announces that he will relate a dream more wonderful than ever came to man before. The importance of this remarkable dream is emphasized. It can be told only after an invocation of Morpheus, and the lives of the listeners will be affected by having merely heard it. May the mover of all bless the dreaming of them who “take hit wel;” may they have success in love or in whatever they most desire; may they be shielded from poverty, harm, mishap, and disease. But woe betide the scoffer! If any man “misdeme” it, through scorn, or jape, or villainy,

… preye I Iesus god
That (dreme he barfoot, dreme he shod),
That every harm that any man
Hath had, sith [that] the world began,
Befalle him thereof, or he sterve,
And graunte he mote hit ful deserve,

The traditional comment of Ben Jonson that “in affecting the ancients Spenser writ no language,” amplified by objections of nineteenth century philologists against Spenser's supposed inaccuracy in reviving old words and his lawlessness in coining new ones, has been much qualified by recent critical analysis. Professor Renwick has emphasized the relation of Spenser's diction to the general Renaissance problem of developing and enriching the modern tongues as mediums for serious literature. In somewhat greater detail Miss Pope has traced the course of Italian, French, and English Renaissance criticism on the subject of literary diction and its relation to Spenser's practice. From these studies Spenser's experiments in language are seen to have a dignity of purpose quite different from the freakishness implied in Jonson's petulant remark and all too often assumed by previous critics. Though Spenser was the first great English poet of the sixteenth century, general cultural activity had been vigorous. Printing had made possible the vogue of translations, both scriptural and purely literary, and English as a literary language assumed a growing importance.

The recent inclusion of the triple-portrait of John Lacy in Shakespeare Improved prompts the question: How certain is it that the picture shows a character from a Restoration “improvement” of Shakespeare? The identification of one of the figures as Sauny the Scot in the Restoration adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew must rest upon more than The Catalogue of Engraved Portraits in the British Museum and Wheatley's annotation of Evelyn. It must, as will be shortly apparent, rest upon a complete study of the history of the portrait and of the actor's rôles.

There are few of Chaucer's works for which the principal source has been so definitely pointed out as for the Clerkes Tale. Chaucer borrowed it from a Latin prose tale by Petrarch, who in turn had it from the tenth story of the tenth day out of Boccaccio's Decameron. Petrarch's Latin, which is Chaucer's source then, has been made easily accessible to everyone by the Chaucer Society, who published it in Originals and Analogues. Unfortunately, however, the Chaucer Society took their text from the Basle edition, which is notorious for its inaccuracy and inexcusable corruptness in reading after reading. For a long time, therefore, Chaucer scholars have felt the need for a reliable text of Petrarch's Latin tale. Professor G. L. Hendrickson, to whom credit is due for correctly inferring a number of necessary emendations in the text, has this to say after one such emendation:

Swift wrote brilliantly of the Dissenter, or Puritan, as revealed in the person of Jack, one of the three brothers in the Tale of a Tub, but there was a century of attack on the Puritans behind him. It is not the purpose of this paper to try to show that Swift was influenced by earlier writers. All that will be attempted is the analysis of the various themes of the attack on the Puritans in the Tale of a Tub, and a comparison of the results with those obtained from a similar analysis of the more prominent earlier satires of the Puritans. There may well have been various influences of earlier men on Swift, but, as has been said, this question will not be raised. The real contribution of Swift—what he alone thought and said about the Dissenters—will be more easily seen if we first eliminate the themes which had already been used. Of equal importance is the listing of the points Swift definitely avoided using or emphasizing but which the earlier men had delighted in employing.

In the repertory of the mature Rachel are to be found only four modern tragedies which were performed with some success. Two rôles among these were created by her: that of Virginie in the tragedy of that name by Latour Saint-Ybars (April 5, 1845) and the Cléopâtre of Mme de Girardin (November 13, 1847). The other two were revivals: Marie Stuart by Lebrun and Jeanne d'Arc by Soumet.

Though the influence of Chaucer upon Greene has been commented upon from time to time by various critics, the similarity that exists between The Clerk's Tale and Pandosto has apparently gone unnoticed. This is in a manner surprising, since the two pieces show resemblances that run true throughout—in characters, in situations, and in general plot-structure. There is a lack, however, of parallel passages; and this may account somewhat for their not having been linked up before now. Greene's method in employing his material, too, has blurred the original outline, though it has by no means disguised it beyond recognition.

In Thomas Wright's Life of Daniel Defoe we find the following statement:

During this illness [i.e., of the ‘apoplexie,’ 1715] Defoe was visited by a Quaker whose kindness made a great impression on him, and he never after neglected an opportunity of speaking well of the religious body to which the good man belonged. And they deserved to be well spoken of, for at this exciting period, when all England was in a ferment, when even the pulpits were made to answer the purpose of hustings, the Quaker body alone advocated temperance and Christian charity. Like Defoe, they cried ‘Peace, peace!’

The history of the controversy over naturalism in England centered about the translations of the writings of Zola, and the trial in 1888 of the publisher Henry Vizetelly. The first translations of Zola's writings appeared in 1884, and almost immediately aroused a storm of criticism. These writings, however, were not the first to call the attention of the English public to French naturalism. Just as in France Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and others had prepared the way for Le Roman Expérimental, so also in England translations of Balzac's novels, Baudelaire's influence on Swinburne, and Saintsbury's articles on French writers had helped to prepare the way for Zola translations. English critics of the Victorian era recognized Balzac as the father of French realism, and as one who anticipated in many ways the theories of the naturalists. The reaction of the English critics to the work of Balzac is an interesting commentary on changing literary fashions, and an important expression of Victorian literary taste.

As a result of recent investigations, states Professor Borgman, “the old explanation of this satire [MacFlecknoe] as Dryden's answer to Shadwell's The Medal of John Bayes is no longer sound.” In 1918, Mr. Thorn-Drury called attention to the following passage, which appeared in an attack on Shadwell in The Loyal Protestant and True Domestick Intelligence of Thursday, February 9, 1681/2:

… He would send him [Shadwell] his Recantation next morning, with a MacFlecknoe, and a brace of Lobsters for his Breakfast; All which he knew he had a singular aversion for. …

The attitude of Honoré de Balzac toward poets and poetry has received casual comment from several of his critics and biographers, and they are agreed that it was unfavorable. A consideration of the two poets who figure prominently in the Comédie humaine, Lucien de Rubempré of Les Illusions perdues and Canalis in Modeste Mignon, as well as a study of Balzac's correspondence and of documents about him by contemporaries, bring little to contradict that judgment. Théophile Gautier, in his chapter on Balzac in Portraits contemporains, devotes several pages to a discussion of Honoré's harsh criticisms of verse and verse-makers, evidently the cause of some resentment from the author of Emaux et Camées. As another example of such opinion, note a statement from the diary of Charles Weiss, apropos of a visit to his home in Besançon by Balzac in 1833. He tells of a first interview with Balzac, in which the conversation happened to fall upon contemporary French poets, eliciting very frank criticisms from his visitor, and then, on the following day, indicates this summing up of attitude toward poetry in general by Balzac, in the course of a second discussion: “Il est sensible à l'harmonie du style et cependant il n'aime pas les vers. Il prétend qu'il n'en faut plus faire.”

As all Chaucer scholars know, it was the intention of the Chaucer Society to follow the Life Records of Chaucer with a similar volume on Thomas Chaucer. This intention was referred to as early as 1901, at the close of R.E.G. Kirk's Forewords to the former compilation; and for many years the work was announced in the list of future volumes to be published by the Society. As the years passed and the expected work failed to appear, it was naturally assumed that the project had been abandoned, perhaps after Kirk's death in 1908. So that when Professor Ruud published his monograph a few years ago he voiced the common sentiment when he said “we cannot now expect from the Chaucer Society the volume, long promised, of the life records of Thomas Chaucer.”