In spite of the fact that Spenser, less than three years befor his death, published An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie and An Hymne of Heavenly Love, which show a mixture of strongly Christian elements with Platonic idealism, there has been a tendency of late to classify Spenser as pre-eminently pagan, or even atheistic. A moderate view is that of Denis Saurat, who, in his “Les idées philosophiques de Spenser,” concludes that religion was necessary to Spenser's temperament but impossible to his intellect. He credits Spenser with no systematic cosmogony or reasoned agnosticism; and, though he quotes Professor Greenlaw on Spenser's interest in contemporary scientific thought, he does not seem inclined to rate it so highly. Spenser, as Saurat depicts him, is by temperament a pagan: though he has a sincere desire for religious faith, he has at the same time an intellectual inability to believe.

Detailed study attendant upon the preparation of a critical edition of the Woman Hater has led me to the conclusion that the play is not an unsuccessful juvenilium in the Jonsonian “humour” school, as it has often been described, but is rather indebted to the evil influence of the outlawed satirist, John Marston, and identifies its author as one of a group of daring young comedists who took for their common subject the crimes and follies of the Court of James I. The purpose of the present paper, however, is not to discuss the evidence of this satirical cabal of which Marston was unquestionably the arch-conspirator, but to point out several topical allusions to the King and his court in Marston's Fawn and Beaumont's Woman Hater.

Elsewhere I have undertaken to show that the sermons of Chaucer's Pardoner and Parson conform to the practice of the mediaeval pulpit. It remains to examine Chaucer's utterances regarding preachers and preaching, in order to determine the full extent of his knowledge of the ars praedicandi. I shall treat the passages regarding the methods of sermon making, the times and places of preaching, the conduct of the preacher in the pulpit, and finally the audience.

In a recent article on “The Sources of the Restoration Heroic Play,” Mr. William S. Clark discusses Elizabethan and French influences on heroic drama and supports the claim made by Sir Walter Scott, a century ago, that the heroic plays must be regarded as “the legitimate offspring” of the French heroic romances. Concerning the English influence, Mr. Clark observes: “In the face of this extensive dependence upon French suggestions the resemblances between the heroic plays and the English drama of earlier periods come to have much less significance.” Indeed, he regards as erroneous the opinion of scholars who have maintained that earlier English drama influenced “to a large degree” the heroic drama of the Restoration.

Critics have frequently remarked upon the Ovidian eroticism which Marlowe introduces into his poem, and which is quite lacking in the sober Greek original. A few particular parallels have been noted between Hero and Leander and Marlowe's earlier translation of Ovid's Amores, and this article collects some more. As the two works are commonly placed at the beginning and end of Marlowe's career, the close verbal resemblances suggest that he had a good memory or was rereading his translation when writing Hero and Leander.

Few readers of Hudibras have escaped the fascination of trying to identify the characters in the poem. Yet after two hundred and fifty years, during which readers have wondered and scholars have pondered, we are little nearer the goal. We do not even know whether Butler intended his titular hero to be the satiric portrait of a particular Puritan or the personified picture of a type.

In his discussion of “The Early Printed Editions of the Canterbury Tales” Dr. Greg endeavored to discover the affinities of the manuscript which was used by Caxton in correcting his second edition, printed in 1484. “We have already seen,” he notes, “that C8 was printed from C7, but we have Caxton's own word for it that the text was carefully revised by comparison with a new manuscript, and this claim is amply borne out by the table of collations.” In other words, whatever manuscript copy Caxton may have had in hand for his second edition, he seems to have used it only for corrections where he felt his earlier source to be at fault. From a thorough examination of the variant readings in the first 116 lines, Dr. Greg concluded that it “does not appear possible to determine the affinities of Caxton's second manuscript for the opening of the Knight's Tale.” According to Koch, Caxton's second manuscript is to be assigned to the “Eλ-Dd group,” but Dr. Greg finds that none of the MSS of this group is consistently more successful than others in the Petworth or Corpus groups: “It cannot, then, honestly be said that there is anything to choose between these three groups, and we seem bound to suppose either that Koch's conclusion was invalid or that the relations of the manuscripts are not constant.” Nevertheless, Dr. Greg's investigation is not without results. The manuscript used by Caxton, he concludes, must belong either to the Eλ-Dd, the Petworth, or the Corpus group. Among these he narrows the selection by his table to a comparatively small number of MSS, and he points out that of those which he has examined “A [BM Addit. 35286] does best.” However, the variants shown in lines 70 and 74 of the Knight's Tale “seemingly bar this manuscript.”

On may 30, 1667, Samuel Pepys attended a meeting of the Royal Society at Arundell House where he found “much company, indeed very much company, in expectation of the Duchesse of Newcastle, who had been desired to be invited to the Society; and was, after much debate, pro and con., it seems many being against it; and we do believe,” he observes, “the town will be full of ballads of it.” Thomas Sprat, in his history of the Society published the same year, after pointing out to “Wits and Railleurs” that experimental science will afford them new material for their “wit” and fancy, declares:

I acknowledge that we ought to have a great dread of their power: I confess I believe that New Philosophy need not (as Caesar) fear the pale, or the melancholy, as much as the humorous, and the merry: For they perhaps by making it ridiculous, becaus it is new, and becaus they themselves are unwilling to take pains about it, may do it more injury than all the arguments of our severe and frowning and dogmatical Adversaries.

It was in 1905 that Mr. Evald Ljunggren, Librarian of Lund University, collated the newly discovered copy of the first quarto of Titus Andronicus with the quarto of 1600, and published his list of variant readings. Forty-seven of his readings involved more than mere variations in spelling and punctuation, and, of these, fifteen had been anticipated by the ingenuity of earlier scholars. One variant was a misprint, and thirty-one offered material for the consideration of the textual critic. But although these readings have been available to the scholarly world for a quarter of a century, editors have shown a marked hesitancy in introducing them into the traditional text of the play. The Neilson text, published the following year, incorporates only four, although twenty-two are listed in the notes. In the Tudor edition of 1913 Professor Elmer E. Stoll adopted as many as twenty-one, and in his notes included five others. But in the Yale Shakespeare issued in 1926, Mr. A. M. Witherspoon accepts none of the recovered variants, and in his notes leaves twenty-seven unmentioned. Basing his text almost entirely upon the First Folio, Mr. Witherspoon, I take it, assumes either that the editors of one or more of the editions following the first quarto had had access to the original Shakespearean manuscript or Shakespearean annotations, or else that Shakespeare himself did the revising.

Of All the decadents in the Spanish drama as it fell away from the glory of the golden age at the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, there are three who most merit the name of disciples of the great Calderón: Bances Cándamo, Vázquez de Zamora, and Cañizares. Taken together, they form a sort of trinity in their support of the Calderonian theory of the drama. But while all wrote, as well as they might, after the manner of their illustrious predecessor and master, it is to Bances Cándamo that one must turn as to the spokesman of a dramatic theory and technique more or less common to his time, a system whose repercussions are to be found not only in the works of the three writers just mentioned, but as well in those of a number of wholly inferior dramatists who, together with the three, form the background of the Spanish stage as it existed from the death of Calderón until, or perhaps slightly beyond the third decade of the eighteenth century; until, indeed, it found opposition and eventual overthrow at the hands of the afrancesados, led, as is generally thought, by Luzán, whose Poética (1737) was for decades the text-book and vade mecum of the neo- or rather pseudoclassicists.

It is evident that Chaucer's depiction of and attitude toward the lover were not always the same. In some of his works, notably his earlier, shorter poems, the conception of the lover conforms apparently in all particulars to the conventional pattern of the romantic lover of chivalry. In other works he shows a definite deviation from this concept. What the character of these deviations is, where they occur, and what deductions may be drawn from them, it is the purpose of this paper to indicate. At the outset of our inquiry two possible explanations of this change may be noted: first, the possibility that Chaucer's attitude changed as he grew older either in revolt against or in conformity to the standard ideal; secondly, the possibility that the changes in his attitude were the result of shifting moods instead of modifications produced by age and experience.

The poem To the Memory of Mr. Congreve, first printed in 1729, is usually attributed to James Thomson, although his authorship of it has been questioned. This poem was not reprinted until 1843, since which date some editors have included it in their collections of Thomson's works, and some have excluded it. I hope soon to present some hitherto unrecorded evidence that this poem was written by Thomson, and accordingly in the present paper I proceed on the assumption that he was its author. At the same time, as I shall try to show, the conclusion which this paper seeks to establish will itself supply important evidence in support of Thomson's authorship.

A Lexander Pope as known to his contemporaries is a study in extremes. One group knew him as the satirist, diabolically clever and Papistical, responsible for the Moral Essays and the Dunciad. But another group less frequently commemorated idolized him as the romantic author of the Pastorals, of Windsor Forest, of Eloisa to Abelard and The Dying Christian to his Soul; he satisfied their love of beauty both in external nature and in the soul of man. With something of surprise we see through the eyes of these admirers the figure of the romantic poet usually obscured by that of the satirist of later years. The gradual stages by which the admirers of the younger Pope become the stern judges of his middle age are evidences of changes in the poet himself and not in those romantically-minded readers who turned reluctantly from him to Thomson and Shenstone and Young.

For some time the conviction has been growing that many of the current generalizations concerning eighteenth-century literature have been arrived at by the à priori, or deductive, method. A few outstanding figures that have been studied with considerable care have furnished the chief and sometimes the only basis for characterizations of the period. The age has suffered, as most ages have, from the tendency to dogmatize as to what the people of the time must have thought, and from the corresponding neglect of that humbler and more arduous task of finding out what, as a matter of fact, they said.

The parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate is a most important one in the history of the early English drama. Within its confines and some five minutes walk to the north of the parish church stood the Fortune theatre, whose ancient site is still marked by the Playhouse Yard running between Golden Lane and White-cross Street. There are Elizabethan aspects to the parish still. One cannot elbow his way through the grimy crowds of White-cross Street Market and hear the occasional “Buy, buy, buy!” and the commoner “They're love-ly! They're love-ly!” and watch the haggling over fish and peepshows and lace and panaceas without thinking of earlier days.

There is no doubt about the effectiveness of the long-bow in the hands of a skilful archer. There is no doubt that the skilful employment of the archers, armed with this formidable weapon, contributed largely to the English victories in the Hundred Years War. The long-bow, peculiarly adapted to the foot-soldier rather than the knight or the horseman, seems a fitting national weapon for a nation which, even in the Middle Ages, showed a more democratic temper than did the great Continental powers.

Fashions in literature run not only to theme, form, influence, and diction but also to title and even part of a title. For a century following the Dunciad an extraordinary number of productions had titles ending in -iad (-ead, -ad, -ade). The presence of this suffix denoted that the work dealt with the subject suggested by the name to which those final letters were affixed. The NED gives the English suffix -ad as representing the Greek -άδ-α, forming feminine patronymics and hence used in names of poems. The mere -ad did not often appear but yielded to the more euphonious -iad and sometimes -ead; the -ade was the French spelling.