Most Shakespeare scholars have believed that an earlier form of The Taming of the Shrew once existed, whether it was The Taming of a Shrew or some other version. There are scholars also who hold that an earlier form of The Taming of a Shrew must be postulated. Some have suggested a theory of a common source.

The power of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet's intellect is not yet spent; few theologians—Catholic or Protestant—have wielded a major premise so cogently; that premise for him, hors de l'église, point de salut; and of this premise, the most impressive conclusion is still, after two hundred and fifty years, the work entitled Histoire des Variations des Eglises Protestantes. It is quite true that his adversaries, for the moment dismayed by the appalling results of the Reformation, as therein portrayed, rallied and returned to the attack, asking whether, indeed, variation was necessarily so great an evil, whether in fact it was not the very genius of Protestantism; to which there is but one answer, and that pragmatic rather than metaphysical. But here, too, the Bishop of Meaux was singularly equipped, for the penchant of his thought is assuredly towards the Visible; the Six Avertissements aux Protestans sur les Lettres du Ministre Jurieu contre l'Histoire des Variations were in the nature of a brilliant counter-attack; they were to be the Bishop's last word on this question. What, asks Bossuet, is the result of disobedience to the Church Universal? He concludes, “que faute de se soumettre à une autorité si inviolable, on se contredit sans cesse, on renverse tous les principes qu'on a établis, on renverse la Réforme même et tout ce que jusqu'ici on y avoit trouvé de plus certain; et qu'enfin on se jette dans le fanatisme et dans les erreurs des Quakers.” His Ultima Thule, then, of nonsense, was the doctrine of the Society of Friends.

Goldsmith's extensive borrowings from other writers, especially from French writers, have long been known. It has been established that he was heavily indebted to Buffon, Voltaire, Marivaux, Montesquieu, D'Argens, and the Encyclopédie. To these French sources of Goldsmith should be added La Spectacle de la Nature of the Abbé Pluche, published in eight volumes in Paris between 1732 and 1751. La Spectacle de la Nature is a medley of popularized scientific knowledge, presented in dialogue form. It includes material on zoology, botany, physics, and astronomy, with a strong teleological motivation. Its popularity in England may be seen in the fact that the English translation appeared in 1733, almost immediately after the first Paris edition, and went into an eighth edition between 1754 and 1763. To the English sources of Goldsmith, moreover, should be added William Derham's Physico-Theology, first published in London in 1713, which includes astronomy, physics, and natural history, and which, like La Spectacle de la Nature, promulgates the argument from design.

Professor E. M. Clark in his edition of The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the present writer in a previous article have incidentally called attention to Milton's employment of the principle of the mixed or balanced state in his venture in commonwealth construction. I wish now to develop the thesis that this principle was a basic one in the poet's political thought, and that a study of its relationship to the development of his ideas yields significant results, not only for his attitude toward episcopacy, monarchy, and dictatorship, but for an understanding of the point at which he finally arrived in The Ready and Easy Way.

It has long been recognized that the fundamental ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder's thought are few and consistent, in spite of the fact that their author frequently expressed his deep-seated aversion to metaphysical systematics. Herder's principle of regarding the individual experience as primordial and the abstract statement as derivative has been labeled by his biographers and commentators as “irrationalism,” when, as a matter of fact, his aversion to systematics was merely the result of a sincere concern with the discoveries of empirical science. Though Herder very often gave voice to his belief that all philosophical systems are “fictions” or “poems,” he was unwilling to go as far as do the radical positivists of our own day—Wittgenstein, Carnap, et al., who deny validity to all metaphysics. In fact, certain conceptions frequently used by Herder are admitted by him to be genuinely metaphysical. At the same time, in his use of the conception of “Kraft,” which definitely belongs among these, Herder will be seen to stand in much the same position as the Kant of the first Kritik, i.e., in that of having to reconcile inherited metaphysics and the results of the scientific experimentation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An examination of Herder's attempted reconciliation has long been overdue; it has been neglected in the past because of the outspokenly pro-Kantian attitude of Herder's biographers, among whom Rudolf Haym and Eugen Kühnemann stand unquestionably preëminent. It is the purpose of the following to sketch the conception of “Kraft” inherited by Herder and to indicate the synthesis he attained between the older idea and the scientific conceptions of his age. In addition, the rôle played by the final development of the idea in the break between Herder and Weimar classicism will be brought forward as a better explanation than the purely personal (and hence unfairly derogatory) motives hitherto adduced to explain it.

So many brilliant critics and scholars have interpreted the metaphysical image that one hesitates to push the analysis farther, but analysis and theory are justified if they throw new light on a subject or show a possible relationship between things that had previously seemed independent. The question is not whether metaphysical poetry can be analyzed more fully, but whether one simple, underlying peculiarity can be found to explain some of the characteristics of this type of verse and to show that these disiecta membra are of a piece. The underlying quality that appears to connect many of the seemingly unrelated features of metaphysical poetry might be called the dynamic image.

The Versailles edition of the Works and Correspondence of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715), Archbishop of Cambrai, reproduced again with some modifications in the Paris edition, is the best edition available; but it is incomplete and imperfect in many respects. This is true especially of the correspondence with its cumbersome classification, its doubtful identifications, its discrepancies and deficiencies in chronology. Fortunately, in recent years numerous additional works and letters of Fénelon have been published in books and periodicals, and these, together with a number of corrections and revisions which have been made of the correspondence, have served to supplement and to rectify our knowledge of Fénelon and his activities. It is the purpose of this paper further to modify and to complement this knowledge: first, by correcting an error made by the editors of the editions mentioned above, in mistaking the identity of the person to whom one of Fénelon's letters is addressed; secondly, by revising the text of this same letter as it is published; thirdly, by reproducing for the first time a Mémoire written by Fénelon, which seems either to have been unknown to the editors, omitted through mistake, or deliberately suppressed by them as unimportant.

The problem of Burke's anonymous writings in Dodsley's Annual Register has baffled biographers and critics for nearly a century and a half. Since Burke himself never acknowledged any of these writings, and since no conclusive evidence exists to fix their authorship, it is impossible to make use of them with any sense of security. On the other hand, since the Register must contain, even at a low estimate, some thousands of pages of Burke's writing, important both intrinsically and as our principal record of the early development of his mind, we cannot ignore it. Burke's biographers have about evenly divided themselves into those who were willing to take the risk of asserting on their own authority that specific parts of the magazine had been written by Burke, and those who preferred to make no use whatever of the dubious material. Thus Murray boldly assumes that Burke wrote all parts of the magazine from 1758 to 1791, and constantly quotes expressions of opinion in the magazine as Burke's personal expressions. Magnus on the contrary makes no direct use of the Register's contents in his biography. Neither those who have assumed Burke's authorship, nor those who have rejected it, have ever informed the public concerning the grounds of their judgment. But, admitting that certainty is impossible, such evidence as exists to make probable Burke's authorship of parts of the magazine deserves to be carefully weighed and analyzed.

Voltaire criticizes the famous motivating principles of the three forms of government more vigorously than any other theory in the Esprit des lois. In general his criticisms of that great work have been too often discounted because of his known hostility to Montesquieu. The aim of this study is to account for his attitude toward the motivating principles as they are set forth in the Esprit des lois. Here the facts reveal that his criticisms are sincere and in keeping with his own established opinions. They show the impatience of a mind thinking in relativist and human terms with the generalizations of legal theory.

The phenomenon of synaesthesia has been much studied in recent years, both on its psychological and on its literary side. In the strict scientific sense, it consists in the arousing, by the stimulation of one sense, a concomitant sensation in another. Thus the man who always felt a pain in a certain tooth when a soprano sang off-key was a genuine synaesthetic. In such simple forms, modern investigators have shown, synaesthesia is a psychological “Urphänomen” and can be traced back to prehistoric times, though it became an object of scientific attention only with Newton's Opticks in 1704.

L'exactitude des Mémoires de Mme de Vandeul a toujours été, en J plusieurs endroits, suspecte. La correspondance de Diderot nous a révélé quelques incompatibilités et a fourni matière à quelques déductions nouvelles; cet article en résume les conclusions.

Es ist heute eine allgemein bekannte Tatsache, dass das Werk Rousseaus von wesentlicher Bedeutung für Herder gewesen ist, aber es fehlt fast völlig an Versuchen, dieses Verhältnis genau zu bestimmen. Jedermann weiss, dass Herder Rousseau vieles verdankt; aber was er ihm eigentlich verdankt, in welcher Richtung sich der Einfluss des Franzosen ausgewirkt hat, das ist bisher entweder nur flüchtig oder nur unter Beschränkung auf gewisse Spezialgebiete dargelegt worden. Schon Gervinus glaubt, Herders Wesen am besten dadurch verdeutlichen zu können, dass er ihn Rousseau gegenüberstellt, beide als im Grunde gleichartige Geister erkennt und den Unterschied zwischen ihnen allein in ihren Uebertreibungen sieht: Herder geht zu weit in seinem Optimismus, Rousseau in seinem Pessimismus. Sieht Gervinus hier noch von einer Untersuchung der kausalen Bedeutung Rousseaus für Herder ab, so erscheint Herder bei Hettner fast ausschliesslich als ein Schüler des Genfers, und diese Ansicht findet sich in neuerer Zeit bei Bartels wieder, der Herder bedenkenlos als den deutschen Rousseau bezeichnet. Zweifellos geht Bartels dabei weit über das Ziel hinaus, und diese Uebertreibung ist umso erstaunlicher, als der Biograph Herders, Haym, deutlich genug auseinandergesetzt hatte, dass der Einfluss Rousseaus, so gross er auch ist, jedenfalls Grenzen hat und schon von Hettner überschätzt worden war. So zuverlässig aber auch die Ausführungen Hayms über das Verhältnis Herders zu Rousseau sind, so ist doch der Biograph im Gegensatz zu Hettner zu sehr geneigt, gewissen abfälligen Aeusserungen Herders über Rousseau übermässigen Wert beizulegen, und dadurch erscheint bei ihm dieses Verhältnis wieder zu sehr im negativen Licht. Die schon von Hettner erkannten Uebereinstimmungen im Werke Herders und Rousseaus entgehen auch Haym nicht, doch möchte er sie mehr dem “genius epidemicus der Zeit,” als einer direkten Beeinflussung zuschreiben. Einer eingehenden Untersuchung, die allein das Problem von Einfluss oder Parallelität entscheiden kann, geht aber auch Haym aus dem Wege, sodass die Frage nach wie vor als ungelöst gelten muss. Dies gilt in ganz besonderem Masse von derjenigen Lehre, die sowohl bei Herder wie bei Rousseau im Zentrum ihrer Werke steht, der Lehre von der Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, wie sie der berühmte Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inégalité parmi les Hommes am eindrucksvollsten verkündet hat.

Thomas Percy was a born scholar. He loved the meticulous detail-hunting his studies required—or he would not have done so much of it. But pure scholarship offered him little opportunity for advancement. Given a post, one might be a solitary worker, like Wanley, content with doing one's duty to the books without much interest in the public. And if Percy had obtained the assistant librarianship in the British Museum about which he inquired, he might have become a scholar of that type. But he was expecting scholarship to subserve literature as a means to clerical advancement. And clerical advancement required pull. Percy had no pull—he must make it himself. He must become widely known; his approach must be literary.

Although the relationship of Shelley and Southey has several times been traced, it has not been sufficiently emphasized that Shelley's attitude toward the older poet went through two fairly distinct successive stages: a period from 1811 to 1817 of mild friendship and regard in spite of strong differences in opinion; and a period from 1817 to Shelley's death of an almost unmixed dislike and mistrust. It is the purpose of this article to outline this change in Shelley's attitude toward Southey, to advance a hitherto unnoted reason for it, and finally to speculate upon its bearing on Adonais.