In this paper I wish to suggest in broad outline a hypothesis concerning the unity of Fragment vu of the Canterbury Tales, based upon the thematic significance of the terms, “sentence” and “solaas.” I will not attempt to explicate any of the tales here, nor elaborate very fully upon their interplay of theme; rather, in introducing such a hypothesis, I will concentrate on the place inquiry must start: with the way Harry Bailly puts his own terms to use. This evidence will be drawn from the links, and lends itself to a fuller understanding of Chaucer's intent in putting Harry into the foreground of this series of tales, even as it leads towards the discovery of Chaucer's own principles of craft.

A number of critics, most thoroughly A. D. McKillop in his excellent Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist, have commented on Richardson's tendency to repeat himself. Like other novelists of fairly limited experience (e.g., Jane Austen) or with a strongly intuitive way of perceiving the world (e.g., D. H. Lawrence), Richardson tended to use similar character types and involve them in similar situations, and this even more pervasively and significantly than has so far been noted.

Perhaps the most curious episode in Henry Fielding's masterpiece occurs toward the end of Tom Jones's journey (Book xii, Chapters xi–xii), when Tom, Partridge, and their less than Virgilian guide lose their way in the darkness of a stormy winter's night—a night, indeed, so obscure and inclement that Partridge, whose Jacobitism extends to a belief in demons as firm as that of James I, believes the company to be enchanted. Having strayed from the plain high road to Coventry into a dirty lane, the wayfarers at length discern the lights of a barn and hear the confused noises of merrymaking from within. Inquiring the road to Coventry, Tom, together with his companions, is given shelter and hospitality in the barn by a strange, jovial crew who prove to be “no other than a Company of Egyptians, or as they are vulgarly called Gypsies … now celebrating the Wedding of one of their Society” (xii, xii).

John Dryden's work is part of that great stylistic synthesis called neo-classicism; and in it the classical, particularly the Roman, past finds a new relevance to the modern world. The classical tradition not only remains a constant presence but also (in Reuben A. Brower's metaphor) exerts an “active pressure.” Awareness of this basic element, this Roman posture, in Dryden's art shows signs of disappearing behind the varied ingenuities of our own age of criticism. Since A. W. Verrall's lectures were first published in 1914, Dryden's work has been studied extensively and, we may say, has been looked at with new eyes. His great poem, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), has been recognized as a complex and highly sophisticated work of art. The past five years have brought (not to mention the reprinting of Verrall's lectures and the publication of many articles) three important books on Dryden's poetry. One is about Absalom and Achitophel; two others devote many pages of discussion to this poem. Each of these books reminds us, in a slightly different way, that when we have supplied the English equivalents for Biblical persons, institutions, and events we have scarcely begun to read Absalom and Achitophel.

Certain of Donne's sermons can be fully appreciated only if we know a great deal more about their background than we usually do. The editors of his sermons have supplied brief descriptions, in many cases, of the circumstances in which the sermons were given but, except for certain obvious examples such as the Sermon of Valediction, did not have time to show how closely Donne's sermons, even those which are less celebrated, could be involved in the time and place in which they were delivered.The purpose of this paper is to call for a more serious in-depth approach to the backgrounds of many sermons by showing that such an approach can be of real value. Donne was a world made cunningly of elements in the sermons as well as the poems, and a large part of that world was his interest in the people and events around him. Often he succeeded in bringing those people and events into his art of preaching, and until his manner of doing so is examined his art goes unrecognized and one side of his complex mind will be unappreciated.

Cooper's third novel, The Pioneers, published in 1823, is usually considered to be his most realistic in reflecting actual scenes and events. The Effingham plot is fanciful, but numerous details as well as the general situation relate to family and community history. These factual elements involve all levels of the story: the setting, ranging from a description of Lake Otsego and its environs to such specific landmarks as the Bold Dragoon Tavern (Red Lion Inn) and the manorial hall; several characters, including Judge Temple (based upon the author's father, Judge William Cooper), the first sheriff Richard Jones (in actuality one Richard R. Smith), Major Hartmann, and the French merchant Monsieur Le Quoi (Mr. Le Quoy); and such contributing themes as the struggle over establishing a village church, the manufacture of maple sugar, and the danger of forest roads. Certain improbable details, such as the sheriff's arresting a gang of counterfeiters in the wilderness, are based upon fact toned down in the telling. Cooper apparently alluded to such reminiscent subject matter in his original Preface, which states that the book, in contrast to his first two, “has been written, exclusively, to please myself.” He further called attention to the novel's realism by subtitling it “A Descriptive Tale,” as he explained in a letter of 1822 to his London publisher: “I had announced the work as a ‘descriptive tale’ but perhaps have confined myself too much to describing the scenes of my own youth. … If there be any value in truth, the pictures are very faithful, and I can safely challenge a scrutiny in th[is?] particular.”

Analysis of the rhetorical structure of Religio Laici, by directing attention to the form and development of the poem, clarifies its meaning. Such an analysis, further, enables us to accommodate equally appealing but apparently contradictory readings of the poem.

In recent years much has been made of Robinson Crusoe as an epic of economic quest and conquest—one unfortunately impeded, however, by what James Sutherland calls “boggy stretches of moralizing.” Here I will suggest that some of the major tenets of the modified Calvinistic theology articulated in those moralizings are paralleled by a series or system of traditional Christian symbols which embody that doctrine, and so I propose a reading which takes the work to be precisely what Crusoe says it is—an “allusive allegorick History,” intended originally not only to delight but also to instruct. A complete study of this kind would draw its evidence not only from The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but also from its continuation, The Farther Adventures, and their sequel, The Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With His Vision of the Angelick World—all three volumes “Written by Himself.” Furthermore, it would orient the symbolic elements of the work within the context of Defoe's other works and of traditional Bible exegesis particularly as it was expressed in the pietistic literature of the Puritans in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This exploratory study can treat only a selection of basic images and symbols, particularly from the narrative of the first two volumes of the work itself; for their context in exegesis—and aside from occasional illustrative materials— it must presume to some extent upon the reader's familiarity with some of the main traditions of Christian symbolism and the prevailing characteristics of the varied and extensive Puritan literature of piety.

Many twentieth-century commentators on Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables—probably the majority of them—have found it necessary to note serious failings in the work. The censures are in a sense as different as the men who registered them, but I think they can be fairly summarized as: (1) objection to the plot as lacking coherent action and to the narrative method as partial cause of this difficulty; (2) objection to the conclusion as being artificial or forced; and (3) objection to the short-sightedness of the author in saying in his Preface and as comment within the story something which the story itself confutes. Structure, conclusion, and theme have all proved problematical.

Tennyson's “hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre,” written when he was ten or eleven, and “the six thousand lines à la Walter Scott,” written “at about twelve,” have passed into oblivion. “The Devil and the Lady,” an unfinished blank verse drama written when Tennyson was fourteen, was not published until 1931. “The Lover's Tale” is the first of his early long poems to be published in his lifetime. That this product of Tennyson's youth was so long cherished in obscurity and ultimately published with affectionate apology affords grounds for speculation regarding the relationship of the writer and the written.

Because in the closing hours of his life Dr. Johnson was unable to conclude the task of identifying his early compositions for the Gentleman's Magazine, the early canon of his work has remained obscure; and for his share in the Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia we have had to rely on Boswell, who questioned Johnson at an inopportune time, for Johnson's answer did not settle the matter: “He this year [1741], and the two following, wrote the Parliamentary Debates. He told me himself, that he was the sole composer of them for these three years only. He was not, however, precisely exact in his statement, which he mentioned from hasty recollection; for it is sufficiently evident, that his composition of them began November 19, 1740, and ended February 23, 1742–3.” The vagueness of this statement has raised two questions about Johnson's portion of the debates: (1) what are the dates, initial and terminal, of Johnson's exclusive authorship, and (2) did he write any reports which fall outside of that period, that is, when he was not “sole composer” of them? In answer to the first question G. B. Hill and, more recently, Benjamin B. Hoover have established July 1741 through March 1744 as the period in which Johnson's exclusive share of the reports was published. In partial answer to the second question, Hill attributed to Johnson two debates, from the Guthrie period (which Hoover apparently overlooked in his broad discussion of authorship); and Hoover found Johnson to have revised for Cave certain reports that first appeared in the London Magazine. Still more recently, Donald J. Greene, arguing against the terminal date, ascribed to Johnson the debate on the Removal of the Hanoverian Troops, which appeared in the magazine from May to December-Supplement, 1744. If this attribution is correct, and I believe it is, then the debates which Cave published from July 1741 to December-Supplement, 1744, were, with one un-assigned exception—the short debate on the Corporation Bill which appeared in March and April 1744—written by Johnson. The purpose of this paper is to show, by reexamining the evidence concerning four debates, that one of Hill's two attributions is wrong (on Buttons and Button-holes, 1738), that the other is correct (on the Registration of Seamen, 1741), that one of the revised London debates is in all likelihood Johnson's work (on the Navy Estimates, 1740), and that the Corporation Bill, 1744, is also from his pen, thus making the sequence unbroken from July 1741 through the 1744 Supplement.