No one well acquainted with mediæval literature will deny that the tail-rhyme strophe was a favorite stanza form in English poetry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. When we meet, in any period of literature, such a fashionable garb of thought, an interest is roused to discover, if possible, whence it comes, and why it prevails. For instance the heroic couplet, darling of the eighteenth century, has had many students. That had its vogue in an age we know well, and we can easily discover its origin and the cause of its popularity, but it is quite otherwise with the tail-rhyme strophe. Although recognized as important, it has never been discussed in all its bearings, nor has its origin and history ever been generally acknowledged or established. In the following paper, an effort is made to bring together and examine the various theories of its origin, to investigate its forms and history in Latin, French and English poetry, and to trace the connections, if any, of the form in the three literatures. In brief, it aims to be the biography of the tail-rhyme strophe.

Friedrich Rochlitz, who as editor of the Leipsic Musikalische Zeitung first introduced E. T. A. Hoffmann to the German reading public, relates an interesting interview with the author soon after the appearance of the first volume of the Fantasiestücke in Callot's Manier. In reviewing the work for his paper, Rochlitz had declared, “was,” to quote his words, “kein Mensch verkennen konnte—er (Hoffmann) ahme im Stile und einigermaszen in der Form überhaupt, dem Jean Paul nach.” Hoffman was enraged, and poured out his feelings in the vigorous and excited fashion, so well known to those who had in any way excited his ill will.

Of late the common belief in the subjectivity of the ghosts in Shakspere has received fresh currency from the sanction of scholars who belong unquestionably to the newer school—Professors C. H. Herford and A. C. Bradley and a gentleman named F. C. Moorman who writes in the Modern Language Review. The first and the last may for the time being speak for all:—

The career of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, from 1401 to 1439 is hardly to be equalled in the annals of chivalry, even by that earlier Richard, Cœur-de-Lion It is no part of this introductory note to his Virelai, to rehearse in detail the extraordinary events of his long life of travel, adventure, warfare, and diplomacy. Mr. James Gairdner's life of the hero tells the story of his chief exploits, and those to whom Dugdale's Warwickshire is accessible may read it in detail. But to come upon a literary personality in the fifteenth century is so rare a thing, and the character of Richard Beauchamp is so happy an example of a true knight of the Middle Ages, that these few notes upon him and his family, most of them not in Gairdner's article, will not come amiss to the student of the period.

One of the less widely known episodes connected with the enchanter Merlin in romantic material is the Story of Grisandole, which is contained in the French and in the English prose Merlin, and also in the Livre d'Artus, P. It is apparently so trivial in character, and contains such unattractive elements that it would scarcely merit careful study, were it not that a detailed examination brings to light an early and important form of the Merlin legend, which otherwise would remain unknown, and which as yet has not attracted attention.

Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757; second edition, considerably enlarged, 1759) was received in Germany no less hospitably than in England. Lessing wrote about it in 1757 and 1758 to his friends Mendelssohn and Nicolai, planned to translate it, and left Bemerkungen on sundry points in it; Mendelssohn reviewed it; Herder considered, like Lessing, the making of a translation, referred to Burke in letters, in Das vierte kritische Wäldchen, and in conversation with Lessing; Christian Garve published a translation; and Burke's treatise was not without influence on Kant and Schiller.

There is a restlessness in the world of criticism to-day. Its leading exponents, the impressionistic, appreciative, and scientific critics, do not enjoy any longer the unalloyed confidence of former years. Each has a large body of adherents; but there is a disquieting undercurrent set into motion by not a few, asking for something the criticism of to-day cannot give them. They may value the best of the fruitage each has to offer, but they miss something, forcing itself upon them with ever-increasing conviction,—a standard, a criterion, a code of laws or principles, which should form a basis for critical judgments. There is an urgent demand far judicial criticism.

Although the Middle Ages usually drew upon Classic tradition in the formation of their fable literature, they at times created new themes whose popularity equalled that of many older rivals. Of no small importance among such stories are those that deal with the false peace declared by a fox in order to deceive a seemingly simple-minded bird. The numerous versions of this fable that have come down to us since the middle of the eleventh century evidence strong interrelation, in spite of individual differences of character, scene, or action. The various forms become so well established by the beginning of the sixteenth century that a history of the fable is sufficiently complete if it comes down to the end of the Middle Ages. It is the object of this article to show what versions of the Peace-Fable existed before the sixteenth century, whence they arose, and what are their relations to one another. The following is a list of the mediaeval versions:—

From the very first Dryden's critical essays have called forth widely divergent opinions. Written, as many of them were, in the heat of literary conflict, they served during their author's life, on the one hand, as a statement of faith to be expounded and defended, on the other, as a series of vulnerable points of attack. And even since they have held an assured place among English critical works—at first as authoritative judgments and later as historical documents of the very first importance—there has been no orthodox view as to their nature or value. Some historians have always been led by Dryden's popular, rambling style to deny them solid worth; others have found in them a vitality, a genuine insight, worth more than logic. According to Dean Swift they were “merely writ at first for filling, to raise the author's price a shilling;” Doctor Johnson, on the contrary, speaks of them as “the criticism of a poet; not a dull collection of theorems, nor a rude detection of faults, which perhaps the censor was not able to have committed; but a gay and vigorous dissertation, where delight is mingled with instruction.”

Perhaps no portion of the chapters of Moryson's Itinerary, published in 1903 under the somewhat unexpected title of “Shakespeare's Europe,” has aroused more interest than his brief passage about the so-called English comedians, whom he saw at the Frankfort fair in September, 1592. Of the few contemporary accounts known to us his is the only one from an English source and probably the only one written by a man whose previous acquaintance with the theater fitted him in any way to judge of the merits of such performances.

I cannot begin this discussion more appropriately than by quoting a well known paragraph from Ellis's Early English Pronunciation. In Part I, page 19, he says:—

“The results of emigration and immigration are curious and important. By emigration is here specially meant the separation of a considerable body of the inhabitants of a country from the main mass, without incorporating itself with another nation. Thus the English in America have not mixed with the natives, and the Norse in Iceland had no natives to mix with. In this case there is a kind of arrest of development, the language of the emigrants remains for a long time in the stage at which it was when emigration took place, and alters more slowly than the mother tongue, and in a different direction. Practically the speech of the American English is archaic with respect to that of the British English, and while the Icelandic scarcely differs from the old Norse, the latter has, since the colonization of Iceland, split up on the mainland into two distinct literary tongues, the Danish and Swedish. Nay, even the Irish English exhibits in many points the peculiarities of the pronunciation of the xviith century.”

American criticism of Shakespeare began in 1753 with a New York woman, Charlotte Ramsay, best known as Mrs. Lennox. Until fifteen years of age she lived in America with her father, Colonel James Ramsay, Lieutenant-Governor of New York City. Thence she went to London and, being thrown upon her own resources, supported herself, both before and after marriage, by her literary labors. During her long life of eighty-four years (1720–1804) novels, poems, comedies, memoirs, and translations flowed from her prolific pen. That her intellect was of no mean order is known from Dr. Johnson's testimony. He considered her ability equal to that of Hannah More or Fanny Burney.

Gautier de Coincy, ou Quency, ou Comsy, ou Coinsy, ou Coigny, est, on le sait, ce moine bénédictin, Prieur de Vic-sur Aisne, puis de Saint Médard près de Soissons, qui au début de la relativement brillante période littéraire du XIIIe siècle, écrivit en français la collection la plus importante qui nous soit parvenue des Miracles de Notre Dame. Son œuvre entière, dont la plus grande partie de beaucoup consiste en ces contes rimés, comprend 30 à 40,000 vers. Il a été parfois étudié par les savants, mais les hommes de lettres, considérant un poète du point de vue de sa valeur intrinsèque et artistique, n'ont pas encore été tentés fortement. Pourtant son œuvre est importante. Les hommes qui connaissent le mieux leur Moyen-Age s'en rendent compte et appellent de leurs vœux depuis longtemps le Romaniste dévoué qui mettra la main à une édition scientifique de notre auteur. Plusieurs travailleurs, comme Mussafia et Paul Meyer, ont posé les premiers jalons.

Some thirty years ago, Matthew Arnold, in one of those magnificently cumulative passages with which he so loved to dazzle his readers, said of the future of poetry: “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, when it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact, and now the fact is failing it. Poetry, on the other hand, attaches its emotion to the idea, the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.”

To the average reader, even in Italy, the name Anton-francesco Doni suggests nothing. There is no collected edition of his works, nor, aside from the 1863 edition of the Marmi and the sporadic and limited publication of occasional pieces, are there even reprints of single works. To the average student he is but one of many writers of novelle that, altho by comparison with some of the others are only mildly filthy, are not distinguished by either sweetness or light. Of his other works, the Libreria is the earliest Italian bibliographical work; the Marmi, a series of conversations between Cinquecento Florentines sitting on the steps of the Duomo, is photographic in its realism; the Mondi, a socialistic fantasy, shows the influence of More's Utopia; the Zucca is a collection of proverbs, etc., yet nothing very significant. Nor are the facts of his life (1513–1569) more interesting. Altho associated somewhat mysteriously with the Accademia Ortolana of Piacenza and with the still more mysterious I Pelegrini at Venice, his roving life is tarred with the same brush as that of the “infame” Aretino. And to the English reader his direct claim is even more slender, as it consists only of a translation, made by Sir Thomas North in 1570, of his translation of the fables of Bidpai. In life he was of “vivissimo ingegno;” to-day the “ghiribizzoso” Doni is remembered as an erotic author.

As the Italian origin of the Masque has been questioned in the latest and most elaborate investigation of the subject (R. Brotanek, Die Englischen Maskenspiele, Wien und Leipzig, 1902), it seems worth while to examine the history of the word and the circumstances of its introduction into English. Brotanek thinks that it came from the French, but it is to be borne in mind in the first place that the form masque is not found in sixteenth century English; and in the second place, that the French masque has never meant the performance but always the performer or the domino worn. Cotgrave gives masque as the synonym for “a maske for a woman,” but for “maske” without this qualification “masquerade, masquerie, barboire,” just as he gives for “mummery or mumming” “mommerie, masquerade, barboire.” Littré cites only one example of the use in French of masque for a form of entertainment, and that is from a modern author, with special reference to the English masques, which are elaborately described.