Desert islands and shipwrecked crews are apparently very old themes in French prose fiction. There is a desert island episode in Les Amours de Clidamant et de Marilinde, a sentimental novel of 1603. The shipwreck of a Portuguese merchantman is the prelude to L'Isle des hermaphrodites, a satirical work of 1605. Accounts of such adventures in the “true voyage” literature of the first half of the 17th century in France are numerous. To cite only some works which went through several editions in this period, the Voyages of Jean Mocquet contains the story of a lone European on an unknown shore. Repeated editions in French translation of Garcilaso's Historia de los Incas contain the better known Serrano desert island story, while two editions of the Voyages du sieur Vincent Le Blanc furnish other material of like nature.

The original objection urged against the conclusion of Paradise Lost was its failure to conform strictly to the neo-classic requirement that “an Heroick Poem . . . ought to end happily, and leave the mind of the reader, after having conducted it through many doubts and fears, sorrows and disquietudes, in a state of tranquility and satisfaction.” Milton's subject, according to Dryden, “is not that of an heroick poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works.” Addison concurred in this opinion; but he considered that the poet's “exquisite judgment” in raising Adam to a state of great happiness through the vision of future events had virtually overcome “the natural defect in his subject.” The author, he says, “leaves the Adversary of Mankind . . . under the lowest state of mortification and disappointment. We see him chewing ashes, grovelling in the dust, and loaden with supernumerary pains and torments. On the contrary, our two first parents are comforted by dreams and visions, cheared with promises of salvation, and, in a manner, raised to a greater happiness than that which they had forfeited. In short, Satan is represented miserable in the height of his triumphs, and Adam triumphant in the height of misery.” With one detail of the conclusion, however, Addison found fault. It would have been better, he declared, to omit entirely the last two lines of the poem (misquoted) :

They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Keats' central instinct was for high poetic repose: for the quietude that comes, not from avoiding life, but from surmounting it. The goal, however, was so far beyond his reach that he could not have attained it, I think, even if he had lived a full lifetime. His early death (February 23, 1821) is bound to lose, as the centuries revolve upon that day, much of its tragic color; but at the same time the deeper tragedy of his spirit can appear more distinctly. This deeper tragedy has been considerably dimmed in the atmosphere of uniqueness with which the poet has been invested by the rising admiration of a hundred years. The other chief poets of the past century are now seen more or less clearly in their true boundaries; Keats' limits have been kept uniquely vague. His poetic potentiality and his ruining fate have been so continually balanced against each other, with insensible additions now on one side of the scale and now on the other, that both have come to appear much weightier than they really were. In particular it has been assumed with extraordinary unanimity that Keats' physical disintegration, beginning eighteen months before his death, stopped his progress just as he was approaching a much higher level of poetic achievement.

In the words of Dante, “Carlo Magno perdè la santa gesta”; he lost it thru the base treachery of his brother-in-law, Ganelon. Ganelon became a traitor, we have been told, first, because of bribes, and, second, because of his hatred of Roland. As Gaston Paris formulated it, “In the beginning, Ganelon was a traitor only because he was bought by the gold of the pagans; later on, they rendered the situation more interesting and at the same time increased the importance of Roland by adding the motive of the hatred of Ganelon against Roland.” Thus far, nearly all have been agreed; but when we go a step further and ask, What was the cause of this hatred, the answers vary: simply because the two men were step-father and step-son, says one; because Roland nominated Ganelon to a fearfully dangerous mission, says another. The second of these two reasons has the support of Ganelon's own statement at his trial, at least of his second statement, for he makes two, as will be recalled. His first statement, being a riddle, has been generally left out of consideration: it is the purpose of this paper to advance the idea, based upon a new reading of line 3758, that the step-father motive, and the dangerous mission motive, were both secondary in the poet's mind, not primary; that for the poet the primary motive, the real spring of the action, was that Ganelon, being a covetous man and envious of Roland's greater wealth, had hated him on that account before ever Charles had reached the seventh year of the Spanish war.

Few readers of Shelley devote much time to Oedipus Tyrannus, or Swell-foot the Tyrant, and for a very good reason. Intrinsically, the play is not worth it. Mrs. Shelley, ever careful of the poet's reputation, warns us not to take this piece for more than was meant. We are indebted for its inception, and for some of its devices, to the grunting of a drove of pigs beneath Shelley's window. This fact, notwithstanding what we owe to equally trivial experiences persistently reported of Newton and Dick Whittington, adds nothing to the gravity with which the poem is generally read. The revolting setting, with its thigh-bones and skulls, the outrageous characters introduced, such as a sow-gelder, a chorus of swine, and a hoydenish queen, together with extravagant speeches and actions, sometimes in a serious mood of protest, more often with the hysteric sort of grotesquerie which was Shelley's nearest approach to humor—these factors have combined to make most readers regard the poem as a failure even when taken for no more than was meant. Shelley's serious devotion to liberty could never allow him to treat it in burlesque fashion without a touch of hectic incongruity. Byron could have succeeded much better with Shelley's material, and Fielding could have made an uproarious farce of it, but not Shelley.

Der Stricker, an Austrian poet who is perhaps best known for his Pfaffe Amîs (ca. 1230), is the first (so far as we know) to tell the story of a wicked advocate (or judge) who was more unscrupulous in robbing his neighbors than the Devil himself. This tale, though perhaps a folk-tale originally, and even in its written versions never very far from the spirit of the folk, is interesting chiefly for its literary adaptations, notably Chaucer's Friar's Tale. Its principal forms, which are maintained with remarkable consistency, no doubt because its propagation was rather through books than through oral tradition, seem to have been determined by its use as exemplum, jest, or simple story. The oldest form, as it occurs in the narratives of der Stricker and Caesarius of Heisterbach, is also the most frequent and important. A rather unhappy rearrangement of the same incidents, which have to do with the leveling of a curse at a man or beast, characterizes a second form, of which the earliest example is found in Johannes Pauli's Schimpf und Ernst (1522). A little later (1537) Hans Sachs altered the story by omitting one episode regularly found in the other two types. Into one of these three closely related groups, represented by der Stricker and Caesarius, Pauli, and Hans Sachs respectively, the great majority of the thirty known versions fall. The variations are comparatively insignificant, and the analogous tales which do not follow one of these standard outlines are strikingly few.

Writers almost always, either consciously or unconsciously, make of their books mirrors of their personalities, eagerly exposing every trait to the public. But occasionally a writer wears a mask before this literary mirror and the public sees him only in disguise save perhaps in the pages of his intimate correspondence. Such a man was Hippolyte Taine, and it is a curious task to study this reserved scholar as he reveals himself in his books, to watch for the rare lines where he has dropped his mask in unguarded moments of secret ambition, of ennui or despair, of sudden mockery or mirth.

The dreams of Charlemagne in Rol. 717–36 and 2525–60 have several times been the subject of critical investigations. Professor Rajna sees in them a direct influence of the Old Teutonic epic; Wilhelm Tavernier, on the other hand, is inclined to consider at least one of them as the literary imitation of a dream occurring in the Waltharius. The fact that some of those dreams are animal dreams appeared also to him as a proof of Teutonic influences due perhaps to the Norman descent of the author. It will, therefore, be the purpose of this paper to examine those dreams and to test the arguments put forward to prove their Teutonic character.

Of all the literary terms in common use, the word “essay” has perhaps the widest field and the most indeterminate content. Since the form to which it applies has taken on a fresh character in the hands of almost all its chief exponents, it has become in practice the designation for any piece of prose of moderate length, and has consequently embraced a bewilderingly various subject-matter. Moreover, the essayists themselves are by no means all of a piece. Bacon and Lamb, for instance, have little in common; and the type of ‘essayist’ represented by Macaulay and Carlyle has little in common with either. As a result of this wide extension, studies of the essay either include so much as to be very indefinite, or else are based on partial views, the upshot, in either case, becoming sufficiently vague. At the same time, the word “essay” goes on being used, and collections, of curiously assorted content, go on being made; and it therefore seems worth while to pass in review the different types represented in actual practice, in order to see just how much continuity is discernible among them.

In Notes and Queries for February 10, 1917, John H. Sandham Griffith, Esq., of Llwynduris, Llechryd, Cardiganshire, announced that he had in his possession Shelley's set of the Hon. Robert Clifford's translation (4 vols., 1797-8) of the Abbé Barruel's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinisme. The set, Mr. Griffith believes, was left by Shelley at Horsham after his expulsion from Oxford;1 and he further explains that “there was such a considerable degree of intimacy existing between the poet's family and my ancestor William Sandham of Horsham, a tenant and near neighbor of Sir Timothy Shelley of Field Place, that the poet was probably a frequent visitor, and obtained a loan of £100 in January, 1811, before being sent down from Oxford, which he never repaid. The unredeemed promissory note is in my possession, and also a holograph letter, requesting a further loan on the plea of ‘now being reduced to the very last extremity,‘ written from Keswick shortly after his marriage to Harriet West-brooke [sic].” Volume II of the set, Mr. Griffith says, “bears the poet's autograph in full, and the date 1810.”

Political controversy and partisan feeling were intimately blended with the literature of England during what we call loosely the Romantic Period. The views of individual authors have been treated here and there by their biographers; but little attempt has been made to generalize or draw conclusions from the several political attitudes of the poets, who, tho forming no school in the strict sense of the term, were nevertheless outstanding figures in the same liberal movement in literature. Some simple conclusions, drawn from a study of these men, are presented here; and in the presentation of this material opportunity has been taken to correct a few misunderstandings which exist regarding their political relations. For convenience, the poets may be divided into three groups : the conservative yet individual men, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge; the Old Tory, Scott; and the more or less radical trio, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. For obvious reasons little need be said of the last-named poet.

Although Poe is now all but universally acknowledged to be one of the three or four literary geniuses that America has produced, there was a period immediately following his death when few writers in America were willing to concede to him any extraordinary merit beyond that of an exceptionally gifted artist. It has sometimes been held that Poe was similarly neglected even before his death. Thus, so distinguished a scholar as Professor Sir Walter Raleigh, of Oxford, in a letter addressed to the celebrators of the Poe centenary at the University of Virginia (1909), makes the statement that Poe was “barely recognized while he lived.” Baudelaire, who did more than any other to light the flame of Poe's reputation abroad, believed that Poe was cruelly neglected by his fellow-countrymen, and most other Frenchmen have, I believe, adopted much the same view. In America, too, there has long existed a tradition that Poe was but little appreciated during his lifetime,—a tradition that has flourished especially at the South, though it has not been confined to the South. On the other hand, some of the ablest of those who have made a special study of Poe have held that this tradition is without any substantial basis in fact. The lamented Professor Charles F. Richardson, for instance, in one of the most sympathetic and discriminating essays that we have on the Southern poet, asserts that it is “a serious mistake” to assume that Poe was unpopular in his own day. And Professor W. P. Trent, a no less eminent authority on our literary history, has recorded the belief that “Poe is no exception to the rule that the writers who really count began by counting with their contemporaries.”

Although Dr. Johnson is one of our best English critics, he has left much that the world would willingly let die. But alas ! the written word is imperishable, and will every now and then repair its drooping head, in spite of the opportunities of oblivion. Johnson's strictures on the shorter poems of Milton have now for a good while been taken for what they are worth; even his severity with Comus is recognized as more than half perversely irrelevant. I say nothing of Paradise Lost, for no other poem so inexorably demands the willing suspension of disbelief which Johnson was incapable of. But recently his obiter dictum that Samson Agonistes is not a dramatic whole in the Aristotelian sense, having a beginning, a middle, and an end; that “ the intermediate parts have neither cause nor consequence, neither hasten nor retard the catastrophe ” has re-entered the listed field. And “ these shifts ” must be “refuted.”

The Old English ms. volume, Cotton Vitellius A XV, in “which the unique copy of Beowulf is preserved, consists of two separate codices which have been bound together since the time of Sir Robert Cotton to make the present volume. The first, in two main hands of the twelfth century, contains four articles: Flowers from St. Augustine's Soliloquies, translated by King Alfred, fol. 4a; Gospel of Nicodemus, fol. 60a; Dialogue between Solomon and Saturn, fol. 84b; and a fragment of eleven lines concerning martyrs, fol. 93b. The second codex, likewise in two hands, but of considerably earlier date, consists of five articles: A fragment of the Life of St. Christopher, imperfect at the beginning, fol. 94a; Wonders of the East, fol. 98b; Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, fol. 107a; Beowidf, fol. 132a; and Judith, a fragment, fols. 202a-209b.

The scholars who have investigated the history of gender in Middle English have been unanimous in the conclusion that the loss of grammatical gender was the result of the loss of the gender-distinctive forms of the strong adjective declension, the definite article and demonstrative, and other pronominal words. Körner wrote in 1888 : Die angelsächsische sprache unterschied bekanntlich drei grammatische genera, während das moderne englisch das grammatische geschlecht überhaupt nicht mehr besitzt. Der verlust desselben hängt natürlich mit dem verluste der flexion aufs engste zusammen und findet auch hierin seine alleinige erklärung. Bot doch die flexion allein dem sprechenden einen anhalt für die unterscheidung des grammatischen geschlechts; woran hätte man sich sonst noch halten können, als erstere aufgegeben wurde? Denn der zusammenhang zwischen der bedeutung und dem überkommenen geschlecht der bezeichnungen für leblose wesen wurde längst nicht mehr gefühlt. Als daher durch aufgabe der flexion das äussere erkennungszeichen für das grammatische genus fiel, so musste letzteres überhaupt schwinden. Es ergab sich von selbst, dass an seine stelle das natürliche gechlecht trat.

Traces of the aube in English and Scottish literature are to be found in a few titles and a few fragments or adaptations of the type. But the aube, which deals with the parting of lovers at dawn, seems to me to represent only one group in a large body of songs that picture the various phases of a lover's secret visit to his lady at night. No such number of these related songs, either medieval or modern, is to be found in England as on the Continent, but enough material survives in one form or another to suggest their main conventions.