In September 1960 a hundred years will have passed since the appearance of Jacob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. No other work has had a comparable influence on the formation of the concept of die Renaissance, and during the last one or two generations it has become an historical classic read in all western countries. Since the re-publication of Burckhardt's original text by Walter Goetz in 1922, one German reprint has followed another. After the second World War the early Italian and English translations began to share in this ever-growing popularity (America has seen three new editions recendy), while the first Spanish translation came out in South America in 1942.

At the turn of the century, a few years before the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603) was printed, the reappearance of the choirboy troupes—the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul's—at their own private theaters in London provided serious competition to the adult companies acting on the public stages, and among them the Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's company. In a topicality in this corrupt, ‘reported’ version of the play, Guildenstern alludes to the popularity of the child actors as he accounts for the visit of the traveling players:

Yfaith my Lord, noueltie carries it away,
For the principall publike audience that
Came to them, are turned to priuate playes,
And to the humour of children.

My brief note on Sir Thomas More's reading and use of Aulus Gellius did not pretend to be a complete survey of the fortunes of the Nodes Atticae in the Renaissance; nonetheless it should have made reference to Hans Baron's important essay on Aulus Gellius in the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. Echoing Professor Baron's statement that ‘the study of Gellius’ fortunes in the Renaissance has not made much headway beyond a modest start; we cannot point to any monograph on Gellius among the humanists, or in other Renaissance circles'—I would like to add this further note.

Besides More himself and Erasmus, others in the More circle knew their Attic Nights. For having disparaged Seneca, Gcllius was ‘passionately taken to task’ by Juan Luis Vivcs, yet Vivcs cited Gcllius with great frequency in his commentary on the City of God. Clearly, Gellius is one of those classical authors whose influence upon other members of the More-Erasmus circle (such as Bude and Pace) it would be most fruitful to explore further, and that influence will doubtless also be found in many minor writers of the earlier sixteenth century.