The historian, most especially the historian of ideas, since he cannot undo the processes of time, is always in difficulties over problems of causation, transmission, and migration. Hume determined to leave speculation aside and observe only sequence. We cannot decide what the intellectual climate of Stuart England would have been like without the Advancement of Learning, or the Authorized Version, or of Western Europe without The Discourse on Method. Yet certain coincidences tempt investigation. Machiavelli, for two or three centuries a familiar name of both authority and reproach, was very widely read, if even more widely misrepresented and oversimplified. Scholarship has been occupied with his legend. Yet little attention has been focused on the identity of many of the ideas of the Discorsi with the commonplaces of political writers between the Renaissance and the French Revolution in England and France.

Mr. A. D. S. Fowler's article in Modern Language Notes, of April 1960, ‘The River Guyon’, makes the interesting suggestion that the name of Guyon, Spenser's Knight of Temperance in Book Two of The Faerie Queene, may be derived from Gihon, one of the four rivers of Paradise mentioned in Genesis 2:13. Mr. Fowler cites the commentaries of Philo and Ambrose, which allegorize the rivers as the four cardinal virtues, to prove a definite relationship between Gihon, later written Geon or Gyon, and the virtue of temperance. Other authorities for this equation can be added: Bede's Commentary on the Pentateuch, the Glossa Ordinaria, and Alexander Neckham's De naturis rerum. It seems very likely that Spenser meant the name of Guyon to recall this traditional association.