“Comme tout le monde avait lu le même conte dans Boccace, … les éloges des critiques anglais étaient inépuisables en l'honneur de Chaucer, qui, dans son imitation, avait su ajouter, disait-on, d'heureuses circonstances au récit de Boccace. Nous savons aujourd'hui que tout ce mérite d'inventeur qu'on lui attribuait consiste à avoir fort bien copié notre fabliau.”

On the slopes of the Appenines overlooking the fertile plains of Apulia, and about fifteen miles west of the ancient town of Luceria (the modern Lucera), are found the two small towns of Celle and Faeto. They are only a mile apart and their combined population is about four thousand. Besides Apulian, which is the dialect of that region, the inhabitants of Celle and Faeto still speak a kind of French dialect.

The play commonly known as Shakspere's Pericles first appeared in 1609, in a version so corrupt that it was clearly a piracy. Whether this was identical with the drama of the same title which was entered on the Stationers' Register in company with Antony and Cleopatra, on May 20, 1608, cannot be determined. This, however, is certain: the entry was made by Edward Blount, but the play was published by Henry Gosson, to whom no record of transfer is to be found. As to the composition of Pericles, it is now generally admitted that, with the possible exception of a few phrases, the first two acts are not by Shakspere but in all probability by George Wilkins.

At the present time, when the world is too much with us, many reasons might be urged for a wider and deeper attention to the study of Wordsworth. We must content ourselves here with a single, obvious reason, easily grasped. The two accredited leaders of English criticism in the nineteenth century, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, ranked Wordsworth among the five greatest English poets, his compeers being, in their opinion, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. A third critic, no mean one, namely Wordsworth himself, held substantially the same belief, viewing the grounds of his belief as objectively as he could. It is well for everybody, now and then, to regard some matters in a broad perspective.

Some loose vellum leaves of a manuscript written between 1431 and 1450 (according to Dr. Kenyon of the British Museum) are bound in with a paper ms. of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, in ms. British Museum Sloane 1212. These leaves, written in what may be a different hand from that of the Hoccleve scribe, contain some interesting material, most of which has up to now remained unidentified.

It is so unusual a circumstance at this late day for an entirely new English ballad to come to light that we are justified in hailing its appearance as an event of general interest to the world of English scholarship. From the completion of Professor Child's magnificent work up to the present no ballad has been discovered, which would merit insertion under a new title in that corpus. Variants of ballads already known continue to be unearthed with gratifying frequency, but so well did the great collector glean the field that it can seldom fall to the lot of any follower to bring to light a new specimen. The honor due for such a discovery belongs, however, to Mr. Frank Sidgwick, who printed in 1905 a ballad called The Withies, or The Bitter Withy in Notes and Queries.