During a period of something like fifty years, roughly from 1580 to 1630, there developed in France a complete change of attitude toward the theatre as a professional and social institution. This shift in concept was responsible for the growth in the city of Paris of successful dramatic companies who derived their total livelihood from the theatre. It is true that toward the end of the sixteenth century and in the early years of the seventeenth century, as has been pointed out by Trautman, Faber, Rigal, Fransen, Madame Deierkauf-Holsboer, and others, there existed struggling companies of professional actors who gave plays in French in the provinces as well as in Belgium, Holland, and across the German frontier. Such a group was in Strasbourg in 1593, and later went to the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris.

Every reader of Wyatt's poems will, I am sure, have no difficulty in recalling the epigram, In dowtfull brest…, which he himself furnished with the caption: ‘Of the mother that eat her childe at the siege of Jerusalem’. I quote from the Egerton manuscript version as given by Kenneth Muir, the latest editor of his verse, in Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 61.

In dowtfull brest, whilst moderly pitie
With furyous famyn stondith at debate,
Sayth thebrew moder: O child vnhappye,
Retorne thi blowd where thow hadst milk of late.
Yeld me those lymns that I made unto thi,
And entre there where thou wert generate,
For of on body agaynst all nature
to a nothr must I mak sepulture.

All the studies of the influence of Plato on the Utopia of St. Thomas More, even such excellent discussions as J. H. Lupton's introduction to his edition of Utopia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), Ernest Barker's Greek Political Theory (London: Methuen, 1918), and the article by Lina Beger, entitled ‘Thomas More und Plato: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Humanismus’, in the Zeitschrift für die gesamten Staatswissenschaften XXXV (1879), have little to say about the religious thought of the Utopians.

Such cursory treatment of the religious passages in Utopia would seem to be due to the assumption that the Renaissance work and its major classical source are primarily politico-economic treatises.

First to compose music for the burial service in English was Thomas Morley (1557-1603). The verbal text that he followed was that of the second Book of Common Prayer, pubhshed in 1559, one year after the accession of Queen Elizabeth I. The splendor of this piece of literature exalted Morley's genius to an equally magnificent piece of music.

About a century and a half afterward, his manuscript came to the hands of Doctor Maurice Greene (c. 1695-1755). In 1718 Greene became organist of St. Paul's, a position that Morley once occupied. In 1727 he was elected to the Chapel Royal, of which Morley had been a member. Three years later he was made Doctor of Music at Cambridge; Morley had been Bachelor of Music at Oxford.

Of all the forms of Latin hexameter verse cultivated during the European Renaissance none, perhaps, had so long and so vigorous a history as the bucolic eclogue or pastoral. From early in the fourteenth century to late in the eighteenth there was a constant stream of pastoral verse, some of it written by triflers, some by many of Europe's foremost poets: it is enough to mention Milton's Epitaphium Damonis. Most such poems were literary and derivative, some were attempts to develop a new class of pastoral, some were attempts to put the pastoral form to entirely new uses.

A common variety of eclogue in Renaissance Latin literature is the pastoral lament on the death of a friend or patron. We may instance that of Marco Girolamo Vida (1485-1566) on Pope Julius II (d. 1513), that of Cinzio Giambattista Giraldi (1504-73) on Ludovicus Bonactiolus and Joannes Manardus (both doctors who had taught the poet), that of Giano Anisio (ca. 1475-ca. 1540) on Giovanni Pontano (1422?-1503) of Naples, or Pontano's on his wife Adriana Sassone (d. 1491).

In 1413 King Ladislaus of Naples captured Rome, forcing Antipope John xxiii (1410-15) to flee to Florence. Gregorovius describes the sack of the Eternal City on this occasion as follows:

For visitors to the historical museums of many English cities, trenchers are familiar objects; a small body of scholarly literature has also grown up concerning them. Those who are interested in the subject may find a convenient summary in Professor Sir Arthur H. Church's chapter on ‘Old English Fruit Trenchers’ (Some Minor Arts as Practised in England [London, 1894], PP. 47-54). The use to which these tablets were put, whether in the serving of fruits and sweetmeats or as a source of entertainment for the guests, is uncertain; certain it is, however, that they were extremely popular in Tudor and Stuart days. In most cases, the trenchers were adorned with mottoes, proverbs, epigrams, Biblical and classical quotations, or bits of English verse.

The Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library recently acquired an interesting, late fifteenth-century leather-covered wooden box, probably designed to hold a manuscript or book, with a rare impression of a single woodcut representing The Almighty Enthroned which is pasted into its upper lid. The object is of significance as it leads to observations of the use of printed illustrative material during the first century of printing. It is also of sociological value for our knowledge of its use by the people of the time. Only about thirty such boxes, coffers, cofferets, or cassettes with pasted-in woodcuts are in the collections of London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam, with but one box recorded in an American collection, that of the Print Room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The secular poetry of Philippe Desportes (1546-1606) is most often characterized as précieux. One may wish to distinguish between préciosité as an historical phenomenon and précieux as a recurring literary tendency, and one may quarrel about the exact definition of the term, but when examples are needed none are any better than those chosen from the works of Desportes. This no one would deny, but when the extreme view is taken that Desportes is nothing but an insincere and clever versifier who crassly imitates Italian models and hawks his wares to the highest bidder, then one must protest.

Since Professor Marti has been in Europe for the past year and expects to stay there for another year, Professor Bradner has agreed to join the Executive Committee, first as an acting member and later as a regular member. This Committee has held three meetings since October 1954.

The place of Miss Sanford as a member of the Editorial Board and as Section Editor for Latin Commentaries of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries has been filled by Professor Revilo P. Oliver of the University of Illinois.