The problem of the nature of free and checked vowels in the gallo-roman popular speech has recently been made the subject of an article published by Dr. L. E. Menger, in Publications of the Modern Language Association, x, pp. 306-341. His conclusions are that vowels are free when ' they develop: a > e, ẉ > oi, e > ie, ọ > ou, o > ue;' that they are checked when 'they retain their original forms,' and that those cases which cannot be included in either category are neither free nor checked, and are to be grouped under the general term of 'secondary developments.' It is evident that such a division begs the question at issue. The solution offered must be rejected in toto and has already received a categorical answer by Behrens in Z. f. R. Ph., xxi, p. 304. The question is however of sufficient importance to merit new consideration, and I shall try to outline in the following pages the direction in which its solution must be sought. The history of the terms free and checked and of their grammatical signification will serve as a suitable basis for the argument.

The whole bibliography of Elizabethan translations from the Italian, as far as my researches have gone up to the present time, consists of 404 separate titles. Of these, I have already published 70 numbers in Part I, “Romances in Prose” (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. x, No. 2, June, 1895), and 82 numbers in Part II, “ Poetry, Plays, and Metrical Romances” (Ibid., Vol. xi, No. 4, December, 1896). The “ Miscellanea,” Part III, comprise 252 numbers, so many that I have found it convenient to divide them; The present paper contains 111 titles, classified under the general heads, religion and theology, science and the arts, grammars and dictionaries, and proverbs. It will be followed by a second section dealing with history and politics, voyages and discovery, manners and morals, and Italian and Latin publications in England. I need hardly add that this is merely a working classification. Many of the titles are obvious enough, but as is well known the Elizabethans exercised a lively fancy in the naming of books. To one uninstructed in the Elizabethan love of color and melody in phraseology, A Joyfull Jewell does not at once suggest a treatise on the plague, nor A Divine Herball a sermon, nor the Enimie of Idlenesse a complete letter-writer. I have no doubt but that with a wider acquaintance with the subject I should reclassify to a certain extent.