The chief prose works of the fifteenth century in France, by common consent, are the long pseudo-chivalric romance entitled Le Petit Jehan de Saintré, the satire on women called Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage and the collection of tales known as Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. The author of the first work alone names himself: it is Antoine de la Sale, a native of Provence, known also as the author of several didactic works, La Salade, La Salle, Le Réconfort, etc. The author of the Quinze Joyes has hidden his identity in a riddle which has not yet been satisfactorily deciphered. Not even a hint as to the author or editor of the Cent Nouvelles is contained in the manuscript. Led astray by an erroneous interpretation of the riddle, Pottier in 1830 ascribed the Quinze Joyes to La Sale. Le Roux de Lincy did the same for the Cent Nouvelles, in 1841. The first scientific attempt to prove these ascriptions was made by L. Stern in 1870. Stern sought to establish La Sale's authorship of the Cent Nouvelles by a comparison of certain details of style and by the fact, noticed more in detail later, that a “conte” addressed to La Sale appears as one of the hundred tales. This was followed immediately by the paper of E. Gossart, which gave special attention to the Quinze Joyes. Gossart showed that La Sale, in La Salle and in Saintré, had made use of St. Jerome's paraphrase of Theophrastus, also cited in the prologue of the Quinze Joyes. However, as M. Raynaud has pointed out, this epistle of Jerome, with that of Valerius, also cited in the Quinze Joyes, was the chief source of most of the diatribes against marriage in the Middle Ages.

In 1887 Mr. Charles Plummer in his Elizabethan Oxford reprinted from various sources several records of Queen Elizabeth's visit to Oxford in 1566. This visit was a great event for town and university, especially since Oxford wished to outdo the welcome which Cambridge had given the Queen on a similar occasion two years before. Consequently the various ceremonies, stage-plays, and disputations of her five days' stay at Oxford were carefully chronicled. The most enthusiastic of the chroniclers was a certain John Bereblock, whose Latin Commentarii is a most detailed and valuable record. In the course of this commentary Bereblock makes large and interesting additions to our knowledge of three lost plays, Marcus Geminus, the Palæmon and Arcyte of Richard Edwards, and the Progne of Dr. James Calfhill, all of which were acted during the Queen's visit. He also gives an important description of the manner in which plays were staged at the universities.

In the progress of Oriental stories westward, a movement which has been, to say the least, far from uncommon, the means and methods of transportation are usually extraordinarily difficult to ascertain. When analogues of tales well-known in the folk and formal literatures of Europe are found in the East, it is easy enough to assume that the parent form of the type was Asiatic in origin; but it is no light task to show the successive stages by which the material passed from the one continent to the other. In cases where the story was adopted by the Christian church at an early date for the moral or religious instruction of its adherents, there is perhaps less difficulty than elsewhere in believing that it was actually transplanted from the East, since the lives of the hermits of the desert, those reservoirs of Christian example, were strongly tinged by Oriental thought.

Joost van den Vondel is one of the few Dutch poets who have attained to anything approaching international fame. To him is attributed a rather noteworthy influence on Milton. As long ago as 1854 A. Fischel demonstrated in his Life and writings of Joost van den Vondel that Milton knew and made use of Vondel's works. Gosse, in his Studies in the Literatures of Northern Europe, pointed out that this influence came only from Vondel's Lucifer and was restricted to the sixth book of Paradise Lost. Edmunson, however, in his Milton and Vondel: A Curiosity of Literature (London, 1885), showed that not only in Books 1, 2, 4, and 9 of Paradise Lost, but also in Paradise Regained and in Samson Agonistes fragments are imitated from Joannes den Boetgezant (John the Messenger of Repentance), Adam in Ballingschap (Adam in Exile), Samson of the Heilige Wraak (Samson or the Sacred Vengeance), and from Bespiegelingen van God en Godsdienst (Reflections about God and Religion). Among the other discussions the most important are that of Masson in his Life of Milton, that of Professor Moltzer in Noord en Zuid (vol. 9), and that of Van Noppen in the introduction to his translation of Vondel's Lucifer.

Perhaps the most significant phenomenon of modern history is the emancipation of woman—the rise of the submerged half. No more interesting and no more complex problem can be dealt with, and it is well worthy of the attention which scholars have of late years been devoting to it.

In the study of the heroic play it has been rather generally assumed that Dryden and his fellow-playwrights went direct to France for their models and established in England a form of drama distinct from anything that had preceded them. The French romance and the French drama, because they had an influence on the Restoration drama, have been regarded as its sole progenitors. The position of D'Avenant as the connecting link between the earlier and the later drama has been recognized; Dryden himself acknowledges his indebtedness to the author of The Siege of Rhodes. But very little has been done to show that a stream of influence percolates from the Jacobean drama through D'Avenant to the heroic play. Of course, it is easy to exaggerate resemblances, to imagine similarities of capital importance, and to proclaim a paramount influence; but, nevertheless, a prion reasons are in favor of an influence, and a comparison of the two types of drama will, it seems to me, undoubtedly show a connection between them which is more than casual.

This treatise, which contains the earliest notice of Arthur, deserves a place in the history of literature as foundation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae.