M. Pauphilet, dans son article “Sur la Chanson de Roland” (Rom. LIX, 176) a montré l'origine toute littéraire, nullement historique, du personnage de l'ami “sage” et mesuré du turbulent et vaillant Roland: ce n'est que le poète Turoldus qui a pu être amené à créer ce contre-type de Roland;

L'enthousiasme orgueilleux de Roland, la sagesse d'Olivier, ce contraste est la plus immortelle beauté du poème, ou pour mieux dire, il est l'essence même de l'episode de Roncevaux; la première mention d'Olivier auprès de Roland présuppose le poème, et la tombe d'Olivier à Blaye est un monument à la gloire du poète créateur.

In Speculum, xvi (1941), pp. 149–166, A.C. Krey devoted to William, archbishop of Tyre, an article most welcome to students of French medieval romance. Rousing our interest in the work of this great chronicler of the crusades, he makes us read it, and reading it we find what we least expected: a historical background for Chrétien's Conte del Graal.

The following list is meant to be a useful tool in locating authors and copies of books; it is not a complete bibliography of all editions. In most cases only the earliest ones available have been noted. Modern editions of separate plays have been listed when found, but modern editions of the works of the various authors have not been included. For Latin plays written by Englishmen, including those printed on the Continent, see Alfred Harbage's “Census of Anglo-Latin Plays,” PMLA, liii, 624–629.

In 1911 Edwin Greenlaw offered the following interpretation of the fable in the February eclogue of Spenser's Shepheards Calendar:

Milton writes in his preface to Samson Agonistes that “Chorus is here introduc'd after the Greek manner, not antient only but modern, and still in use among the Italians”; that “In the modeling therefore of this Poem … the Antients and Italians are rather follow'd, as of much more authority and fame.” It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect to find in Italian drama of the seventeenth century these evidences of classical usage to which he refers. Milton is here concerned, it would appear, only with the use of chorus, and he implies that there was common in Italy in his day an imitation of Greek drama which differed from similar efforts in other countries in the handling of the chorus. He is not writing of dramatic criticism, but of dramatic practice. An interest in Minturno and Castelvetro does not explain so direct a statement. Furthermore, the phrase, “still in use,” cannot be accepted as a reference to drama of the sixteenth century, however convenient it would be to fall back upon proved relationships. Trissino's Sophonisba, for example, so close a copy of Sophocles and Euripides, presents many parallels to Samson Agonistes, but it was written more than a hundred and fifty years earlier (in 1515), and presented in 1562. Certain sixteenth-century Italian pastoral plays, such as the Aminta, show interest in the use of chorus which is derived from Greek tragedy, but the Aminta, in spite of its classical ancestry, and Milton's known admiration for its author, was written in 1573, and can scarcely answer for chorus “still in use among the Italians.” Even the seventeenth-century revivals of it would be too infrequent to account for a statement as broad as Milton's. Much the same may be said of the Pastor Fido. Moreover, at the same time, between 1550 and 1590, Jodelle and Garnier in France were writing tragedies at least as much after the Greek manner as were Tasso and Guarini. We must return to the fact that Milton is concerned with a trend in his own century.

Since Dryden lived in a period when the authority of Aristotle in matters of poetry was gaining rather than losing strength, and since he was both a critic and a writer of serious plays, it was inevitable that he should come to grips with the principle of a tragic catharsis and with the broader problem of the function of tragedy. The passages in which he gave his answer to these problems are well known, but the significance of his remarks in relation to the ideas of his time has not always been understood. Especially, the assumption in recent years that all Neo-Classical renditions of the Aristotelian catharsis are irrelevant because of the strong moral bias of the period has led to the ignoring of quite important differences between the theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

“le familier, non le bas …” L. S. Mercier. Du Théâtre.
“ … le familier devient populaire …” Marmontel à l'Académie, 1785.

Faut-il s’étonner si aucun manuel des lettres françaises ne place dans son jour authentique l'intervalle qui sépare, de la mort de Voltaire et de celle de Rousseau, la réelle époque révolutionnaire? Tantôt le lecteur est laissé sous l'impression que, ces deux antagonistes ayant disparu, Diderot n'a guère qu’à les suppléer de son mieux pour faire le pont entre les mouvements des lettres et ceux de l'histoire, tandisque Beaumarchais s'agite en aventurier politique autant qu'en écrivain. Tantôt, le Romantisme ayant à toute force à succéder au “siècle des lumières,” les prodromes des prochaînes nouveautés étant mis au compte de L. S. Mercier et de B. de Saint-Pierre, n'ont vraiment plus qu’à paraître de soudains protagonistes tels que Chateaubriand et Mme de Staël, pour opérer une de ces volte-faces qui sont, en réalité, l'un des problèmes par excellence de tout exposé se préoccupant de continuité. Ainsi qu'il est naturel quand “les arbres nous cachent la forêt,” les contemporains ont peut-être moins à nous dire à ce sujet que les historiens rétrospectifs: ni les Mémoires d'outre-tombe, ni les innombrables relations, plus ou moins fidèles, de l'Ancien Régime agonisant ne mettent, à mon sens, l'accent principal sur ce qui paraît bien avoir été la caractéristique maîtresse de ces douze quinze années—et maintenant que nous disposons d'un néologisme savoureux pour les désigner, pourquoi hésiter à dire que c'est une variété de “populisme” qui fut la dominante d'une pleine décade de littérature française?

One sentence in Wordsworth's long letter to Dorothy describing his journey through France and Switzerland in 1790 might very well be used as a datum line from which to chart later utterances of the poet, either in prose or poetry, on God and nature. Wordsworth says, “Among the more awful scenes of the Alps I had not a thought of man or a single created being; my whole soul was turned to him who produced the terrible majesty before me.” When we add to this a sentence from a letter to Mathews written from Keswick late in 1794, “Cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions,” we can measure more or less accurately the distance Wordsworth had covered between 1790 and 1798, when cataracts and mountains had become “the soul of all his moral being” and He who had produced the terrible majesty a “motion and a spirit” that “rolls through all things.” Both sentences serve a salutary purpose in focusing attention on those formative elements in Wordsworth's early training which we tend under the influence of descriptions in The Prelude and its apostrophes to the “Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe” either to forget or to push into the background. With their outlines sharpened by a proper perspective they support the contention that Wordsworth's later orthodoxy is less a retreat from the naturalism of “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude than it is a return to an earlier position, which, while all its implications at the time may not have been realized, was more in line with the later Wordsworth than with the pantheist of 1798–1802.

Morgan Odoherty, the mythical Irishman who contributed to Blackwood's Magazine in its salad days, is usually—and correctly—acknowledged to have been the creation of Captain Thomas Hamilton. Yet he is almost always identified with Dr. William Maginn, the sprightly contributor from Cork who reprinted several Blackwood Odoherty articles as his own and later used the pseudonym in articles for Fraser's Magazine. Maginn has, accordingly, been praised and damned for many an article in which he had no part. The letters which he wrote to William Blackwood prove that he was only one of many who contributed Odoherty-signed articles. And although as years passed he wrote a larger and larger share of them, he never completely preempted the pseudonym.

Although it has long been recognized that there is a certain political-historical content to Prometheus Unbound, there has, so far, been no attempt to make a consistent interpretation of it in terms of this content. It is the object of this paper to attempt to remedy this defect. In so doing I shall present only interpretations which can be supported by reference to Shelley's other works, in many of which the same basic ideas are present though, fortunately, minus their symbolic garb.

No one really believed in the authenticity of the answers,” complained Poe. “People will not believe I really decipher the puzzles.” But Poe did decipher the puzzles—that is, he really read a good many cryptograms of a certain simple type. Even the most recent biographers of Poe might be surprised to learn how many cryptograms were sent to him from time to time, and how many he solved or nearly solved. Some of the evidence has been published or cited but not much of it ever in one place, and much of it has been left hidden, especially that part which reveals the limitations of Poe as cryptographer. A large part was not available until September 1941, when the American Antiquarian Society acquired a file of the long-sought Alexander's Weekly Messenger for 1840.

In his Literati Edgar Allan Poe has left for students of Italian literature and history a very precious contemporary picture of Piero Maroncelli, author of the Addizioni to Pellico's Le mie prigioni, a poet of some merit (especially if judged by American literary taste of the eighteen thirties), a musician of some distinction, and a promising composer whose career as author and musician was interrupted by the more exciting, though often distressing, vicissitudes of a political life. Maroncelli, well known to anyone who has read Pellico's Le mie prigioni, since in reality he is the hero of that book, is probably the most romantic figure—if we exclude Byron—of the early Italian Risorgimento.

Among Balzac's many devoted admirers and literary friends must be listed a third or fourth-rate novelist, playwright, and poet, de Custine. As is well known, the writer of Le Père Goriot had a weakness for aristocrats and the Marquis could well take his place in the galaxy that included a Princesse de Belgiojoso, a Duc de Fitz-James, and a Comtesse Serafina San Severino, not to mention his future son-in-law, Count Mniszech. The friendship no doubt had firmer foundations since it lasted from the early thirties until Balzac's death.

In seinem Ringen um einen neuen Stil des historischen Dramas auf naturalistischer Grundlage hat Gerhart Hauptmann die frühneuhochdeutsche Dichtung eifrig studiert. Bei Murner, bei Hans Sachs, beim historischen Volkslied, bei Gryphius hat er nach Wendungen und Redensarten gefahndet, die das Gewebe seines altertümelnden Satzbaus als stilecht und dauerhaft erweisen sollten. In dem bereits erschienenen Stück dieser Untersuchung ist das einschlägige Material zur Vergleichung vorgelegt worden. Daß aber Hauptmanns Belesenheit auf diesem Gebiet noch viel mehr umfaßt als die von mir angezogenen Bücher, wurde schon damals klar ausgesprochen. Inzwischen haben sich ein kleiner und ein großer Fund aus diesem Bereich eingestellt. Die sollen hier mitgeteilt werden, ehe wir den Hauptgegenstand dieser Abhandlung—das historische Schrifttum als sprachliche Quelle des Florian Geyer—in Angriff nehmen.

The purposes of this article are two: 1) to consider the sources of “The Wanderings of Oisin” that Yeats himself gives; and 2) to consider additional sources, not given by Yeats, that I have found in the Irish literature written in English that we are fairly sure Yeats was familiar with. I shall be concerned throughout with only the first version of the poem—that of 1889—for in subsequent printings it was much changed.