Among the numerous pieces of verse in the Exeter Book, one to which comparatively little critical attention has been devoted is the Harrowing of Hell. The only special studies of this poem were made many years ago, by J. H. Kirkland and Julius Cramer, though it has, of course, been discussed more or less casually in the several recent editions of the Exeter Codex.

Geoffrey Chaucer and Oton de Graunson, as members of the retinue of the Duke of Lancaster, were thrown into close personal association, and Chaucer's translation of some of Oton's balades affords conclusive evidence that literary connections also existed between the two poets. The full extent of Oton's influence upon Chaucer can not now be accurately determined, inasmuch as some of Oton's poems have been lost and even of those which have been preserved some are still difficult of access. We are specially fortunate, therefore, in having available a sequence of Valentine poems by Graunson, who seems to have been the first to popularize this type of verse in fourteenth-century England. Chaucer himself, notably in the Parlement of Foules and the Complaint of Mars, also took part in this cult of Saint Valentine's Day, and there thus seems reason to expect that an examination of Oton's Valentine poems may supply evidence which will be helpful in interpreting these Chaucerian pieces.

In the sale of the large collection of Gurney Manuscripts in 1920 one manuscript was overlooked, and still remains in the possession of Mr. Q. E. Gurney of Norwich, the brother of the former owner. Miss Allen supplies some information in regard to the date and the previous history of this manuscript; and a list of its contents (omitting, of course, the prose Abbey of the Holy Ghost) will be found in Carleton Brown's Register of Middle English Religious and Didactic Verse.

Erich Schmidt's brilliant essay, Fatisi und das sechzehnte Jahrhundert, gave the final sanction to the thesis, voiced by Goethe himself, that the Faust legend is in all its attributes a product of the Reformation. Despite recurrent protests, raised before and after the publication of Schmidt's essay, the Lutheran character of the legend has come to be regarded by literary historians as a dogma. To be sure, the universally Christian ancestry of Faust, Simon Magus, Theophilus, and other Manichæan and mediæval forerunners of the sixteenth-century Devil's Disciple, was unearthed by a host of parallel hunters; still, the Lutheranism of the legend has been upheld until today. Eugen Wolff's attempt to prove that the Volksbuch was a Catholic pamphlet met with little success. Although Adolf Hauffen conceded that there must have been a Catholic Faustbook also, the “genuine Lutheran tendency” of the legend, the triumph of faith over learning, was emphatically pointed out by Wolfgang Stammler in 1927; its Humanist and Lutheran tendencies were stressed by A. Bernt in 1930; and the familiar argument was reiterated by the recent work of G. Bianquis, who declared that in its form of 1587, and in all its subsequent versions, Faust's life is a Lutheran treatise.

Splendora may have been unworthy of the praise or censure of her contemporaries; she may not deserve ours. Yet the series of poems addressed to her and here transcribed from contemporary manuscripts reveal that her cheeks bloomed as rosily, her eyes burned as brightly, her lips flamed with as brilliant a scarlet as those of Amarantha, Lucasta, Sacharissa, and other beauties of established literary distinction.

In the history of literatures, as in the history of the races that produce them, it is axiomatic that often there comes from without some invigorating influence which, on being assimilated, may assume a significance perhaps all out of proportion to its original importance. Such was the effect of the figurón, in the Spanish comedia de figurón, upon the development of a type of uncouth and cowardly lover rôle in seventeenth-century French comedy, such as that of Sganarelle in Molière's Le Manage forcé. Now that we are enabled to study in its proper perspective French dramatic literature of the grand siècle, thanks to Professor Lancaster's monumental work on the subject, it becomes increasingly possible as well as pertinent for those interested in comparative literature to supplement and to underline certain facts already clearly brought out in Mr. Lancaster's six-volume study. In this paper I wish to present some observations on the literary antecedents of the figurón in Spanish drama and an interpretation of the significance of the figurón, together with a few comments upon French treatment of this type as transplanted by Paul Scarron and Thomas Corneille.

The Celeslina's probable influence on the early stages of the English drama through the adaptation published in 1530, its direct though perhaps slight influence on the English realistic novel, and its much greater indirect influence through its stepchild, the picaresque novel, lend interest to the translation published in 1631 by James Mabbe, or “Maybe,” as he may have pronounced his name, since he uses the punning pseudonym Don Diego Puede-ser. Despite numerous errors, some as elementary as confusing subject and object or turning a grandson into a nephew, Mabbe's work is a brilliant achievement. It does not read like a translation; nor does it read like the Spanish Celestina. Apparently the translator set himself to erase the vertical line of the Middle Ages completely, to paganize the work, and to make it represent the Renaissance spirit as he felt it.

No major English writer contemporary with William Congreve has left such scant information about himself. Biographers have feared, as Edmund Gosse tells us in 1888, that “the opportunity for preparing a full and picturesque life of this poet has wholly passed away.” When Gosse revised his life of Congreve in 1924, he found that the intervening thirty-five years had added practically nothing to our knowledge.

That the title of the Esprit des Lois is an accurate description of the contents of the book has not been seriously questioned, nor has the form of its translation into English as the Spirit of (the) Laws. But the extensive use of esprit by Montesquieu in the book has attracted the attention of most of its critics from the eighteenth century on. In the Lettres persanes, an ironical reflection of the manners, morals, customs, and laws of eighteenth-century France, the use of esprit is taken for granted; merely to amuse and interest is, clearly, a legitimate objective in a work of this type. But in a treatise of universal jurisprudence the frequent introduction of esprit has naturally provoked much comment, and some criticism.

Non, Muse et Grâce, il faut que vous vous accoutumiez à vous entendre dire naïvement qu'il n'y a rien dans le monde de plus aimable que vous, et qu'on voudrait passer la vie à vous voir et à vous entendre.“ Celle à qui Voltaire adressait1 ce galant badinage est la Charmante Iris des Epîtres xxxv (1732) et L (1736?):

Charmante Iris, qui sans chercher a plaire
Savez si bien le secret de charmer . ..

By 1755 English dramatic audiences as well as English dramatic critics were less concerned with faults in the construction of Shakespeare's plays then they had been twenty years earlier. Largely because of Garrick's excellent acting, the focal point of Shakespearian criticism was shifting from consideration of plot structure to consideration of character delineation. But even though advance was being made in the new criticism as well as in the growth of Shakespeare idolatry, such a varied mixture of realistic material, classical mythology, and fairy lore as Shakespeare used in A Midsummer Night's Dream was bound to fail in presentation. Pepys, nearly one hundred years earlier (September 29, 1662), had seen the play and had remarked that it was the most insipid and ridiculous one he had ever witnessed in his life. In 1716 Richard Leveridge presented his Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe at Lincoln's Inn Fields, where it had nine performances (from April 11 of that year until September 9, 1723). As the title suggests, it was a brief handling of Bottom's playing artisans—a mere fragment of Shakespeare's play. On January 21, 1745 an anonymous Mock Opera, Pyramus and Thisbe, appeared at Covent Garden and enjoyed some twenty-two performances until April 13, 1748. The music was composed by John Frederick Lampe, and the play was slightly longer than Leveridge's. No other performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in any of its parts is recorded until 1755 when Garrick made his first attempt to give his audiences some more of the material of the play. He was wise, as subsequent events proved, not to try to present it at that time in its entirety. Yet he was vitally interested in the whole of the play and joined eight years later with his friend George Colman in an attempt to produce it in its Shakespearian form.

Unter den Uebersetzungen deutscher Dramen in die englische Sprache nimmt die auf amerikanischem Boden entstandene und 1789 in Philadelphia anonym erschienene Übertragung von Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Trauerspiel “Miβ Sara Sampson” als eine der ersten eine wesentliche Stelle ein. Durch ihren Ursprung kommt ihr auβerdem für die Erkenntnis der frühen Einflüsse deutscher Literatur auf Amerika besondere Wichtigkeit zu. Da die deutsche Literatur im 18.Jahrhundert in diesem Lande fast unbekannt war, hat jede damals hier veröffentlichte Uebersetzung eines Literaturerzeugnisses ganz allgemein grosse Bedeutung. Diese wächst in jeder Beziehung, wenn es sich dabei um das Werk eines Dichters vom Range Lessings handelt.

For an admirer of Coleridge's literary criticism it is most unsettling and mortifying to observe that the scholars who have questioned his reputation, though they have been in the minority, are among the most distinguished students of literature in our time. Sometimes, it is true, this distinction has come in Wordsworth studies, which often produce not only the inevitable study of Wordsworth's friendly association with Coleridge but also an unconsciously partisan defence of Wordsworth against the criticism in Biographia Literaria. In other cases one assumes that these doubters of Coleridge's fame have been annoyed by the uncritical and sanctimonious chorus in his praise, and wish to work back toward a more balanced judgment. Yet when Mr. Lucas—to take the most explicit and severe critic for a first instance—ridicules a few selected absurdities of Coleridge without acknowledging his profundities, one does not get the impression of balanced literary criticism but of urbane and deadly satire. Such absurdities as he quotes are numerous enough in Coleridge, no doubt; one might even agree that many of them are not exceptional, but characteristic. But we do not judge Shakespeare by Titus Andronicus or Wordsworth by The Excursion or Keats by Endymion. Even if we consider the whole mind of a great man as the background of his genius, we judge him ultimately only by the genius itself, which can never be more than part of his mind. Surely this is more necessary with Coleridge than with almost any other writer whom one could name, for his ill-health, unhappiness, and slavery to opium, and the instability of his temperament, all clouded his genius so much that it is easier to see the clouds than the light. Students who have collected fragments never intended for publication have given only too ample a field of choice for those who wish to illustrate the dullness or the nonsense of Coleridge's prose, but these students have presumably worked for other students, who wish material for complete historical information. As a finished and sensitive historical student of English and classical literature, Mr. Lucas is surely as fully qualified to select for praise as for blame, though he limits himself to the latter. The illustrations which he so deftly and plausibly presents of “the art of sinking” in criticism might well be matched by similar bits from the poetry, which Mr. Lucas, like Mr. Garrod, praises at the expense of Coleridge's criticism. Yet neither he, nor any one else, has ever offered the poorer poems as a proof that The Ancient Mariner has no excellence.

If De Quincey has more than once proclaimed his mastery of the pure theory of political economy, he has also admitted, as in the Confessions, his occasional incapacity for systematic “domestic economy.” The extent of that incapacity is indicated, however, less in what he wrote for publication than in his anxious letters to the publishers who were the sources of his earned income; and Professor Eaton's faithful and judiciously proportioned new biography amply attests the reality of the financial tribulations which perplex that correspondence. But, while Professor Eaton's account of individual actions for debt—protested bills of exchange, homings, arrests, flights into and out of sanctuary—is impressive, if not appalling, the official records of De Quincey's cessio bonorum in 1833, which seem to have been overlooked hitherto, provide a general summation of his desperate financial plight in one of his most difficult years. The story of that action, as I may now piece it together with the assistance of Mr. W. M. Parker of Edinburgh, will show that in 1832 De Quincey actually suffered imprisonment for debt, though very briefly; that, in taking the benefit of a kind of personal bankruptcy procedure peculiar to Scots law, he acknowledged in 1833 a total indebtedness of £617 16s. to some fifty-one creditors; and that in his desperation he was driven to list among the debts due him the “gift” of £300 made to Coleridge in 1807.

The writers who exerted the greatest influence on the development of De Sanctis' thought are Vico and Hegel. We do not know exactly when De Sanctis became acquainted with Vico's theories. As early as 1833 he struck a friendship with Enrico Amante, who at that time was deeply immersed in the study of Vico, and he shared an apartment with Amante for three years, between 1837 and 1840. It is possible—and even probable—that De Sanctis was introduced to the study of Vico by his friend. Be that as it may, it is certain that the esthetic ideas of Vico constituted a powerful factor in the development of De Sanctis' critical theories. Cardinal tenets of De Sanctis' criticism—such as the sensuous character of poetry, phantasy conceived as the peculiar poetic faculty, the antithesis between poetry and philosophy, the psychological rather than logical approach to poetry—are obviously derived from the Principi d'una scienza nuova.

The letters written by Robert Browning to Isabella Blagden constitute the longest sustained correspondence carried on by the poet with any individual. The correspondence extends over more than twenty years, and for more than ten years of that time letters once every month were exchanged. This scheme of exchange—Miss Blagden to write on the twelfth and Browning to reply on the nineteenth—was begun in June, 1862. The correspondence ended in December, 1872, within a few weeks of the death of Miss Blagden. In bulk the letters outweigh those written to any other individual except Elizabeth Barrett. In style they are loose, usually hurried, dynamic, faultily constructed, friendly letters—full of gossip, opinion, detraction, dogged frankness, and honest vehemence. They are Browning, unadorned and prosy. Possibly no other single source offers so much information concerning his intimate life.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell, die sehr gewandte Biograpbin ihres vergötterten Onkels, Ch. G. Leland schreibt mit einer etwas belehrenden Ueberlegenheit:

I have heard it said the “younger generation” does not read the “Breitmann Ballads.” But, for all that, Breitmann has in him the stuff that endures, the stuff that ensured his success from the start.

The affinity of modern Populism to certain aspects of the Naturalist school in France has found general acceptance. Few critics, however, have attempted to trace this line of descent further back into the nineteenth century. Zola himself saw no precursors in the field of the proletarian novel beyond the confines of his own school, and cited Germinie Lacerteux as the first work bringing to the novel a sympathetic treatment of the humbler classes of society. Mr. Felix Walter has shown that the famous preface to the first edition of this novel constitutes a variety of pre-populist manifesto. Yet the claim of the Goncourt brothers to have produced “un roman vrai”—like their boast: “ce livre vient de la rue” —strikes no new note in the literary history of France. Almost a century earlier Rétif de la Bretonne had advanced substantially the same claim for his Pied de Fanchette, further noting that this seeming originality belonged to still another before him.

Le succès rapide de Julien Green n‘étonne pas: ce jeune Américain, né à Paris le 6 septembre 1900, s'est illustré dans les lettres francaises en publiant, entre 1925 et 1929, une série de romans et de nouvelles, toutes œuvres hallucinantes qui frappent par leur profonde originalité, par leur structure solide et par leur puissance. Il a reçu le prix Paul Flat de l'Académie Française pour son roman Adrienne Mesurat (1927), le prix Bookman pour la version anglaise de ce même roman sous le titre de The Closed Garden et le prix Harper pour The Dark Journey, traduction de l'original Lêviathan (1929). Si ses œuvres postérieures sont moins sensationnelles, elles n'en sont pas moins intéressantes, car elles jettent une lumière plus claire sur la personnalité et la philosophie de l‘écrivain.