The Interlinear gloss of the Vespasian Psalter (in British Museum MS. Cotton Vespasian A. 1) is generally regarded as a Mercian text; indeed, it seems to be our best written record of the one Old English dialect which comes closest of any to being the direct ancestor of the standard language of modern England. Where so important a text is concerned, we should like to know as much as possible about the date, the provenience, and all other matters having any bearing upon our linguistic interpretation of the written symbols. One of the more crucial questions at the present time is whether the gloss is an original work of the ninth century or a ninth-century copy of an earlier (? eighth-century) gloss. It is important that we know whether this text represents the more or less homogeneous dialect of a single period or whether it is a mixture of earlier and later forms.

The Authorship of the Romaunt of the Rose, subject of ardent controversy for nearly a century, can at last be established beyond any significant measure of doubt, for there is a new and highly reliable kind of evidence to show that at least two men were responsible for the existing partial translation of the famed Roman de la rose into Middle English. More than 200 MSS of the original French poem, composed by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun in the thirteenth century, have been catalogued by the late Ernest Langlois. The French scholar divided these MSS into three main groups, I, II, and III, and into subgroups or families marked by capital letters; while individual MSS he designated by the family letter plus a lower-case letter, Ab, He, Ha, and so on. In consequence of Langlois' great work, scholars have been enabled to compare the ME Romaunt with the variant readings of the MSS of its French original, and as will be demonstrated below, such comparison throws revealing light upon the facts of the Romaunt's composition.

After Foscolo's arrival in England in 1817 he was soon made welcome at Holland House, the palatial home of Lord Holland—a home distinguished by the generous kindliness of its master and by the richness of its library. Among the residents of the great establishment were two Italians with whom Foscolo became well acquainted: Serafino Buonaiuti, a factotum who assisted in the library, and Giuseppe Binda, a protégé who at times, at least, rendered secretarial service.

Milton's polemical tracts of the Puritan Revolution have long offered difficulty to scholars, and these difficulties are intensified in the eight pamphlets which he wrote during the chaotic closing years of the interregnum. One problem concerns Milton's bewildering shifts of political allegiance among the various parties and models of government: he first acquiesced in the protectorate of Richard Cromwell, then denounced protectorian government and eulogized the restored Rump Parliament and the commonwealth, then defended an army government which deposed the Rump, then demanded the Rump's return, then offered plans for perpetuating three different legislatures in power or about to come to power, and at one point proposed the establishment of a temporary monarchy or protectorate. Furthermore, during this brief period he restated two contradictory theories of government developed in earlier tracts—the popular-sovereignty theory, asserting the right of every free people to choose, alter, and depose their government, and an “aristocratic” theory justifying the “worthy minority” in imposing and perpetuating its rule over an “unworthy” majority. Also intensified is the ambiguity, long present in Milton's tracts, concerning the relation of regenerate to the civil government: Milton's ecclesiastical pamphlets of 1659 define a sharp separation of church and state in terms of their laws, concerns, and jurisdictions, but in other works of this period he appears to assert the contradictory doctrine that the “Saints” should enjoy special political privileges.

The Pope-Philips controversy, and particularly the place in it of Gay's Shepherd's Week (1714), has been studied from many points of view by George Sherburn, William H. Irving, Hoyt Trowbridge, and J. E. Congleton. Sherburn has, in his felicitous manner, guided us through the convolutions of conflicting personalities and animosities both political and literary which effected the quarrel. Irving has suggested that the connection of The Shepherd's Week with the quarrel existed only in Pope's fertile imagination, since Gay's poem primarily burlesqued Virgil, not Philips; and Trowbridge, in answer to Irving, has demonstrated that Gay was quite aware of Philips' Pastorals in writing his own. Finally, Congleton has discussed the whole controversy against a background of neoclassical and rationalistic French and English critical theory of pastoral poetry. None has indicated, however, that Thomas D'Urfey's reputation for the writing of songs and ballads influenced both the quarrel and The Shepherd's Week.

The female husband (published 12 November 1746) is an anonymous pamphlet so obscure and so nearly pornographic that its few acquaintances have passed it by, almost in complete silence. I know of only four copies, one each in the British Museum, the Bristol Public Libraries, the Huntington Library, and the library of Charles B. Woods, of the State University of Iowa. It purports to be the biography of one Mary Hamilton, who was in fact tried for fraud at Taunton, Somerset, on 7 October 1746. It has long been acknowledged, on external evidence, as Henry Fielding's. But among themselves scholars remain skeptical. The pamphlet has remained in limbo, listed for immortality but ignored, not quite accepted and not quite damned. I hope to demonstrate beyond all doubt that The Female Husband is Fielding's, and to suggest that this pamphlet, though of slight literary worth, is an interesting exhibit of Fielding at work upon meager journalistic fact, a somewhat discomforting glimpse of the comic moralist trying to sustain his principles and his comedy within recalcitrant material.

In recent works on eighteenth-century drama and theatrical practices, Aaron Hill's Zara has received passing attention because of its notable longevity. The play did make theatrical history of a sort in that it was one of only three which were presented for more than twenty consecutive years during David Garrick's tenure at Drury Lane as manager (1747–76). Zara, with its twenty-three consecutive seasons, was surpassed only by Hamlet and Benjamin Hoadly's Suspicious Husband in unbroken performance, both of the latter, having achieved twenty-nine consecutive seasons. But mere longevity and consecutiveness of performance cannot force the play upon the attention of today's students of the history of the drama. What perhaps can, however, is the hitherto unrecorded fact that for a considerable portion of its history in Garrick's theater and for years afterward it was not Hill's play but Garrick's own adaptation that was popular. Furthermore, it is an adaptation which sheds interesting light on Garrick's dramatic methods and increases his stature as a careful reviser of older plays.

Jean Philippe Rameau (1684–1764) is generally recognized as the greatest French musician of the eighteenth century. His achievements in theory and practice were considered outstanding by his contemporaries, friend and adversary alike, and posterity has not altered this opinion. After what would ordinarily amount to a lifetime as a church organist, Rameau propounded in 1722 and 1726 his famous principle of the basse fondamentale, which he expanded and defended in more than twenty-five books, articles, and pamphlets in the course of his career. After one failure (Samson, 1732), he conquered the operatic stage with Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 and dominated it with his more than two dozen other operas until his death. His heavy-handed discipline exerted upon the singers, the dancers, and especially the orchestra of the Royal Academy of Music worked an enormous and radical improvement in performance. Few musicians in any time can lay claim to greater practical accomplishment in the service of their art.

Ever since it was first published, Shelley's The Cenci has met with antagonism and misunderstanding. In the original instance this reaction was in part due to a prudish horror at the subject matter, which an enlightened modern reader finds hard to comprehend. However, continued resistance to the play, characterized by grudging admission that it has poetic merits but doesn't quite “come off,” suggests that something more than the theme of incest has dulled or blurred its tragic impact. One clue to The Cenci's failure to gain acceptance as “the best tragedy of modern times,” as Mary Shelley called it, might be found in its varied and often conflicting interpretations by critics and casual readers alike. That the play should be ambiguous to anyone would doubtless have puzzled Shelley. “It is,” he told Trelawny, “a work of art; it is not colored by my feelings nor obscured by my metaphysics.” It would seem, however, that his faith in his own lucidity was not justified.

Among the surprising omissions from Rus-kin's autobiography Praeterita is any substantial analysis of the critical debate over the art of J. M. W. Turner which led Ruskin to write Modern Painters in 1843. The autobiography merely tells us that in 1836, when Ruskin was just seventeen years old, he had been aroused to a pitch of “black anger” by a review in Blackwood's of Turner's pictures, and that he had remained in this mood “pretty nearly ever since.” This ribald review, Ruskin adds, expressed “the feelings of the pupils of Sir George Beaumont at the appearance of these unaccredited views of Nature.” We learn only from his correspondence that it was a similar review in 1842 which made him resolve to write a pamphlet that would “blow the critics out of the water.”

Verlaine may be one of the least intellectual of French poets, yet his “Art poétique” finds its way regularly into anthologies of French literature as the perfect symbolist counterpart of Gautier's “L'art,” the manifesto Of the Parnassians. “De la musique avant toute chose” is the advertised motto of the symbolist school of the eighties and nineties, just as the marmorean ideal was of the Parnassians of the sixties and seventies, indeed of Verlaine himself in the Poèmes saturniens (“Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Vénus de Milo?”). As in the case of any such well-worn document, there are two points of view from which it may be studied: (1) the intent of the creator of the document and (2) the overlay of interpretation which has developed around it. Let us attempt to render service to Verlaine by trying to determine his own meaning, through close examination of this and other works of the poet, as distinct from the meaning which his followers and associates read into this little “chanson.”

When critics compare an author's early works with those of his maturity, it is usually to emphasize his final achievement. In one extreme case, such a comparison has even been urged as a source of moral uplift for struggling authors. When Charpentier brought out in 1880 a new printing of Zola's first novel, La confession de Claude, a critic advised young writers to read it and take heart, since the fact that the author of Nana could have written anything so abysmally bad twentyyears before proved beyond question that lamentable beginnings did not mean inevitable failure. Too seldom have critical comparisons of this kind gone beyond this demonstrative act, and one might reasonably question their worth when they fail to do so, for after all, if a work is a masterpiece should not that fact be discernible from the work itself?

The extensive commentaries on Ibsen as a writer of tragedy are varied arid, as one might suspect, even contradictory. S. H. Butcher, for example, found Ibsen deficient as a tragic dramatist on nearly all counts. My primary purpose in this essay will be to present Ibsen's concept of tragedy through an analysis of Brand (1866), Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1886), and The Master Builder (1892), with passing attention to Emperor and Galilean (1873), while my secondary purpose will be to determine how successful he was as a writer of tragedy.

The three sonnets that Rilke published in his Neue Gedichle (1907–08) under the collective title “Das Portal” were written between 8 and 11 July 1906, during the period of intense productivity following the break with Rodin (May 1906). Ever since it has become fashionable to ignore Rilke's Neue Gedichte as “intellektuell aufgezwungen,” these poems have been overlooked by many scholars and critics; even the most recent and staunchest champion of the Neue Gedichte, Hans Berendt, has failed to explore various aspects of these sonnets that would serve to relate them more closely to Rilke's earlier and later work. The reasons for this neglect are obvious. The three sonnets represent a perfect example of the “Dinggedicht” of this period, being apparently nothing more than the poetic depiction of a particular portal of a certain cathedral in France; such an objective attempt to grasp and express the essence of a foreign “thing” is, by common consent, necessarily alien to the singularly subjective flow of the poet's own thoughts and emotions. Furthermore, this new conception of poetry arose under the influence of the sculptor Rodin, whom Rilke was striving to emulate in his efforts always to capture the essential nature of the model and the “modelé” to the exclusion of subjective impressions. Since Rilke learned much about cathedrals under the tutelage of Rodin, his poems on architectural subjects are even more highly suspect of being “intellektuell aufgezwungen” than, say, poems dealing with gazelles or carrousels. Yet in many of the Neue Gedichte, as has been demonstrated, there is more to be found than sheer poetic virtuosity, and undeniable thematic connections with the entire body of Rilke's poetic creation have been uncovered. A closer examination of the “Portal” sonnets reveals that even here certain characteristic themes may be found.

Sherwood Anderson's autobiographical works attest his continuing absorption with the incidents and the form of his short story “Death in the Woods.” In his Memoirs he says that he tried to write the story “a dozen times over as many years.” It appears in a tentative early version in Tar. Many of its episodes are used in a seldom-read fragment entitled “Father Abraham,” which supposedly developed the life of Lincoln; indeed, the story's materials occupy a dominant position in that strange, often autobiographical work. Elsewhere in his Memoirs (pp. 310–312), he relates the incident of the dogs' death ritual as having happened to himself. We may doubt the literal truth of that account, since Anderson himself repeatedly questions whether the event was fact or dream; in any case, however, the story was filled, for Anderson, with great personal and artistic significance.