In his “Introduction” to Beowulf (p. lvii) Klaeber makes the following remark:

That some of the speeches follow conventional lines of heroic tradition need not be doubted. This applies to the type of the gylpcwide before the combat (675 ff., 1392 ff., 2510 ff.), the ‘comitatus’ speech or exhortation of the retainers (2633 ff., cp. Bjarkamál [Par. §7: Saxo ii.59 ff.,] Maldon 212 ff., 246 ff., Finnsb. 37 ff.).

The cardinal question of the inherent strength of the initial syllable has again been raised by Roland G. Kent in an article “The Alleged Strength of the Initial Syllable,” Language, vii, 3, (September, 1931), 179–189. Kent introduces his challenge of certain current notions of the Latin accent with the query:

This paper has for object the study of the type avoir beau+infinitive in Old French and Modern French. While pursuing the research the author was led to the observation of several cognate types which will be treated later. These, however, may be occasionally referred to in the present paper by the following stock phrases: bel le salua, le blé leva bel, molt lor est bel. In all these types bel is used adverbially.

This memorable passage (despite its anachronism in assuming that a superstition popular in the time of James I had already been accepted in the time of King Duncan of Scotland) illustrates the ramifications incident to an attempt to study a problem touching upon Romance philology and the history of medicine. The inflammation of the lymphatic glands, technically known as “tuberculous cervical adenitis” but ordinarily called “scrofula,” for a long period received the name of “the King's Evil,” and the treatment of it used to be the special prerogative of royalty. It was thought that the power of the British King to cure scrofula by touching the afflicted person went back to the time of King Lucius of Great Britain. As a matter of fact, King Lucius never existed —except in the imagination of the English theologian William Tooker in the sixteenth century—and the thaumaturgical power of the King began with Henry II (between 1154 and 1189). In France this royal prerogative was supposed to go back to the Merovingian King Clovis, but the earliest document substantiating the claim is the De Gallorum Imperio et Philosophia of Étienne Forcatel, published at Paris in 1579. The tradition of a French King's curing scrofula started with Philip I (between 1060 and 1108), and was actually revived at the coronation of Charles X at Reims in 1825. Attention is called to a painting of the sixteenth century, in the Pinacoteca of Turin, which shows a King of France about to touch a scrofulous crowd. At the right stands a patient on whose stomach one can discern clearly the head of a pig.

Among the manifold etymologies which have been proposed for the verb aller there is only one that is satisfactory phonetically, semantically, and historically: that is its derivation from aliare based on allatus. This simple and direct etymology seems to have occurred independently to various persons, but was first formally proposed in 1878 by J. Baur (Zs. für Rom. Phil., ii, 592). None of the other champions of the idea have ventured to publish anything on the subject. Baur's presentation was brief and unpretentious, for he apparently felt that the merits of the derivation required no elaborate argument.

Lord Berners's translation of Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de Amor presents a number of problems to scholars of English and Romance languages. This sentimental romance, which appeared in Spanish in 1492, was soon turned into Italian and French. The English version, The Castell of love, made by Lord Berners a few years before his death in 1533, does not appear to have been published much before the middle of the sixteenth century. Only four copies of the book in English, representing three editions, are known to exist. The British Museum possesses copies of two editions; a third edition is in the Huntington Library at San Gabriel, California. There is some disagreement over which of the English editions is the earliest, though it cannot be established with certainty that they were not preceded by some impression of which no copy is known today. A question of greater importance is whether or not Lord Berners actually translated the story, as is claimed on the title-page, from Spanish, or if he even translated a part of it from that language. If it can be determined that the claim made for a Spanish original is true, in whole or in part, this book deserves to be recognized as the first published translation from Spanish into English. The influence of the sentimental romances, such as The Castell of love, upon English fiction and wit in the sixteenth century is a subject which remains to be adequately treated.

In the third volume of E. K. Chambers' Elizabethan Stage is a short notice of Henry Cheke and his Certayne Tragedie written first in Italian, by F. N. B. entituled, Freewyl, and translated into English, by Henry Cheeke. Although Chambers, probably confused by the entry in the Stationers' Register on May 11, 1561, of a book “of Frewill,” quotes the title with John Tysdale as printer, none of the extant copies bears any mention of printer, place or date. It has been assumed in the past that the entry to Tysdale referred to Cheke's translation, but Dr. Harold Stein has pointed out to me that it must actually refer to one of a series of translations from Jean Veron issued by Tysdale at this time, the title in question reading: A most necessary treatise of free will. Cheke's book is listed under 1589 in Herbert's edition of Ames' Typographical Antiquities, but no printer is assigned and no reason given for the date except the statement that the revolt of the Netherlands is referred to in the play, whereas as a matter of fact it is the revolt of Germany from papal authority in the time of Luther. The question has been pretty well settled, however, by Mr. William A. Jackson, who has made a detailed study of the copy in the Pforzheimer collection. He writes me that the book is certainly the work of Richard Jugge and that a comparison of some of the smaller initial blocks in the Cheke volume with the same ones in Eden's translation of Peter Martyr's History of travayle in the west and east Indies, printed by Jugge in 1577, shows that the blocks are noticeably more worn and broken in the latter volume. Cheke's book was presumably printed, therefore, before that date and after 1572, since the dedicatee, Lady Cheynie of Toddington, did not acquire that title until her husband was raised to the peerage as Baron Cheynie of Toddington in 1572. I incline to a date close to the earlier year.

It is an old and popular tradition that Elizabeth was a great lover of letters and a patron of the Arts. In 1718 Ambrose Philips sought to animate his country-women

Spenser's Muiopotmos has provoked much ingenious speculation, but no general agreement as to its meaning has been reached. One school of critics in fact warns us against seeking too precise a meaning. Selincourt in the one-volume Oxford edition of Spenser's Works, says:

Specific study of the interesting critical dicta in Fielding's histories has been unreasonably neglected by scholars: Austin Dobson in his biography merely touches upon the author's general literary purpose as expressed in Joseph Andrews. G. M. Godden is content to take brief notice of Fielding's estimate of critics, and John C. Metcalf, in his essay “Henry Fielding, Critic,” is concerned almost exclusively with that phase of Fielding's opinion which is brought out in his dramas. In the monumental work of Cross, the subject as such is ignored, though Fielding's war with The Grub Street Journal receives ample exposition. Miss Thornbury's recent dissertation embodies a thorough commentary on Fielding's learning, and establishes him as a traditionalist in form, an artist practicing, in the light of reason always, established comic-epic rules. Yet such significant items as Fielding's quarrels with dogmatic critics, his convictions about travel books, plagiarism, and the essentials of a good writer, and his philosophy of character lie, in the main, outside the limits of her investigation. The only adequate approach to this subject has been that of F. O. Bissell, Jr., and it is perhaps not so thorough as might be wished, in spite of ample excerpts from the prefaces and digressional chapters of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.

Le Manuscrit catalogué sous la cote 612 à la bibliothèque de Besançon est un volume de 498 pages intitulé “Correspondance littéraire de M. Suard avec le margrave de Bareuth, commencée au mois de Janvier 1773, terminée à la fin de 1775.” Aux folios 137–144 de ce manuscrit se trouve un article portant comme titre: “Eloge de Jean Bte Colbert qui n'a point concouru pour le prix de l'Académie françoise.” Ce titre est suivi des deux mots: par Diderot, et, d'autre part, on lit en marge l'annotation: ms. de Diderot. Cette double indication invite à examiner l'authenticité et la signification du morceau, mais, pour éclairer la discussion il semble désirable d'en présenter d'abord le texte, que nous reproduisons, en respectant l'orthographe et la ponctuation de l'original.

The only occasions on which Burns is known to have kept a regular journal were his tour of the Border in May, 1787, and his visit to the Highlands in the late summer of the same year. Dr. Currie, the poet's first authorized biographer, made some slight use of these documents, but what was alleged to be the complete text was first published by Allan Cunningham in 1834, after being further quoted by Lockhart in his Life of Burns in 1828. When the original of the Highland journal again came to light some years ago it proved to be considerably briefer than Cunningham's printed text. Mr. J. C. Ewing, who in 1927 edited the work in facsimile, believes the additions to have been made by Burns himself in a recension, now lost, of his original penciled notes. Professor Snyder, however, suspects Cunningham himself to be the author of the revisions, and in the absence not only of Burns's enlarged manuscript but of any proof that such a manuscript ever existed, it is difficult not to agree with Snyder. Cunningham's reputation as editor and biographer is so justly suspect that the burden of proof rests upon the defenders of his text.

Though Milton and Mirabeau were devoted to almost identical ideals of civil liberty, their personalities offer a peculiar contrast. Milton was an idealist, a theorist, a poet; he was abstemious in food and drink, inclined to seclusion, religious by nature. Mirabeau, on the other hand, was a soldier, an orator, a political leader. Whereas Milton was thoughtful and reserved, Mirabeau was animated, impulsive, ever seeking the center of action, forever restless and impatient. Sensual and gluttonous, he was as much a slave to his passions as any of the Englishmen Milton condemned for being so; and in his last moments he turned away, more in kindness than in derision, the priest who sought to shrive him. Notwithstanding these essential differences, Mirabeau found in Milton a kindred spirit; he found in him that flaming love of liberty, that passion for essential freedoms, that lofty and unselfish devotion to country to which he himself aspired. Milton's influence on Mirabeau, many times suggested but never evaluated, is one of significant interest to students of Milton's politics. A close study of two Mirabeau tracts, Théorie de la Royauté après la Doctrine de Milton and De la liberté de la Presse, reveals not only that Mirabeau's reading of Milton strikingly verified his own political conclusions: it presents evidence that Milton's voice at a critical period of the Revolution became the weapon of its most powerful leader. French cries for liberty found expression in the tracts of the Puritan poet.

On New Year's Eve, 1828, Washington Irving, who was stopping in Seville during his first visit to Spain, made this entry in his diary:

In a former article, I traced the history of Balzac's literary reputation in England as an example of the persistent change in the Victorian point of view toward moral and literary questions. In spite of the vitriolic attacks of critics and moralists and the general apprehension of the reading public, Balzac ultimately was accepted in England. In the thirties, “… a baser, meaner, filthier scoundrel never polluted society”; in the nineties, he is acclaimed one of those “divine spies, for whom the world has no secrets,” who finds “spirit everywhere,” and who gives “us so much life that we are almost overpowered by it.” The fervor of the moralists in the nineties was no less than in the thirties, but the objects of their concern, and consequently their standards of judgment, had undergone radical modifications.

It is not commonly known that Pierre Lasserre, author of the notorious Romantisme français and long associated with Charles Maurras as leader of the dogmatic, authoritarian reaction against the romantic and liberal philosophies of the nineteenth century, died a liberal. That Lasserre in 1930 was on the threshold of a new life, that he was struggling desperately against time to bring forth the fruit of an intellect that had been slow in ripening, is a conclusion which may readily suggest itself to one who is familiar with the last stages of the critic's thought.

To speak a foreign language with a correct accent, one must acquire the ability to produce each sound accurately, but is that all? Are sounds put together differently or are transitions from one sound to another made perhaps in the same way in different languages and, consequently, of little or no importance? Comparatively little attention has been paid to the waysounds are put together, to glides or sons transitoires. The generally accepted opinion is expressed by Jespersen:

In an exposition of the chief views of art set forth by Oswald Spengler anyone familiar with The Decline of the West will realize at once that a short paper can present only a very brief summary of the material on art scattered throughout the two volumes. Moreover, Spengler's views of art are so completely intertwined with information relative to the other activities of life that an essay may not be wholly restrictive in subject matter. Spengler makes the task doubly uninviting for the investigator by erecting a pons asinorum between himself and the would-be critic. Note, for example, the following sentence: