The nearer the knights of Arthur's Court approach the Grail, the more illusive and intangible the holy vessel appears. In Sir Percivale's own words:

“Lo, if I find the Holy Grail itself
And touch it, it will crumble into dust.“

Thus one might say the Grail symbolizes in its evasiveness the problem of its own origin. For if its source is still to be sought, this is largely because the problem involved so easily eludes one's grasp. The difficulty is to fix the eye on the main issue, to the exclusion of secondary considerations. The Grail stories have been classed as Perceval and Galaad forms, as those in which a quest is the burden of the tale, as those in which it is the history of the sacred vessel itself.

In 1904 I ventured to write an article entitled “The Nature and Fabric of The Pearl,” in which I advanced opinions at variance with those previously held on the subject. Since then have appeared a new edition of the poem, five new English translations of all or a large part of it, and several articles on various aspects of the work. In no one of these documents has my point of view with regard to the symbolism, allegory, and autobiography in the poem been fully accepted. To be sure, the chief part of former, fanciful speculations regarding the author's life and incentive to composition have not been repeated; but all who have recently written about the poem have clung tenaciously to the pleasant belief that The Pearl is a personal lament of the poet for a daughter of his own, and therefore strictly elegiac and autobiographical. This belief would be fairly harmless if (because of the primary stress always laid upon it) it did not inevitably obscure the true significance of the poem; but on this account it should not be allowed to establish itself more firmly without frank protest.

It has usually been assumed by historians of the drama that amusements of a dramatic kind at court kept pace with those of the country in general. The entries of 1348 in the Record Books of the Great Wardrobe, which belong to the reign of Edward III, and which concern tunics and visors used in a Christmas celebration, have been interpreted as referring to dramatic entertainments (Collier, i, 15, 22; Warton, ii, 72; Brotanek; Ward, i, 148). This view, however, has recently been called into question in the researches of Professor Arthur Beatty, of the University of Wisconsin, who has pointed out that tunics and visors were also necessities of the tournament, that “It is antecedently improbable that Edward III should have had dramatic entertainments on important occasions,” and that therefore these important entries do not prove the existence of dramatic entertainments at this early date.

This farce, which is here published for the first time, is found in a collection of manuscript poetry in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid with the press mark 2621. It bears number 1239 in Sr. Paz y Melia's catalogue of plays in the Biblioteca Nacional. The handwriting is of the early sixteenth century. The volume contains poems, for the most part anonymous, of the sixteenth century, in Castilian and Catalan. On the first page, in a hand of the seventeenth century, we read: “En este libro ay poesias de Jorge de Montemayor, de Juan Fernandez, de D. Luis Margarit, de D. Luis de Milan, de D. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, de N. Torrellas, de D. Hernando de Acuña, de Alvaro Gomez de Ciudad Real y de otros autores inciertos.”

Some time since, Mr. Paul Radin, a student of Ethnology in Columbia University, happened upon the discovery, in a second-hand book store in New York, of an early edition of the works of Lucan. On investigation, the two stout wooden boards with which the volume was bound were found to be lined with two manuscript sheets of an admirably written parchment codex (150 x 195 mm.) which Mr. Radin brought to the present writer for examination. It is by Mr. Radin's kindness that opportunity has been given to make the following communication.

Although French fable literature played a prominent part in the evolution of the Æsopic Fable in the Middle Ages, no general account of its history and development has as yet been written by any modern scholar. Single collections of French fables dating from this period have been published from time to time in more or less critical editions, and certain phases of the more general field have been investigated by various scholars, but it is believed that the present paper may justly claim to be the first general survey of Old French Fable Literature within certain well-defined limits.

The Faust legend is the Hydra of literature. One of its heads pops up in the story of Simon Magus, its body reaches from New Testament times to the days of Goethe, while a new head has just sprouted in Stephen Philips's latest drama. The Faust story has all the ear-marks of a legend endowed with eternal youth. More than three hundred years ago the most popular tragedy on the London stage was Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, while the play which is creating the greatest interest to-day on our American stage is a modern treatment of the Faust legend under the title of Der Teufel. So much for the absorbing interest which the story has (and ever will have) in its dramatic form.

The Towneley Mysteries have two remarkable characteristics which have attracted the attention of scholars: they contain a number of plays borrowed directly from the York cycle and they also contain a number of other plays so conspicuous for their highly dramatic form that the cycle may be said to have reached in them the highest point in the dramatic development of the English Mystery. Various theories have been advanced to account for the presence of these two sets of plays in Towneley and especially for the relationship, and its extent, of Towneley and York. The two theories of greatest interest are those of Professor Davidson and Professor Hohlfeld. A third, advanced by Mr. Pollard, is practically the same as Professor Hohlfeld's, with one or two slight modifications, which hardly concern us here.

One of the earliest members of the important Scève family at Lyons was Henri Scève, great-grandfather of Maurice Scève, the leading poet of the Lyonnese renaissance. Henri, who was still living in 1471, seems to have had two sons, François and Léonard. Of François, the younger of these sons, we learn that about 1480 he suffered considerable damage à la barre du pont du Rosne tant pour la mortalité, gens d'armes, que pour les grans eaues.

In 1493, he possessed des prés et des terres labourables in the parish of Vaise. Ten years later (1503), he and his son were proprietors of the inn Ste-Catherine, which, however, was maloustru et mal prouffitant.

The Latin poem De arte graphica by Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy was edited with a translation into French prose and with notes by Roger de Piles in 1668; and in 1695 John Dryden, “to satisfy the desires of so many gentlemen who were willing to give the world this useful work,” not only translated de Piles's book into English prose but also supplied his translation with an “original preface containing a parallel between painting and poetry.” Dryden's Parallel is one of the least original, but it is not the least interesting of his literary essays: Saintsbury calls it “the first writing at any length by a very distinguished Englishman of letters on the subject of pictorial art.” Together with his translation of du Fresnoy and de Piles, it forms for us English-speaking people the handiest introduction to that long-lived esthetic theory founded upon the proposition Ut pictura poesis. Lessing seems to have seen in Dryden's preface some suggestion of a deviation of the parallel lines from the common direction; or perhaps the point at which they ought to have parted company; for he wrote, “ Falsche Übertragung des mahlerischen Ideals in die Poesie. Dort ist es ein Ideal der Körper, hier muss es ein Ideal der Handlungen seyn. Dryden in s. Vorrede zum Fresnoy.”

This curious product of mediævalism, translated from some Latin treatise by an unknown hand in the latter half of the fifteenth century, carries symbolism to its last stage. It is interesting as showing how the preachers in the abbeys and cathedrals of England found, on occasion, “sermons in stones.” It would seem as if Longfellow must have read this poem; for a part of his Golden Legend, the close of Friar Cuthbert's sermon, is an accurate reproduction of the spirit of this piece.

The Scandinavian analogues to the adventures of Beowulf are of considerable interest to students of the Anglo-Saxon epic. Stories of this type, occasionally affording striking resemblances in detail, appear in distant countries,—among the Japanese and the North American Indians, for example,—but these are clearly of little significance for the evolution of the tale on Germanic soil. And we need hardly attach more weight to the feats of the Celtic hero Cuchulinn, nearer neighbor though he be, than to those of Tsuna in Japan. The case is different with parallels in märchen and saga found among the very peoples by whose kinsfolk the deeds in the epic must have been celebrated. In two instances the story is told of heroes of later times. Grettir the Strong, who subdues two trolls, one in a hall and the other in a cave under a waterfall, was a historical character of the eleventh century, and Orm Storolfsson, whose struggles with a demon cat and a giant recall in many ways the deeds of Beowulf, flourished some two centuries later. The validity of a third parallel, in the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, is by no means clear. Here the problem is complicated in various ways. The saga itself is late, hardly older than the time of Chaucer in its present shape, and possibly dating from the early part of the fifteenth century.

This interesting clue to the source of the play has not been carefully followed up. “The origin of the story on which it is founded,” says Ward, “is unknown; but unless the Prologue's assertion that the plot is based on fact is to be taken literally, its source is probably some nearly contemporary novel. Either Ford or the novelist from whom he borrowed made little account of historical probability in choosing Sparta as the scene of a love-tragedy which savours of mediæval Italy.” Ellis, also, remarks that the scene is “curiously placed in Sparta,” and adds that the story “may have been taken from an Italian novel.”

The normal sign for ń in Old French is ign. The consonantal portion of this trigraph represents the value of Latin gn as felt or pronounced in the Merovingian period in such words as magnus, agnellus, the sequence of development probably being gn > > > ń thru the fronting influence of n upon the preceding . That the vowel i should have been added to gn with this new palatal value will not appear strange to anyone familiar with the history of palatalized consonants in Old French. It represents the vowel glide which is potentially present whenever a palatalized consonant follows after a vowel. Its appearance in writing must therefore be due to a definite consciousness of its presence as a phonic element in the spoken syllable. In other words, the scribes who invented the trigraph ign must have heard and felt the vowel. And as a matter of fact, the modern pronunciation of this sound in final position and before consonant shows that this assumption is accurate; for gain, coin, juin presuppose an earlier pronunciation gãiń, kõiń, džỹiń, and plaindre and joindre must have passed thru plãindre, džõindre. However, if this evidence may be accepted as conclusive for the presence of the i under these conditions, there is equally strong evidence in the modern language that in medial position (montagne, gagner, besogne) the palatal glide did not develop into a full vowel.

While the origin, sources, and evolution of the drama of the sixteenth century have been elaborately studied, curiously enough the non-dramatic literature of the period has suffered from comparative neglect. Monographs on single authors, studies on English literature alone, in many cases have erred thru false perspective. Thus, altho the time is not yet ripe for the general history of the sonnet, desired by M. Vaganay, it may be profitable briefly to consider English literature, in one of its phases, in relation to the great movement of which it was a part.

In the Prologue to the Man of Law's Tale we are told that any one who will read Chaucer's Legend of Good Women may see—

The crueltee of thee, queen Medea,
Thy litel children hanging by the hals
For thy Jason, that was of love so fals;

but when one turns to the Legend of Medea, one looks in vain for the promised bit of sensationalism. In the closely related Legend of Hypsipyle, to he sure, the unhappy Lemnian queen prophetically prays—

That she, that had his herte yrafte her fro,
Moste finden him to her untrewe also,
And that she moste bothe her children spille.