The Coventry carol ‘Lully lulla yu littell tine child’, sung by the women in The Taylors & Shearmens Pageant to their babes before Herod's murderous soldiers burst in on them, is now well known and deservedly popular. It was first copied out by Thomas Sharp in 1825 from a manuscript copy of the pageant ‘newly correcte by Robert Croo’, who is said at the end to have finished his work on March 14, 1534. The manuscript was unfortunately destroyed in the disastrous fire at Birmingham City Reference Library in 1879, and thus Sharp's edition of the play has assumed considerable importance. Sharp's copying down of the musical score for ‘Lully lulla yu littell tine child’ presents no editorial difficulties; he was probably impressed by its immediate appeal and copied carefully from the manuscript. ‘Lully lulla’ has duly found a place in The Oxford Book of Carols.

In the major study concerning the relationship between the French dramatist, Robert Garnier, and the Elizabethan drama, the author, A. M. Witherspoon, tends to see literary choice as primarily motivated by casual personal considerations. He claims, for example, that Garnier, living in a period of civil strife in France, chose Roman themes for several of his tragedies because he admired ‘the Roman genius for organization’. Likewise he explains the Countess of Pembroke's attraction to Garnier's tragedies in that they centered around strong-minded women like Portia and Cornelia.

Although one cannot, of course, discount the importance of congeniality of theme in a dramatist's selection of a subject to portray or of a translator's choice of a work to render, one must not at the same time overlook certain other influences which govern these choices. And, in fact, since both Garnier and the Countess of Pembroke wrote as members of learned and circumscribed coteries, we might expect external influences to assume more than usual importance.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry has evoked wide disagreement among critics; even Wyatt studies seem conducive to scholarly scuffling. Back in 1908 and 1909, a lively controversy took place over the question of priority of French or Italian influence on the poet. The excitement has long since died down, but the question may be reopened by the small finding which this note reports.

Wyatt's well-known douzaine, Madame, withouten many wordes, was found by A. K. Foxwell to have a French source, with ‘some lines which are an exact translation of St. Gelais’ douzaine, S'amour vous a donne un cueur en gage’. Although this view has not been challenged before, a much likelier candidate for Wyatt's model is an Italian poem, Madonna, non so dir tante parole. This poem has been known to students of the Italian madrigal because it was set by one of the pioneer madrigalists, Phillip Verdelot.

The Neo-Latin Lexicon was launched two years ago with the publication of a brief prospectus appearing in the Winter, 1955, issue of Renaissance News (vii, 160-162). That prospectus announced the initiation of a cooperative project in Neo-Latin lexicography which would study and codify the Latin coinages and neologisms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Subsequently, an editorial committee was formed consisting of R. T. Bruère (Chicago), Fred W. Householder, Jr. (Cornell), James R. Naiden (Lakeside School), and Paul W. Blackford (Western Illinois State College). With the publication of a detailed outline of the project in Classical Weekly (No. 8, March 7, 1955) and in the Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance (1955, xvii, 2), and with the distribution of that outline to scholars with known interests and proficiencies in the field of modern Latin studies, a group of collaborators was recruited.