George Wither was first imprisoned in 1614 for his Abuses Stript and Whipt. But he had barely escaped a similar fate a few years before as a result of an earlier edition of the same work. While in prison in 1614, he expressed his gratitude to the Princess Elizabeth for her intervention in his behalf on that earlier occasion:

For once I stood accus'd for this before,
As I remember I so long agon,
Snng [sic] Thame, and Rhynes Epithalamion.
When SHE that from thy Royal selfe deriues,
Those gracious vertues that best Title giues.
........................................
Daign'd in her great-good nature to encline
Her gentle eare to such a cause as mine;
And which is more, vouchsaf't her word to cleare
Me from all dangers (if there any were).

For over a hundred years critics and biographers, in commenting on Dryden's interest in experimental science, have assumed that he was an active member of the Royal Society. That Dryden's name was connected with the early affairs of the Society seems to have been discovered by Andrew Kippis and announced by him in the following note to his account of Dryden's life in the second edition of Biographia Britannica.

Literary style, like human personality, is a compound exceedingly difficult of analysis, for when its more obvious constituents are made clear, there still remains an illusive element, consciousness of which leaves the analyst with the unpleasant sensation of not having reached the bottom of the matter. As the most complex phenomenon in literature, style is the resultant of all the forces, known and unknown, underlying literary development, and the method and extent of the contribution made by each of these forces are a matter of probable inference rather than of positive demonstration. For that reason, any attempt, however ambitious, to account for the style of a literary epoch must be content with pointing out those more obvious influences that are combined and reflected in speech and writing, and with ignoring other factors which may escape detection. Under the protection of this confession I shall attempt to make manifest what seems to me the most important influence instrumental in changing the luxuriant prose of the Commonwealth into that of a diametrically opposite nature in the Restoration.

In 1843 Peter Cunningham included in a collection of verse printed for the Percy Society an anonymous poem in blank verse, To the Memory of Mr. Congreve, whose authorship Cunningham, at the suggestion of H. J. Cary, ascribed to James Thomson. This ascription was made on the following grounds: that the style of the poem was Thomson's; that the poem was originally printed in 1729 by J. Millan, who was the publisher of Thomson's Winter, Summer, To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, and Brittania; and that “these poems by Thomson are advertised among Millan's books, and at the head of his list at the end of this very publication.”

Few lyric poems of the eighteenth century have aroused as much interest during the past fifty years as Christopher Smart's Song to David. Poets, critics, and scholars have lavished praises upon it ever since Browning so liberally commended it in his Parleyings. It appears—usually only in part—in nearly all the anthologies, and in England the entire text has several times been separately reprinted. So much attention to the poem has led inevitably to a desire for more knowledge about the poet, and various scholars have attempted to satisfy this desire. Nearly all, however, have been baffled by the complications of the poet's periods of insanity, or else have jumped to conclusions that will not fit the facts. The late Sir Edmund Gosse, by the beauty and urbanity of his appreciation of Smart's poetic genius, in Gossip in a Library in 1891, did much to rehabilitate him in the world of letters. Unfortunately, Sir Edmund was seriously wrong in many of his most essential statements concerning the poet's life, and his misconceptions and misinterpretations of the facts have served as the basis of nearly all subsequent accounts, including that by Thomas Seccombe in the Dictionary of National Biography.

In the year 1761 there was published, it is uncertain where, a French play entitled L'Humanité ou le Tableau de l'Indigence, Triste Drame par un Aveugle Tartare. Although of mediocre dramatic or literary merit, it has attracted the attention of various scholars because it forms the center of a “curious problem of literary history.” The mystery that has hitherto surrounded the play may be satisfactorily cleared up, it seems to me, with the aid of a notice furnished by C. H. Schmid in an eighteenth-century German periodical.

Almost a century and a half ago, on March 3, 1784, a brilliant audience overflowed the Theatre Royal at Edinburgh on the occasion of a performance “For the Benefit of a Lady in Distress.” The proceeds, some three hundred pounds, were later sent to Ann Smollett, then a widow in Leghorn. Since that remote period there has been very little news of the wife of Tobias Smollett. Rather recently, however, certain material has come to hand which contributes to our knowledge of Ann Smollett, and also throws additional light upon the closing years of the author of Roderick Random.

In 1790 a gruesome incident occurred in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, which incidentally affords evidence as to the reputation of Milton in the late eighteenth century. A body, thought to be that of the poet, was disinterred and for two days despoiled outrageously by souvenir-hunters. The question whether the body was or was not that of Milton was much disputed at the time and has remained unsettled ever since. Masson does not so much as allude to the affair and its discreditable and distasteful character has resulted in a glozing suppression of truth.

Pantisocracy, although usually dismissed with a casual paragraph in any discussion of Coleridge, presents a chapter in the poet's development which deserves to be more fully investigated. I shall endeavor in the present paper to trace the influences that awakened Coleridge's interest in Pantisocracy, and to follow the course of this interest down to its termination. In dealing with this subject, it is necessary to consider two questions: first, what travel literature was extant at the period under discussion (1790–1801); and second, what probability there is that Coleridge had access to these sources.

In the course of preparing an edition, with the kind permission of the Coleridge family, of the unpublished correspondence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I have found, among the several hundred letters examined, five written by Coleridge to Lord Byron which afford a fuller view of the relationship between the two poets. The contact between Coleridge and Byron was brief, their correspondence being confined to the period between Easter 1815 and April 1816, the time at which Byron finally departed from England. It is known that in 1812 Byron interceded with the managers of Drury Lane for the production of Coleridge's Remorse and that he attended at least two of Coleridge's lectures in 1811 and 1812; but their personal intercourse apparently did not extend beyond those incidents and the exchange of a few letters. Most of Byron's letters to Coleridge have already been published, but the five letters which Coleridge wrote to Byron have never been published in full.

The preface to Alastor, though at times obscure, ill-expressed, and digressive, is so much briefer and clearer than the poem itself that its interpretation of the work has, not unnaturally, been accepted without too close a scrutiny of the verse it explains. According to the preface, Alastor is an allegory: it represents a youth who is happy in study and in the contemplation of nature until suddenly, thirsting for “intercourse with an intelligence similar to” his own, “he images to himself the Being whom he loves,”—one who unites all that the poet, the philosopher, or the lover can require. “He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.” The remainder of the preface is given over chiefly to denouncing “those meaner spirits” who, no less than “the luminaries of the world,” “attempt to exist without human sympathy” but with whom the poem does not deal. The sounding, irrelevant moralizing of this paragraph tends to conceal two important observations: “The Poet's self-centered seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin,” and the Power of human sympathy struck him “with sudden darkness and extinction by awakening ... [him] to too exquisite a perception of its influences.”

Though scholars have long been familiar with Peacock's interesting statement concerning the strong influence exerted upon Shelley by certain novels of Charles Brockden Brown, no one has undertaken to define precisely the extent of Shelley's debt to the American novelist. Professor M. T. Solve in a recent article has ably analyzed the intellectual and spiritual kinship of the two men, and pointed out the general direction of the presumptive influence, but he notes no specific indebtedness beyond the borrowing of some details of gothic phraseology and the name Constantia. It is my present purpose to examine relevant passages from the works of Shelley in the light of Peacock's statement, with a view to more precise definition.

Another paper on Keats may be pardoned if by a readjustment of the familiar materials, it makes possible a new interpretation of the poet's mind and work. The present essay ventures to suggest that the literary problem admitted and analyzed by Keats in Sleep and Poetry contains a clue for the study of his verse, which, although recognized in some of its implications by Keats's critics, has not hitherto been understood in its full significance. The following argument attempts to prove that by April, 1819, the poet, having settled, at least for a period, a very difficult question dating back to the autumn of 1816, was so released from his mental bondage that his creative genius, long restrained, broke forth into that glorious series of poems which included the great Odes and Lamia.

When Sir Walter Scott, with his friend and publisher John Ballantyne at his shoulder, was adding his chapter-tags to the proofsheets of his third novel, The Antiquary (1816), he came to a halt at one chapter for which he wanted some lines from Beaumont and Fletcher. Ballantyne undertook the task of finding the passage. Awaiting for some time the discovery of the verses he wished, Scott at length exclaimed, “Hang it, Johnnie, I believe I can make a motto sooner than you will find one.” He did so, and thus began his habit of calling upon his invention when memory failed, producing throughout the remainder of the Waverley Novels numerous chapter-headings ascribed “Anonymous,” “Old Play,” etc., which Lockhart calls “some of the most exquisite verses that ever flowed from his pen.” Of “Old Play” captions there are 94; “Old Ballad” 26—mostly Scott's free-hand alterations; “Old Song” 12; “Anonymous” 29; and unsigned mottoes 10. One of the best of the “Old Play” fabrications occurs at the head of chapter xxix of Anne of Geierstein, describing the good king René of Provence;—in reality, it may be called Scott's own epitaph:

A mirthful man he was—the snows of age
Fell, but they did not chill him. Gaiety
Even in life's closing touched his teeming brain
With such wild visions as the setting sun
Raises in front of some hoar glacier,
Painting the bleak ice with a thousand hues.
—Old Play

During the year 1818, while Washington Irving was at work on the sketches and stories of The Sketch Book, he wrote to his friend Brevoort: “I have been for some time past engaged in the study of the German language, and have got so far as to be able to read and splutter a little. It is a severe task, and has required hard study; but the rich mine of German literature holds forth abundant reward.” The first of the “abundant rewards” which he won from the “rich mine of German literature” are to be seen in his use of German materials for the four so-called short stories in The Sketch Book (1819–1820). At the end of his Dresden diary, which came to a close on July 11, 1823, he wrote, perhaps with himself in mind:

Solitary miners of literature in Germany—men working hours and hours each day in dull little towns.

It is known that the “Lapland song,” quoted at the end of each stanza in Longfellow's poem, My Lost Youth, was first taken down from a native Laplander, Olaus Matthiae Sirma, and printed in the original, together with a Latin prose version, by Professor Johannes Scheffer of Upsala in his exhaustive Latin work Lapponia (Frankfort 1673). The enormous currency of this book, as well as its various translations, and the wide literary interest aroused in different countries by the two primitive Lapland songs which it contained, have been discussed by F. E. Farley and H. Wright. The English translation of Scheffer's work (Oxford, 1674) was so successful as to lead to a second edition in London in 1704. The latter edition was timely for nourishing the flame of enthusiasm for folk-poetry first kindled by Addison's epoch-making essay from the text, Interdum vulgus rectum videt, published in the Spectator of May 21, 1711. On April 30, 1712, there appeared in the Spectator a new rhymed translation of the song under consideration, by an anonymous author, who professed to derive his version from the “original history,” though it is luminously evident that he looked no deeper than into the metrical version given in the English “History of Lapland.” The song printed in the Spectator was widely popular in England during the entire eighteenth century, and led to a number of other English versions, not one of which, however, contained the lines quoted by Longfellow, or went back to the Latin source.

The poem Vingtième Siècle (Pleine Mer—Plein Ciel) forms the climax of the Légende des Siècles, and presents in mythical form a picture of man's ascent through science, out of a state of ignorance, slavery and hatred, into one of enlightenment, freedom and brotherly love. Hugo typifies the idyllic future by an air-ship, (Plein Ciel), the sombre past and present by the colossal steamship “Léviathan,” (Pleine Mer). The same idea, of the deliverance of man through science, had found expression in Le Satyre; but there locomotive, steamer, and airship were equally honored as factors and symbols of man's emancipation, one leading up to and merging into the other. The invention of the steamship was specifically celebrated in the lines:

Qui sait si quelque jour, grandissant d'âge en âge,
Il ne jettera pas son dragon à la nage,
Et ne franchira pas les mers, la flamme au front! (ll. 611–613)

Although suggestions have been made in regard to the possible means by which the Tannhäuser legend may have reached Swinburne's receptive mind, no one has offered a satisfactory explanation. It is my purpose to offer such an explanation, for the sake of the light it throws upon Laus Veneris as well as upon the development of the legend in English.

A preliminary consideration of possibilities is essential. First, there is Ludwig Tieck's Der getreue Eckart und der Tannenhäuser, which Carlyle translated as “The Trusty Eckart” in German Romance, published in 1827. Since Swinburne in his youth was an admirer of Carlyle, he may have known this translation. With some of its melodramatic absurdities omitted, the relevant portion of Tieck's story, part II, is briefly as follows: After a mysterious disappearance the noble Tannenhäuser returns to tell his friend Friedrich of his experiences. He believes that he has fallen in love with Emma and murdered a rival, causing both Emma and his own parents to die of grief. In darkest night he goes to a lofty hill, where he calls upon the Enemy of God; the latter teaches him a song, which in some strange way leads him to the Mountain of Venus. Passing the trusty Eckart, a superhuman figure who guards the entrance, he resigns himself to sensual pleasures in the company of Lady Venus and her train. From this “pomp of sin” he has now returned. Friedrich, who has been listening patiently to this recital of an apparent madman, assures him that Emma, recently married to Friedrich, is still alive. The Tannenhäuser does not believe this statement, supposing it a deception of Satan, and sets out to Rome to perform penance. Some months later he comes back, tattered and barefoot. Entering Friedrich's chamber, he kisses him, announces thatthe Holy Father cannot forgive, and departs. Friedrich discovers that Emma is murdered, apparently by the Tannenhäuser, and that the kiss draws him towards the mysterious mountain. The absence of any reference to the pope's staff and to the sending of messengers may be noted.

It is well known that from 1900 to 1906 (and even before) Proust made a thorough study of Ruskin and translated The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906). Yet it is rather startling to hear him mentioned by André Maurois as “Ruskin's great disciple,” for there does not seem to be much of an affinity between the man whose writings on the architecture of Venice have been termed: “A sermon on stones” and the passionate pilgrim of the human heart who was never hampered in his minute psychological explorations by any of the reformer's ethical theories or creeds.

John Masefield, William Butler Yeats, A.E., and others, continually using the word, have made of ‘beauty’ and ‘Beauty’ a phenomenon at which Thackeray, again alive, would laugh as he once laughed at Beauty-with-a-big-B. Masefield, particularly, trying to create a moral consciousness in the people, takes it for granted that the word ‘beauty’ is at once concrete, specific, and, therefore, self-explaining; and that the things, beauty and Beauty, are to be understood at once as vital, moving forces. He is consequently disconcerting, for he himself has various understandings of the word and the things.