Of monographs and studies on the Grail there is no end but as yet an article dealing primarily with the Bleeding Lance scarcely exists. In the following pages the lance will be kept in the foreground, and the object will be to approach the grail problem from this novel point of attack.

The eighteenth century, which saw the development of the novel into definite form, saw also the beginnings of careful criticism of the novel. The amount and character of this criticism, however, and the extent of a critical attitude among eighteenth-century novel-readers, have received too little attention from students of fiction. Not to speak of the books of the time dealing with the novel and allied forms, which deserve perhaps more attention than they have received,—notably the bibliography, with comments, in Lenglet-Dufresnoy's L'Usage des Romans (1734), and the lectures of LaHarpe, which, though published much later, were delivered before 1800,—there is a mass of interesting material in eighteenth-century periodicals, French, English, and German. There is also a great amount of criticism in prefaces to novels, in memoirs, and in collections of letters, which if systematically examined would perhaps modify current notions regarding our ancestors' views of prose fiction.

In Romania XXX (1901), p. 388, in his article Villoniana, M. Gaston Paris seeks to illumine some points suggested by M. Auguste Longnon's edition of the works of François Villon. M. Longnon in his note to l. 1783 Grand Testament marks “Aller à la moutarde” as an “expression proverbiale.” Of this summary treatment M. Paris ventures the opinion, “cela ne renseigne pas beaucoup le lecteur. Il était d'usage autrefois, au moment du repas, d'envoyer chercher de la moutarde fraîchement broyée; c'était généralement les enfants qui étaient chargés de cette commission, et il paraît qu'ils allaient d'habitude en bandes, et en chantant des chansons plaisantes sur les événements du jour. De là cette locution si fréquente au xvème et au xvième siècle: ‘Les petits enfants en vont à la moustarde’ pour dire un scandale dont tout le monde parle.”

There is a fascination in the attempt to define the supernatural, although one is aware of the etymological contradiction implied in the effort. The definition of the Century Dictionary, “that which is above or beyond the established course or laws of nature,” does not help us much. This definition is best approached by drawing a distinction between the natural and the supernatural which may be epitomized by stating that the former is comprehended, the latter only apprehended. We know, for example, what Poe means when he speaks of the dual self in William Wilson, but we do not comprehend the methods by which that duality is to be brought about. In this lack of comprehension lies the attraction of the supernatural. It is one phase of the larger appeal of the romantic, which includes it; and it springs from that ever present demand for what is strange and new which is a part of the nature of man. It is of interest to note that in the nineteenth century, which has demanded an ever increasing exactitude in science, and in America, where commercial standards have always been definite, there has been developed to a remarkable degree a literature dealing with that which cannot be proved or understood.

The vexed problem of Spenser's missing works, incapable as it inevitably is of absolutely certain solution, has nevertheless been treated, in a recent article by Mr. Philo M. Buck, Jr., with results that are interesting and on the whole satisfactory, though marked, as it seems at least to the present writer, by certain faults of method. Mr. Buck believes, as do various critics, that the greater number of the so-called lost works are to be found in Spenser's extant writings. He contends further that the poet, as a measure of political prudence, voluntarily suppressed them in 1580, only to draw them forth about 1591, when he was wrathful at royal neglect, and eager to level their satire at his enemy, Burghley; and most of them, Mr. Buck argues, were published in the Complaints (1591) and in the Faerie Queene. In our consideration of the article, after the inaccuracy of method has been noted, and certain minor phases of the argument have been questioned, it will remain for us to emphasize the probability of the main contention, and the wider significance it has for Spenser's method of composition, especially as regards the Faerie Queene.

In the Gemma Ecclesiastica of Giraldus Cambrensis there is an allusion to two songs which were evidently current among minstrels of the twelfth century, though they are unknown to us at the present time. The passage is found in the Second Book, where the author is attacking the practice of simony then common among the clergy. Of priests who read the mass twice or oftener upon the same day for the sake of donations additional to the one which it was customary for them to receive upon these occasions, he says:

The Alexandrian followers of Aristarchus, buzzing in corners and busy with monosyllables, have left the world that they worried with their wranglings over and and , the swords that were drawn over inchoate verbs have been rust for centuries. But the bookworms of Aristarchus, the troops of Callimachus, the pack of Zenodotus return at times to earth. In order to hear this pack in full cry, we have only to recall the various emendations in Greek texts necessitated fifty years ago by the fallacious Dawes Canon that is never used with the first aorist subjunctive in the active or middle voice.