Since the preparation of “Some Notes on the Pearl,” a new edition of the poem by Gollancz has appeared, issued in 1921 but too late for use in my former article. Besides, some new notes have been accumulating from further study of the poem, and another article seems warranted.

Numerous parallels, culled from Middle-English metrical romances to illustrate the style and the diction of Chaucer's Rime of Sir Thopas, have shown how successfully Chaucer burlesqued the verses of certain of his less gifted predecessors and contemporaries. More recently the parodistic character of Sir Thopas has been emphasized by Mr. J. M. Manly, who, in the same connection, adduced interesting evidence as to political satire latent in the poem. These studies of the style and the diction of Sir Thopas have contributed largely to our appreciation of the humorous character of the work itself and, more important still, to our knowledge of the poet; for a parody or a burlesque implies the special imitation of a model, and thus we conclude that Chaucer enjoyed an easy familiarity with at least one type of his native vernacular literature. Supplementing this rather imposing body of internal, stylistic evidence, comes a short but enlightening catalogue of metrical romances which the poet introduces towards the end of his own rollicking contribution to this genre:

Men speke of romances of prys,
Of Horn child and of Ypotis,
Of Bevis and sir Gy, Of sir Libeus and Pleyn-damour. (C.T., B 2087–90)

Modern criticism has renounced the notion that Chaucer is naïf, whether as man or poet. It has not, however, been so ready to acknowledge him, especially in respect to style, a fully conscious artist. “Splendour and artifice of style,” says Legouis, “whether the latter be personal or conventional, were unknown to Chaucer,—the wiles of rhetoric are absent.” Splendour of style, I agree, is rare in Chaucer, but not artifice. It is the object of this paper to point out that certain “wiles of rhetoric,” conventional and personal, were familiar to Chaucer. The particular artifice of balance, indeed, appears in Chaucer's poetry to such an extent and is used with such increasing effect that I am obliged to dissent from the statement of a second modern critic that Chaucer's sentences are “free from any studied balance or antithesis.”

MS 3390 of the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève of Paris contains a number of Middle English religious tracts, followed by Richard Rolle of Hampole's Form of Perfect Living and Ego Dormio. Certain of the religious tracts are found in other manuscripts in English libraries, and are usually ascribed to Wycliffe. The Ste. Geneviève MS is an octavo volume of 109 vellum leaves; it is written in Midland dialect in one hand of the early fifteenth century.

This familiar German proverb first made its appearance during the last quarter of the sixteenth century, soon found its way into the popular collections and spread throughout Germany and also to Holland and Scandinavia. By the end of the seventeenth century it had become popular in all these countries, particularly in the schools where it served as a maxim to encourage diligence. Later it appears in literally identical form even outside Teutonic territory.

A possible source for the opening lines of L'Allegro, apparently unnoted hitherto, is to be found in the opening lines of the last satire in John Marston's Scourge of Villanie:

Sleep grim Reproofe, my iocond Muse doth sing
In other keyes, to nimbler fingering.
Dull sprighted Melancholy, leaue my braine
To hell Cimerian night, in liuely vaine
I striue to paint, then hence all darke intent
And sullen frownes, come sporting meriment,
Cheeke dimpling laughter, crowne my very soule
With iouisance, whilst mirthfull iests controule
The goutie humours of these pride-swolne dayes,
Which I doe long vntill my pen displaies.
0 I am great with mirth, some midwifrie,
Or I shall breake my sides at vanitie.
Roome for a capering mouth, whose lips nere stur,
But in discoursing of the gracefull slur:
Who euer heard spruce skipping Curio
Ere prate of ought, but of the whirle on toe

The principle of religious freedom is declared by Masson to have been the precious fruit of the successive persecutions which attended the fission of English protestantism into sects more and more removed from Rome. He believes that the more each protesting body suffered from intolerance the more tolerant it became, that the more it was forced to contend for liberty for itself the more nearly it approached the conception of liberty for all, with the result that the implied principle was finally by the ultimate dissenters extricated from all the pain of cumulative persecution and kindled, as it were, “on the top of a light-house, on its own account.” To Milton, briefly anticipated by Roger Williams, Masson gives chief credit for enunciating this ideal of freedom as an end in itself. When other men argued for liberty, it was always a liberty with some limitation, liberty of such kind and degree as would suit some ulterior interest. When Milton spoke, it was to clarion forth a liberty pure, absolute, entire.

Scholars have explained why Milton chose Paradise Lost as the subject for his great epic, but they have not directly considered his reasons for giving up his original plan of writing a heroic poem about the half-mythical figures of the Britons who preceded the Germanic tribes in England. Reasons may well be sought. Certainly the selective process consists not only in approving the good characteristics inhering in one alternative; it also recognizes the defects and disadvantages in the alternative which is rejected. It is my aim in the following pages to show that these negative considerations had their share in determining Milton to write “Of Man's first disobedience” rather than of

what resounds
In fable or romance of Uther's son,
Begirt with British and Armoric knights.

In composing Samson Agonistes, Milton took from the Bible only his chief characters and his catastrophe, that is Samson's being led away from the prison to entertain the Philistines and his destruction of their theatre. The events which Milton presents before and after his catastrophe do not appear in the Bible, and none of them follow necessarily from anything narrated there. Careful investigation has shown further that Milton made no important use of any other version of the story of Samson. Accordingly, the question arises how did Milton develop the plot of Samson Agonistes?

The purpose of this paper is, first, to attempt to correct a still rather widely prevalent error concerning the logical import and the usual emotional temper of eighteenth-century optimism, and, second, to point out that the significance in the history of ideas of the multiplication and the popularity of theodicies in the first half of that century consisted less in the tendency of these arguments to diffuse optimistic views of the nature of reality than in their tendency to procure acceptance for certain new ideas of the nature of the good, which the logical exigencies of the optimistic argument involved—ideas pregnant with important consequences for both ethics and aesthetics, since they were to be among the most distinctive elements in what perhaps best deserves to be named “Romanticism.”

The life of William Cowper has been written many times; first by his friend and fellow poet, William Hayley, and most recently by Thomas Wright, Principal of the Cowper School at Olney. The present manuscript, here reprinted in full, was probably prepared for the first of these biographers about two years after the poet's death. It is in the hand of the Rev. John Johnson, Cowper's cousin and constant companion during the last five years of his life. It was doubtless used by Hayley for his brief record of these years, but seems to have been unknown to all succeeding biographers. The dismal circumstances of this part of Cowper's life combined with the unscientific historical attitude of a century ago to make Hayley's account altogether unsatisfactory today. The diary comes to the modern student of Cowper, therefore, as virtually new source material for those years of his life which have always been the least documented.

The first poet to cast a spell upon the impressionable mind of the youthful Keats was Mary Tighe. When Mrs. Tighe's Psyche and Other Poems was published in London, Keats, then in his sixteenth year, was fresh from school, where he had revelled in Lemprière and Spence's Polymetis. In the work of the Irish poetess the young reader found chivalric romance and Greek myth against a background of Celtic landscape and mood. The romantic melancholy and the luxuriant imagery of the Psyche touched the springs of his imagination; rhythm and phrase impressed themselves upon his memory and became a part of the fabric of his verse. The biographers and critics of Keats have done scant justice to Mrs. Tighe. Her influence upon the pseudo-Spenserian pieces of his earlier years has been recognized, but the fact that the Irish poetess was one of the most important sources of his poetic inspiration and vocabulary has been overlooked.

In the first of her two volumes to the writing of which Amy Lowell gave her life that John Keats might live afresh, she threw out this suggestion: “If any one would have a grateful task, let him track Keats's indebtedness to Chapman's Homer. There is an ample field and practically unexplored.” In offering this suggestion Miss Lowell evidently was not aware that the expert eye of de Sélincourt had already noted the indebtedness which he had observed in the course of a perusal of the entire series of Chapman's Homeric translations. And I must plead guilty to the same ignorance at the time I began a systematic comparison of the two poets, embracing the whole of Keats's poetry and the entire translation of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns. (I have not included the translations of the Georgics of Hesiod, the Book of Days, or any of Chapman's dramas.)

So far as we know, Wordsworth never bothered himself enough with Keats to write a line about him. The best evidence we have as to his attitude toward his youthful contemporary is in the testimony of Lord Houghton and Benjamin Haydon. Lord Houghton relates that when at Haydon's “the younger poet had been induced to repeat to the elder the fine ‘Hymn to Pan’ out of Endymion …. Wordsworth only remarked, ‘it was a pretty piece of Paganism.‘”

Thomas carlyle's essay entitled German Playwrights appeared in the Foreign Review in 1829. The three playwrights dealt with as representatives of the whole class in Germany are Grillparzer, Klingemann and Milliner. If the space devoted to each of these three could be regarded as a criterion of their relative merit Klingemann would rank slightly above Grillparzer, and Milliner would have to be considered almost doubly as important as either of the other two. In a footnote Carlyle lists the following plays of Grillparzer which had appeared prior to 1829: Die Ahnfrau, König Ottokars Glück und Ende and Sappho. He disposes of Die Ahnfrau in summary fashion in about two pages, devotes about three to Kônig Ottokar, and dismisses Sappho with a few sentences. Of Das Goldene Vliess, which had appeared in 1821, Carlyle merely says (p. 97): “His Goldene Vliess we suspect to be of similar character, [like Sappho] but have not yet found time and patience to study it.”

Seldom do readers of Gerstäcker's Germelshausen, Irrfahrten, Wild-Dieb, etc., know how this author first appealed to, and won, his worldwide clientèle of the last eighty-odd years. I hope soon to present a truly adequate account of his life, letters and works; here I will but most briefly sketch his early life, depict his picturesque attempts to become a real American citizen, and indicate finally the truly dominant influence of this, his first American sojourn, over all his later career.

In discussing the date of the Eddie poems one must carefully distinguish three factors: the date of their written compilation or recording, the date of their actual composition by the poet, and the age of the mythological, legendary and other material which they contain. In speaking of the age of the Eddie poems it is clear that we are referring to the second factor, the creative act of the poet, which, so far as we know, did not contemplate immediate written record either by himself or a scribe. It is by no means superfluous, however, to emphasize the distinction of the first two factors mentioned, as, in the case of the sagas, they have not yet been entirely disentangled. A consideration of the first and third factors is furthermore not without value, as it must be clear that the poems are not younger than the time of their written record and not older than their original content. The recording may be much later, the content much older, than the date of composition. These, however, if they can be established, furnish the most definite termini ad quern and a quo respectively. If the recording was actually centuries later than the time of composition we shall expect to find corruptions of various sorts, such as interpolations and transposition of stanzas and verses, with which we are abundantly familiar in the case of the popular ballads. This allows great leeway for textual criticism, in which, as experience has shown, critics are prone to disagree. Similarly, if the original content is centuries older than the time of composition of the poems, it is reasonable to suppose that the content will have been profoundly affected in its passage through the centuries. If we take as an example the Nibelungenlied, whose date of composition is approximately known, its original content of the time of the Germanic migrations has been in places so affected by the later medieval institutions and ideals of life, which have thereby become an important part of the content, that the terminus a quo would by this very fact be pushed far beyond the time of the migrations. Analogies of this sort may be of value in an effort to date the Eddie poems, but the question is here somewhat confused by the question of possible interpolations.