Dante's interest in the mystic significance of numbers is never again so obtrusive as in the Vita Nuova. But it is quite as pervasive, in his Divine Comedy; and he uses them—and geometrical forms, their related concepts—continually, not only for purposes of exposition and illustration, but also to give the illusion of reality to his Vision. Among the almost innumerable instances of this last use of numerical determinatives, the most striking—from their baldly prosaic injection, in the terms of pure mathematics, outside of any æsthetic qualities—are probably the two cases in Inf., xxix, 9 and xxx, 86, in which the diameters of two circles are given, respectively, as twenty-two, and eleven, miles. The advantages, in the direction of vividness, of this method—although it seems almost to flirt with poetic disaster at times—are great; and its peril is obviated, in the otherwise physically impossible journey within the time limits set, by recourse, sparingly and cannily, in the early cantos of the descent to Hell's apex, to swoons during which the pilgrim poet is advanced indeterminate distances toward his goal; and in the arduous ascent of the Moutain of Purgatory an unspecified but very considerable space is surmounted by the supernatural aid of Lucia.

Are any of the early Dutch or Flemish analogues to tales in the Decameron derived from Boccaccio? Even a hasty survey of the narrative literature of mediæval Belgium and Netherlands raises the question, for we do not possess more than thirty-five or forty fabliaux, and yet in this group—such a small group compared to the French Recueil of Montaiglon and Raynaud—we find five or six close analogues to Decameron stories. The possibility of derivation from the Italian is by no means excluded by dates; for whereas the French fabliaux were all written before the Decameron, the genre flourished in Belgium and Holland all through the fourteenth century.

The two short religious plays, Tres Pasos de la Pasión and Egloga de la Resurrección, are preserved in a probably unique copy, now in the Biblioteca Menéndez y Pelayo, in Santander. It forms part of a “recueil factice” in quarto, and in black letter throughout, containing, first, a treatise on confession; the Scala Coeli of Johannes Climacus; a Vida de San Amaro, Toledo, Juan de Villaquirán, 1520; another religious treatise; a translation by Diego Gumiel of St. Bernard's epistle to a relative, and a life of Barlaam and Josafat. These are followed by the little dramas reprinted below. The volume concludes with Juan de Mena's Coplas de vicios y virtudes, continued by Fray Jerónimo de Olivares and the Farsa sacramental of Hernán López de Yanguas. The upper right-hand corner of the whole volume has been pierced by a cord, or thong, which in certain places has damaged the text.

One may learn from the notes of Foulché-Delbosc that the Orígenes del teatro español of the younger Moratín has not been published in complete form, and that those who prepared or censored the 1830 edition of Moratín's works caused several passages to be altered. Let us look then at the manuscript, which is easily available in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, and see for ourselves the changes that have been introduced. At the beginning is an unsigned statement, in a hand different from that of the manuscript, which declares that the first edition of the Orígenes was printed, not from Moratín's original, but from a copy thereof (now in the Library of the former Royal Palace). This copy is practically identical with the manuscript of the Biblioteca Nacional except that it lacks the six hojas which contain the Indice de las piezas contenidas en el siguiente catalogo. The six sheets follow page 130 of the latter manuscript and are not numbered.

1. In order to place our subject in a proper setting, let us note what moods were distinguished by representative grammarians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The table below reproduces their terminology:

M. Georges Pellissier, in his contribution to Petit de Julleville's Histoire de la Langue et de la Littérature Française, assigns as sources of Baïf's Livre des Météores: Virgil, Aratus, and Manilius. As his statement seems to have passed unchallenged and unverified in succeeding accounts of Baïf's work, the following excerpts have been prepared from a larger study of the didactic works of the Pléiade, and are here presented in the interest of exactness.

There is much independent and debonair criticism of contemporary English literature in the Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne, written for the information of continental Europeans by the Swiss Georges Deyverdun and his very close friend Edward Gibbon. Unfortunately volumes for 1767 and 1768 only were published, although, as Gibbon remarks in his personal Memoirs, “the materials of the third volume were almost completed, when I recommended Deyverdun as governor to Sir Richard Worsley. … They set forwards on their travels; nor did they return to England till some time after my father's death.” The number printed was so small that copies of the first volume are very infrequently to be met with, and of the second very rarely indeed. For Gibbon, the Mémoires littéraires were to some extent the fruit of his studies during a sojourn at Lausanne between 1753 and 1758; for Deyverdun they were a means of livelihood, hit upon only after Gibbon had sought suitable employment for him far and wide in England. Inasmuch as they confirm what became a life-long connection, an account of how they came to be written may very well include a few remarks upon the early friendship of the collaborators.

It is in the Lettres Philosophiques that Voltaire speaks of China for the first time. In these pages the oriental empire is already “la nation la plus sage et la mieux policée de l'univers.” By 1734 the cult of Chinese things had begun to exercise a decided influence on French art and thought. The movement had developed under two aspects: a material manifestation in the vogue of “chinoiseries” or “magots de la Chine,” and an intellectual manifestation which took the form of a profound admiration for Chinese culture and, more particularly, for Confucian thought. The first of these two aspects had made itself felt from the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV. Russian, Portuguese, and English merchants had brought to Europe a vast quantity of Chinese objets d'art which were greatly admired and extensively copied in the Western countries. Of the second aspect of the movement Leibnitz, in the seventeenth century, was the undoubted progenitor. The German scholar, the most universal mind of his time (to quote the opinion of Voltaire), read the maxims of Confucius, newly translated, and his brilliant imagination was fired by the wealth contained in the literature of the Eastern people. He dreamed of a universal culture in which Orient and Occident should pool their resources to produce a new intellectual universe. As instruments for the creation of this new culture he looked first to the Society of Jesus and then to Peter the Great. The former had already given ample reason for being chosen. Under the impulse of the literature produced by the missionaries of the Society, and particularly that polemic element which dealt with the famous quarrel over the Chinese ceremonies, Europe had begun to acquire extensive knowledge of the great Oriental empire, a knowledge hitherto inaccessible.

Although the Epître à Uranie is the first work of Voltaire with which the student becomes familiar, it is still one about which very little is known. In 1924, Professor Lanson wrote:

Sébastien Mercier, who in his Tableau de Paris covered a tremendously wide range of subjects and who was himself a dramatist of sorts (if not of parts), protested against the common practice of representing on the stage young unmarried ladies to whom young men made love. There is nothing more false, says he, in the picture of French manners than contemporary comedy, in which men make love to young ladies (demoiselles); for they are kept in convents until their wedding day, and it is absolutely impossible to make them a declaration of love. They are never seen alone, and it is shameful to employ any means resembling seduction. Girls of the upper bourgeoisie are also in convents; those of the “second étage” are constantly with their mothers; and girls of the other classes have in general no sort of freedom or of familiar communication with men before their marriage. Therefore, Mercier concludes, authors of comedy, in making all their amoureuses ladies of quality, are really portraying only the love-affairs of grisettes. And the dramatists, “s'ils ne veulent pas aller directement contre les usages,” should henceforth admit as heroines only young widows.

Depuis qu'a été publiée, par les soins de miss E. K. Armstrong, la lettre de recommandation confiée au chevalier de Combourg pour le général Washington, toute une partie du Voyage en Amérique a repris une vraisemblance que lui avaient fait perdre les exagérations de l'illustre touriste et la défiance de ses adversaires. En particulier l'horaire, distendu à l'excès, qui avait été proposé pour la première partie du trajet pouvait être ramené à de moins amples proportions: dès lors, les récits de Chateaubriand avant la gloire semblent de plus en plus admissibles pour cette exploration dont le Niagara fut bien pour lui, quoique à son corps défendant, le point extrême, mais qu'il eut tout le temps d'exécuter dans l'espace de peu de mois.

In the repertory of the mature Rachel are to be found only four modern tragedies which were performed with some success. Two rôles among these were created by her: that of Virginie in the tragedy of that name by Latour Saint-Ybars (April 5, 1845) and the Cléopâtre of Mme de Girardin (November 13, 1847). The other two were revivals: Marie Stuart by Lebrun and Jeanne d'Arc by Soumet.

The history of the controversy over naturalism in England centered about the translations of the writings of Zola, and the trial in 1888 of the publisher Henry Vizetelly. The first translations of Zola's writings appeared in 1884, and almost immediately aroused a storm of criticism. These writings, however, were not the first to call the attention of the English public to French naturalism. Just as in France Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and others had prepared the way for Le Roman Expérimental, so also in England translations of Balzac's novels, Baudelaire's influence on Swinburne, and Saintsbury's articles on French writers had helped to prepare the way for Zola translations. English critics of the Victorian era recognized Balzac as the father of French realism, and as one who anticipated in many ways the theories of the naturalists. The reaction of the English critics to the work of Balzac is an interesting commentary on changing literary fashions, and an important expression of Victorian literary taste.

The attitude of Honoré de Balzac toward poets and poetry has received casual comment from several of his critics and biographers, and they are agreed that it was unfavorable. A consideration of the two poets who figure prominently in the Comédie humaine, Lucien de Rubempré of Les Illusions perdues and Canalis in Modeste Mignon, as well as a study of Balzac's correspondence and of documents about him by contemporaries, bring little to contradict that judgment. Théophile Gautier, in his chapter on Balzac in Portraits contemporains, devotes several pages to a discussion of Honoré's harsh criticisms of verse and verse-makers, evidently the cause of some resentment from the author of Emaux et Camées. As another example of such opinion, note a statement from the diary of Charles Weiss, apropos of a visit to his home in Besançon by Balzac in 1833. He tells of a first interview with Balzac, in which the conversation happened to fall upon contemporary French poets, eliciting very frank criticisms from his visitor, and then, on the following day, indicates this summing up of attitude toward poetry in general by Balzac, in the course of a second discussion: “Il est sensible à l'harmonie du style et cependant il n'aime pas les vers. Il prétend qu'il n'en faut plus faire.”

One of the chapters of M. Maurice Souriau's Histoire du Parnasse is entitled “la Question Déroulède.” In this chapter, M. Souriau describes the popularity of Paul Déroulède's Chants du soldat (1872) and of its sequels, such as Nouveaux chants du soldat (1875), as well as the hostility of Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle, and most of the Parnassians to this type of poetry. Insinuating that this hostility was due, in part at least, to the huge sales of Déroulède's volumes, Souriau attacks this attitude bitterly, praises Déroulède's modesty, and allows his critical judgment to be so completely warped by his own chauvinism as to find in Déroulède both an important writer and a great thinker, even greater, perhaps, than Leconte de Lisle because his work “a communiqué à ses' auditeurs le plus vivifiant patriotisme” while that of Leconte de Lisle “a développé trop souvent, trop longtemps, devant ses lecteurs, le plus noir pessimisme.” He calls attention to Calmettes' criticism of Leconte de Lisle as “un adversaire déclaré des Muses patriotiques” and adds: “Il l'était pendant le siège.” He concludes his chapter with the words: “Il [Déroulède] a comblé la lacune du Parnasse.”

Si La renommée de Ramuz a dépassé les frontières de sa petite terre, le Pays de Vaud (Suisse), dont il nous donne une description si typique dans sa Lettre à Grasset; si tant d'articles de journaux, en France, en Belgique, en Suisse, ont été publiés sur l‘œuvre de cet auteur; si, sous la direction de Marcel Péguy, les Cahiers de la Quinzaine lui ont consacré un cahier tout entier; si plusieurs de ses romans ont été traduits en allemand, en anglais, en tchèque, en suédois; si la critique littéraire parle d'un style ramuzien; si enfin il y a un cas Ramuz, c'est que le poète dont nous traitons a réussi à intéresser un public d‘élite par l'originalité de sa conception esthéthique, par la vigueur et le pittoresque de son style et surtout par l'intensité de la vie qui anime les personnages et les choses de ses romans.