“Victorian” is now commonly used as a depreciatory-epithet, and yet we shall search the history of the last thousand years in vain for a period of more important social, political, and industrial changes than those carried on in the Victorian Era. The changes in the spiritual sphere were no less significant. Professor Henry Sidgwick, a singularly acute and subtle observer, writing to Tennyson's son for the Biography published in 1897, said of the sixties:—

Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace,

and generally the forward movement of the thought.

The Letters of Charlotte was first published in London in 1786, seven years after Goethe's The Sorrows of Werter had been translated by W. Render. My acquaintance with this book was made the other day, when I discovered a copy of it, published in New York in 1797, among some volumes which had belonged to my great-grandfather.

The Triumphe of death, a poetical translation of Petrarch's Trionfo della Morte, is found in ms. 538. 43. 1., ff. 286-289, in the Library of the Inner Temple, in London. As may be seen from the title, and from the signatures to each chapter, the translation is accredited to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. The folios containing the translation form part of a group of miscellaneous pieces—in poetry and prose—preserved among the Petyt mss.

Among the literary types which reached their highest development and perfection in the Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the epic alone offers little of permanent value. While the lyric, the picaresque novel, the short story and drama were cultivated with notable success, the epic poets were content, for the most part, to follow slavishly models which came from abroad. The names of Ariosto and Tasso dominated the epic poetry of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and nowhere was their influence more clearly felt than in Spain.

In the Publications of the Modern Language Association for June, 1911, Miss Mabel M. Keiller points out an interesting case of parallelism between the ground-tilling episode in the Macro play of Mankind and the “half-acre” episode in Piers Plowman, A Text, Passus VII (B Text, Passus VIII). After citing parallel incidents and passages Miss Keiller concludes: “Whatever may be thought of the significance of some of these instances, there seems to be no escape from the conclusion that the plot of Mankind depended for its central situation, its characters, its surroundings and general trend of thought on the greatest of English allegories.”

The comment made by the exemplary Clerk of Oxenford upon those ribald tales of the Miller and the Reeve, is eloquent silence. Out of the fund of his ‘moral vertu’ he might, of course, have drawn a sharp rebuke or at least a grave remonstrance, ‘full of hy sentence’; but unless he were at that time studying ‘aboute som sophyme,‘ he contented himself with silent meditation upon our old sins, so light-heartedly exploited for the entertainment of those whose road led to the shrine of the martyred saint. He knew that often silence is golden and words but sounding brass. As clearly appears in that conversation with Harry Bailey which precedes the tale of Griselda, he himself possessed much of that gracious forbearance, which he very nobly celebrated:

‘Hoste,’ quod he, ‘I am under your yerde
Ye han of us, as now, the governance.’