This farce, which is here published for the first time, is found in a collection of manuscript poetry in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid with the press mark 2621. It bears number 1239 in Sr. Paz y Melia's catalogue of plays in the Biblioteca Nacional. The handwriting is of the early sixteenth century. The volume contains poems, for the most part anonymous, of the sixteenth century, in Castilian and Catalan. On the first page, in a hand of the seventeenth century, we read: “En este libro ay poesias de Jorge de Montemayor, de Juan Fernandez, de D. Luis Margarit, de D. Luis de Milan, de D. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, de N. Torrellas, de D. Hernando de Acuña, de Alvaro Gomez de Ciudad Real y de otros autores inciertos.”

The Faust legend is the Hydra of literature. One of its heads pops up in the story of Simon Magus, its body reaches from New Testament times to the days of Goethe, while a new head has just sprouted in Stephen Philips's latest drama. The Faust story has all the ear-marks of a legend endowed with eternal youth. More than three hundred years ago the most popular tragedy on the London stage was Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, while the play which is creating the greatest interest to-day on our American stage is a modern treatment of the Faust legend under the title of Der Teufel. So much for the absorbing interest which the story has (and ever will have) in its dramatic form.

The Latin poem De arte graphica by Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy was edited with a translation into French prose and with notes by Roger de Piles in 1668; and in 1695 John Dryden, “to satisfy the desires of so many gentlemen who were willing to give the world this useful work,” not only translated de Piles's book into English prose but also supplied his translation with an “original preface containing a parallel between painting and poetry.” Dryden's Parallel is one of the least original, but it is not the least interesting of his literary essays: Saintsbury calls it “the first writing at any length by a very distinguished Englishman of letters on the subject of pictorial art.” Together with his translation of du Fresnoy and de Piles, it forms for us English-speaking people the handiest introduction to that long-lived esthetic theory founded upon the proposition Ut pictura poesis. Lessing seems to have seen in Dryden's preface some suggestion of a deviation of the parallel lines from the common direction; or perhaps the point at which they ought to have parted company; for he wrote, “ Falsche Übertragung des mahlerischen Ideals in die Poesie. Dort ist es ein Ideal der Körper, hier muss es ein Ideal der Handlungen seyn. Dryden in s. Vorrede zum Fresnoy.”

In the Prologue to the Man of Law's Tale we are told that any one who will read Chaucer's Legend of Good Women may see—

The crueltee of thee, queen Medea,
Thy litel children hanging by the hals
For thy Jason, that was of love so fals;

but when one turns to the Legend of Medea, one looks in vain for the promised bit of sensationalism. In the closely related Legend of Hypsipyle, to he sure, the unhappy Lemnian queen prophetically prays—

That she, that had his herte yrafte her fro,
Moste finden him to her untrewe also,
And that she moste bothe her children spille.

The Marathon race was undoubtedly a happy thought on the part of the promoters of the first Olympic games of modern times—those held at Athens in 1896. A well-known member of the French Academy, M. Michel Bréal, gave the prize, and the Greeks set their hearts on winning it. A private correspondent wrote from Athens just before the race took place:—

The Rev. Mr. N. J. Halpin in 1843, followed by Professor G. P. Baker in 1894 and Mr. R. Warwick Bond in 1902, have sought to explain Endimion as the vehicle of a personal allegory setting forth a contemporary court intrigue. These commentators have been duly followed in turn, with slight variations, by the historians F. G. Fleay in 1891, A. W. Ward in 1899, and F. E. Schelling in 1908. The existence of this allegory may be regarded, therefore, as generally accepted by authorities on the Elizabethan drama. The exponents of this personal allegory agree in recognizing that Lyly intended to represent the Queen in Cynthia, a point which no one is likely to dispute. They agree further in arguing that Endimion, the lover of Cynthia, represents Leicester, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth. From this basis three varieties of the allegory have been developed, in attempts to identify a third character, Tellus, thè lady deserted by Endimion. Three ladies have been proposed, each of whom played a striking rôle in Leicester's career. Mr. Halpin suggested Lady Sheffield, Leicester's second wife; Professor Baker substituted for her Lady Essex, Leicester's third wife; and Mr. Bond set aside both in favor of Mary, Queen of Scots.