The well-known tenso between Giraut de Bornelh and Linhaure (Gr. 281, 1 = Gr. 389, 10a) whose identification with the Prince of Orange, generally accepted today, stands to the credit of Adolf Kolsen, reveals Raïmbaut as an adherent of trobar clus. Our poem, however, is one of those in which that aristocratic troubadour does not adhere to his artistic convictions. We can be glad of this attitude on the part of the poet because it gave us a poem attractive in its easy-flowing rhythm, simple versification, and continuous presentation of charming thoughts and motifs, from the doubts and hesitations of the beginning to the triumphant finale of the self-confident knight. To reach this goal, the poet takes particular care to connect the stanzas of his poem by repeating in the beginning of each of them the idea on which he closes the preceding stanza and developing it into a new one. He thus forms, as it were, coblas capfinadas, not in the usual sense of metrical technique, but in a higher artistic sense. Besides this stylistic phenomenon, there are two features that seem to me characteristic of this poem. (1) Much as he likes apostrophes to God and the saints, in none of his other poems does Raïmbaut concede to God such a dominant and intrinsic rôle concerning his love as in this one. (2) So God, Love, and Chivalry, those three essential elements of medieval thinking, are blended here into a mental and artistic unity hardly equaled in any other troubadour song.

Dès 1843, J. -J. Ampère faisait honneur à Jean de Meun d'être le devancier ‘des érudits païens et matérialistes du XVIe siècle’; il voyait dans la seconde partie du Roman de la Rose l'origine d'une série d'œuvres où se remarquent les éléments d'une philosophie naturaliste, et il indiquait que, par un curieux mélange du sacré et du profane, cette philosophie se présente à l'aide d'images et de comparaisons suggérées par le rituel catholique. Nous nous proposons d'étudier d'abord cette utilisation de la liturgie chrétienne à des fins étrangères à celles de l'Eglise. Nous verrons ensuite comment le culte de la Nature s'accompagne de la glorification de l'homme, de l'éloge de la science, et de l'idée que la dignité humaine réside dans le travail et dans l'amour. Nous nous demanderons, enfin, dans quelle mesure le naturalisme du XVIe siècle se relie à la tradition médiévale.

One of the most interesting of the plays in the Towneley manuscript is the Processus Talentorum, Play XXIV. The central theme of the play, the gambling for Christ's coat, is present in all the gospels, in the Northern Passion, and in all the extant mystery play cycles. In the Towneley manuscript only, however, has a play come down to us devoted wholly to the theme. It is my purpose here to seek the probable steps by which this play arrived at its present state, to resolve so far as I can its stanzaic confusions, to study its possible relations to York, and to arrive at the probable date of its original composition and subsequent editings.

In the treatment of classical authors and works used or borrowed upon by Rabelais, Cicero's share has not been fully studied, or, if studied, not properly emphasized. Plattard in his study of Rabelais maintains that “Bien que Gargantua recommande à Pantagruel, étudiant à Paris de former son style latin ‘à l'imitation de celui de Cicéron,’ Rabelais ne semble pas avoir beaucoup pratiqué lui-même les œuvres de Cicéron.” In the Lefranc edition of Rabelais' works, the same unawareness is evident although there are, besides quite a few direct mentions of Cicero in the text, many notations indicating possible references to him. These, however, are presumed to have been taken mostly from Erasmus. But on this point there is no complete accord. That Rabelais borrowed generously and frequently there can be no question. It is the purpose of this paper to show the borrowings made by him from Cicero's De Oratore and the Orator.

Quid petitur sacris nisi tantum fama poetis?“ inquired Boissard as a representative sixteenth-century man of letters. That he cribbed the wording of his question from Ovid merely makes him a more typically Renaissance author. Like other literary theorists of the period, the emblematists—those essayists in prose and verse who reached such a vast public in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—subscribed to the contention that the great poet achieves renown and immortality through his works. The emblematists frequently chose engravings or woodcuts containing symbols of glory, affixed brief titles or ”posies“ to these cuts, and then subjoined thereto essays or poems developing the theme of literary glory suggested by the plate. The accompanying reproduction from Peacham's Minerva Britanna (note 23) will acquaint the reader with a typical page from an emblem-book. Of all the literary notions encountered in emblem-books, this belief that the Muse saves poets from ignominy and death is the most frequent. It is the basic idea underlying the classic cult of poetic glory, the one cult shared by classic and Romanticist alike. It is interesting to see reappearing in every language of Western Europe the gratifying thought that authors win eternal life and kudos through their compositions. It strikes a most familiar note when we encounter it phrased in Renaissance Latin, for we remember reading it over and over in classic Latin texts.

Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch treats this word under Bosse, m. (ii, 261–263) and Posse, Posz, Possen, m. (vii, 2013 f.). There is also a long article by Biltz, “Über das Wort und den Begriff Posse,” in Herrigs Archiv,lxxiii, 33–46 (1885), and a brief résumé in Kluge-Götze, 11th ed. (1932), p. 453, under Posse, f. Grimm (ii, 261 ff.) says of the word:

Bosse, m. jocus, nugae, ineptiae, astutia, gestus. es ist schwer, die gestalt und abkunft dieses worts zu sichern, dessen anlaut zwischen B und P schwankt, dessen nom. oft in einsilbiges bosz, botz gekürzt erscheint (wie blicze in blitz, bisse in biß, bitz, böse in bosz), zuletzt gar in possen (wie viele schwache m.) gedehnt. so häufig seit dem 16.jh. der ausdruck wird, nirgends erscheint er früher.

The considerable amount of commentary published on Marlowe's Tamburlaine in recent years makes highly significant the fact that Tamburlaine's catastrophe remains one of the unsatisfactorily explained enigmas of the play. The unwary reader doubtless assumes that at the end of Tamburlaine II the Scythian conqueror simply—though somewhat vitriolically—dies, and that Marlowe should be called to account for marring his play with a badly-motivated catastrophe. The careful reader of Marlowe's text doubtless perceives (or at least suspects) that Tamburlaine's “distemper” at the end of the play is linked definitely with Renaissance medical, physiological, psychological, and astrological concepts. Yet no satisfactory analysis of how these concepts are involved in Tamburlaine's death has been made. Carroll Camden hazards the suggestion that Tamburlaine's death is immediately resultant upon his choleric humour. Miss Una Ellis-Fermor, the most recent editor of Tamburlaine, attempts to supply adequate annotation regarding the physician's diagnosis of Tamburlaine's “distemper,” but her footnotes are woefully inadequate as well as inaccurate. Don Cameron Allen, believing that “Marlowe conceived of his hero as a typical representative of the fortunati,” a Renaissance type of fortunate man upon whom Fortune never failed to smile, contends that Tamburlaine comes to no catastrophe at all but triumphantly “dies of old age.” Roy W. Battenhouse has recently considered Tamburlaine an instrument by means of which God, in His providential justice, scourges the world, and then, when the mundane chastisement is completed, strikes down His tyrannical instrument. Although in this article Professor Battenhouse does not explain, or even consider, the express bodily workings of Tamburlaine's malady, in his recent book he assumes (following Camden) that Tamburlaine is—among other things—a typical choleric man, and affirms that the physician's diagnosis indicates that Tamburlaine dies in a mad frenzy brought on by that disastrous affliction of the “humours” which Elizabethans termed choler adjust.

Various attempts have been made to disentangle the shares of the three authors to whom the Eastward Ho is assigned on the titlepage—Chapman, Ben Jonson, and Marston. “J.C.” in a notice of Eastward Ho contributed to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (September, 1821) made a few vague suggestions. Jonson had not the chief part in the writing; it has no bold delineation of character, no highly wrought finish of dialogue, and none of his peculiar richness of humour. “Neither, on the other hand, is it distinguished by his hardness,” such as overelaboration of character. “The style bears more resemblance to that of Chapman,” but Jonson probably first sketched the plan and revised the whole; he can be traced in the character of Touchstone and in the concluding scenes.

Dr. Johnson praised the style of the author of Letters from the Dead to the Living in reviewing a miscellany of his day. “The essayists,” he declared, “imitated, or tried to imitate the copiousness and luxuriance” of Mrs. Rowe's writing, and “laboured to add to her brightness of imagery, her purity of sentiment.” The poets, he continued, “had Dr. Watts before their eyes.” Elizabeth Rowe also observed Dr. Watts. In his preface to her Devout Exercises of the Heart, Watts remarked:

Though there is not one complete copy of verses amongst all these transports of her soul, yet she ever carried with her a relish of poesy even into her sacred retirements. Sometimes she springs her flights from a line or two of verse, which her memory had impressed upon her heart: sometimes from the midst of her religious elevation she lights upon a few lines of some modern poet, even Herbert as well as Milton, etc. tho’ ’tis but seldom she cites their names. At other times the verses seem to be the effusions of her own rapturous thoughts in sudden melody and metre; or at least I know not whence the lines are copied; but she most frequently does me the honor to make use of some of my writings in verse in these holy meditations of her heart. Blessed be that God, who has so favored anything my pen could produce, as to assist so sublime a devotion.

The Deserted Village is avowedly a didactic poem. Goldsmith wrote it as a solemn warning to England that the fate of Auburn was merely an example of what might happen to every other village of the land. But modern critics have touched upon this theme only very lightly, and where they have gone into it at all, their interpretations have in some cases led to a misunderstanding of the poet's analysis. On the premise that Goldsmith wrote and his contemporaries read the poem as a treatment of current social issues rather than just as a description of a simple rural community, I propose here to re-examine it as a social document. In so doing, I shall raise and attempt to answer three questions on which there seems to be no general agreement among scholars but which must be answered satisfactorily if we are to comprehend fully The Deserted Village. These questions are (1) just what message was the poet really trying to transmit to his readers? (2) how completely does the poem express his actual convictions? and (3) what inspired him to consider the condition he was describing as not merely unfortunate but fatal to the health of the nation?

Many contemporary critics are returning to the old credo that human reason “is often unreasonable.” This probably helps to explain the current revival of that famous study of emotional and intuitive responses, the Émile (1762) of Jean Jacques Rousseau. In as much as contemporaneous English reactions to that work have never been extensively studied, I present my findings.

Gewöhnlich charakterisieren literarhistorische Betrachtungen den Sturm-und-Drang als eine dichterisch-weltanschauliche Revolution, die in wuchtiger Auflehung gegen die Aufklärung für die Freiheit des Gefühls, der Individualität und der literarischen Form kämpfte. Dabei wird Goethe, dem Dichter des Götz, Urfaust, Werther und anderer artverwandter Dichtungen eine führende Rolle zugeschrieben. In seinem klassischen Werke Geist der Goethezeit hat Korff eingehend den philosophischen Hintergrund für diese Bewegung gezeichnet und nachgewiesen, wie sie sich in der Dichtung im Sinne politischer, sozialer, metaphysischer und formaler Freiheit ausgewirkt hat.

Wordsworth once wrote that he had been indebted to the North for more than he should ever be able to acknowledge. By that statement he probably meant to include, among other writings, the border ballads and certainly the poetry of Robert Burns. Burns was one, Wordsworth assures us, whose light he hailed when first it shone, and from whom he learned in youth “How Verse may build a princely throne On humble truth.” Wordsworth must in fact have been among the earliest of Burns' English admirers. When his sister told her seventeen year old brother of a new book Jane Pollard had recommended to her (it was the Kilmarmock edition then just a few months off the press), he replied that he had read it and, as Dorothy put it, “admired many of the pieces very much; and promised to get it me at the book-club, which he did.” Dorothy, too, was very much pleased with the poems and singled out the “Address to a Louse” and “To a Mountain Daisy” for special mention. The second edition of “poems” (1793) she carefully glossed in the margin.

There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry—too much of myself!” cries the painter Basil Hallward to Lord Henry Wotton early in Oscar Wilde's fantastic and tragic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. But, though Lord Henry remarks with his usual cynicism, “Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication,” Hallward continues to lament, “We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.” Nor does the painter forget his self-accusations, for many years later in the story he repeats his charge to the beautiful young man who has been the subject of his painting: “I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it.”

Die auβerordentliche Bedeutung, die Goethe für Thomas Mann gewonnen hat, ist nicht im Aesthetischen begründet. Goethe hat keineswegs im Formalen vorbildlich auf Thomas Mann gewirkt; schon deshalb nicht, weil Thomas Mann ja weder Lyriker noch Dramatiker ist, und was die Erzählung anbelangt, so haben Werke wie der “Werther” und der “Wilhelm Meister,” die in der Tat eine Tradition gebildet haben, schwerlich direkt, sondern höchstens durch Zwischenglieder auf Thomas Mann Einfluβ ausgeübt. Man mag den “Tonio Kröger” als einen späten Ausläufer des durch den “Werther” begründeten Weltschmerzromans betrachten: weder im Temperament noch in der Struktur, weder im Lyrismus noch in der Leidenschaft sind die beiden Werke wirklich vergleichbar. Am ehesten lieβe sich der “Tonio Kröger” noch in die Nähe von Storms “Immensee” einreihen, in dem manches von der Substanz des “Werther” verdünnt und verfeinert wiederkehrt: die kühle Atmosphäre, der leise und behutsame Gang der Handlung, die Abneigung gegen Szenen und Ausbrüche, die fast selbstverständliche Haltung des Verzichts, der gedämpfte Ton, die Vorliebe für Unausgesprochenes, nur Angedeutetes, die durchgehende Lebensproblematik lassen “Immensee” und “Tonio Kröger” in der Tat verwandt erscheinen, auch wenn sie im Zauber der lyrischen Naturstimmung auf der einen Seite, der Meisterschaft dialektischer Formulierungskunst auf der anderen weit auseinandergehen.