In an appendix to the first and most complete study of the Irish wargoddesses, C. Lottner called attention to their resemblance to the valkyries and pointed particularly to the following apparent similarities:

1. (1) The valkyries, like the war-goddesses, appear alone or in groups of three.

2. (2) Like the war-goddesses, they are often companions of single heroes.

3. (3) Like the war-goddesses, they appear in the form of birds.

4. (4) The Germanic cognate of Irish Bodb, a war-goddess, the Cathubodua of a continental inscription, appears in Baduhenna, the name of a Germanic goddess mentioned by Tacitus.

Charlemagne a ramené jusqu'à Saint Romain de Blaye les corps de Roland, d'Olivier, de Turpin. “Les Français,” dit M. Joseph Bédier traduisant le v. 3694 du Roland, “les remettent à Dieu et à ses Noms.” M. Wilmotte (Archivum Romanicum,xv, 155–156) trouve cette explication peu probable et en propose une nouvelle: il s'agirait des nuns (= nonnus ‘haute fonction ecclésiastique’) du monastère d'hommes de St. Romain à Blaye et il s'agirait d'un parallèle à l'enterrement d'Aude au mustier des nunains (v. 3730). Et M. Wilmotte de s'exclamer, triomphant sur ses devanciers, y compris le dernier éditeur, M. Bertoni: “Voilà la clef du mystère!”

Midway in his canticus the woeful Troilus laments: “Al sterelees within a boot am I.” This might seem to be nothing more than a felicitous phrase aptly suited to describe the plight of the unhappy lover. But in the Man of Law's Tale Constance actually experienced the dreadful circumstances which gave rise to a metaphor. We remember that the old soldaness, after killing her son and his Christian partisans, caused the Roman bride to be put on a ship without a rudder, and bade her learn navigation back to Italy. What treasure Constance had brought to Syria was put into the boat with her, as well as a considerable supply of victuals and clothes. For a number of years thereafter Constance tossed about on the sea, preserved from harm and death by Him who saved Daniel and Jonah, until her ship stuck fast on the shore of Northumberland, where she was found by the constable of a castle who came down to search the wreck. Soon after Constance's marriage to King Ælla of Northumberland, the monarch was called away to fight his enemies. Ælla's mother, like the old soldaness of Syria, hated her son's wife and plotted her destruction. When Constance's child was born the old queen contrived that the message to Ælla announcing the news should report the birth of a monster, with the suggestion that Constance was an evil fairy; and for the king's reply she substituted a command that the young woman and her offspring should be placed in the ship in which she had been found originally,—that is, a ship without rudder in the beginning, and now, apparently, a wreck,—that she should be pushed out from shore and charged never to return. The salient facts in these two episodes, which we may call Constance I and Constance II, are: Expulsion by sea in an unseaworthy boat, setting adrift in the same kind of boat by reason of a serious indictment, and safe-conduct or protection by a mysterious or divine power.

The lost Middle English romance which we may call Olive and Landres was written before 1286. It was, therefore, one of the earliest English romances of which we know—among extant romances only four are certainly as old as that, and hardly half a dozen others can conceivably be as old. Before it disappeared it was translated into Old Norse prose. A foreword to the translation tells us how, in the winter after the death of the Scottish King Alexander, grandfather of the Maid of Norway (that is, in the winter of 1286), Lord Bjarni Erlingsson of Bjarkey was busy on a political mission to Scotland. There he found this saga written down in the English language. Impressed, ostensibly by its high moral lessons, Lord Bjarni had the saga translated from English into Norse.

The silhouette of the Troilus, the kinds of poem behind it that it approximates, are essential and not difficult to perceive. Mr. Young, in the most important recent article on the subject, and in a delicate and masterful style, has shown its pervasive elements from the romances. Chaucer hardly set out deliberately to write a poem in the line of Chrétien de Troyes or Floris or what not, but the usages and assumptions of such poems, the commonest kind of serious secular narrative he knew, he adopted as a matter of course. There is vast variety in medieval romance, and the word itself (meaning at first merely a poem in French) is vague, to say nothing of the rarefied air which we reach when we try to grasp the romantic in the abstract. Medieval romance and the romantic in the abstract are not the same, though historically and essentially allied. I turn to the second. One of the essentials of the romantic, the satisfying a taste for the strange, Chaucer provided plentifully for his own day in the intentional ancient coloring, which affected his readers (and not us at all) just as the inevitable and unconscious medieval coloring affects us. He here aimed however no less at satisfying his own informed awareness that the remote past was very unlike his own present than at creating a romantic impression. The emotionalism which belongs to romance also in good sooth is plentiful. What Mr. Young is specially combating is the summary labelling the poem as a psychological novel, a phrase now almost a cliché, taken too literally, though no doubt meant by its first user as a mere simplification to assure the momentum of a fresh idea. The word novel is onesided, even misleading. The hazy word psychological implies lifelike portraiture of complex people with internal conflicts, which allows us with probability to descry undercurrents and motives. This is true of the Troilus. The facts are, as most critics will admit, that the poem is an intricate blending of romance on every side with delicate and perceptive truth to humanity (though emphatically not a mere “page out of the book of modern every-day life”); that the two are not contradictory, though more intense and more commingled here than in almost any other English narrative one can think of; that though it is stimulating to guess briefly, it is impossible to decide how much would fall into each category for Chaucer and his readers. Emphatically he no more medievalizes than he humanizes his chief source; he complicates and intensifies it.

The Towneley play on the Harrowing of Hell, play xxv, derives throughout most of its length from the York play on the same subject, York xxxvii. Towneley, however, varies from York constantly in wording, omits some Y lines, and transmits others in varied degrees of confusion. It also contains considerable writing in septenar quatrains and trimeter double quatrains which, in form and content, have no relation whatever to Y xxxvii as it has come down to us. As the York play is composed of thirty-four perfectly regular stanzas of twelve lines each, the variations of T have given rise to many suggestions in an effort to account for them. It is the purpose of this paper to study these suggestions and the play itself in the hope that from such a study a solution of the complex problem offered by the composite nature of T may emerge with sufficient clarity to warrant belief.

John Donne, Jr., has been said to have “flung” his father's letters “to the world in complete disorder” when he prepared Letters to Severall Persons of Honour: Written by John Donne Sometime Deane of S' Pauls London (1651), and it is true that the letters in this volume are not arranged for biographical purposes. No effort was made to put any of them in chronological order, except that one, the last in the volume, seems to have been selected for its position partly because it was written during Donne's last illness. Most of the letters, moreover, are without dates, and many were deliberately given false addresses. The editor was chiefly concerned about preparing a volume of elegant letters to “severall persons of honour.” Both the adjective and the adjective phrase are significant; for the 1651 volume was not just thrown together. It was arranged so that it would appear to contain letters to a greater variety of people than it did, and to people who were better remembered in 1651. It is the purpose of this article to formulate working hypotheses about the editorial processes which determined the Letters to Severall Persons, first by discovering what the most probable sources of the letters were, and second by examining the motives and methods which governed their arrangement and the headings which were given to them.

The duodecimo volume which is known in the British Museum as Additional MS 10,309 comprises 155 folio sheets, closely written on both sides. It is completely filled with written matter, all in the same hand but showing the gradual variation in handwriting that would normally occur in one person with the passage of time. That the filling of the book took several years, is made more apparent by the wide range of interests shown in its contents.

Throughout his prose works Milton shows familiarity with the theological literature of his time. In particular, he shows, by citation and reference, that he used on occasion, especially in the divorce pamphlets, certain commentaries on Genesis written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He mentions by name the commentaries of four authors: John Calvin, Paulus Fagius, Andreus Rivetus,and David Pareus. Because he knew their other theological works, he may also have been familiar with the commentaries on Genesis of Wolfgang Musculus, Peter Martyr (Pietro Martiro Vermigli), and Hieronymus Zanchius. He almost certainly knew the commentaries on the Old Testament, including Genesis, of Hugo Grotius and John Diodati.

During a recent exchange of notes regarding our separate studies of Christopher Smart, Professor E. G. Ainsworth, Jr., of the University of Missouri, has called my attention in a query to an unsigned poem entitled “The Benedicite Paraphrased,” which appeared in Dodsley's The Museum, or Literary and Historical Register on December 6, 1746 (ii, 182). A detailed study of the poem has convinced me that it is Smart's work. If this attribution be accepted, the poem is of the first importance, for it must alter rather completely our view of Smart's career.

The influence of Count Volney's Les Ruines upon Queen Mab has long been known to Shelley scholars, but it has apparently been assumed that Shelley's interest in the work ceased shortly afterwards. Such, however, was not the case. The Ruins had made so deep an impression upon Shelley that he derived from it much of the central pattern of The Revolt of Islam, some four years later than Mab, and echoes of it are to be found in Prometheus Unbound, some six years later. In fact, Shelley's debt to the work in The Revolt of Islam is of so extensive a nature that it is clear he must have reread it shortly before, or even during, the composition of that poem. It is the purpose of this paper to indicate the nature of this debt.

The writer of the following letters was George Keats, the brother of the poet. He was born on February 28, 1797, the son of Thomas and Frances (Jennings) Keats. At an early age he had been left an orphan with his two brothers, Thomas and John, and had been placed at a private boarding school in Enfield. After leaving school George worked for a short while in the counting-room of his guardian, Richard Abbey. After a quarrel with Hodgkinson, the junior partner, he left and at the end of May, 1818, married Georgiana Augusta Wylie. At the age of twenty-one he journeyed with her to America, planning to reside in Morris Birkbeck's settlement. Keats travelled by horse and carriage from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and thence descended the Ohio in a keelboat. For several months the poet's brother resided at the home of Audubon, the naturalist, in Henderson, Kentucky, where he lost his money in a boat speculation. Keats finally became managing partner in a flour and saw-mill concern in which he accumulated a fortune, and settled as a merchant in Louisville. There, with the exception of a few journeys, he remained until his death on December 24, 1841.

Scholars have identified very few proverbs and proverbial phrases in Browning's poetry. He is credited with only one by Apperson, five by Smith, three by Hodell, ten by Cook, and three by Birrell. Of these twenty-one proverbs the foregoing scholars cite sixteen as occurring in The Ring and the Book. Investigation, however, reveals that seventeen of them and ninety-five additional ones are found in that poem. Listed in the order of their appearance in The Ring and the Book, with their occurrences in Browning's other poems indicated, these one hundred twelve proverbs are:

Stung to the quick. 653.19; 831.67; Touched to the quick. 837.75; Incident of the French Camp, 333.38; Balaustion's Adventure, 565.39; Vexed to the quick. Sordello, 106.86; pierce to the quick. Pippa Passes, 185.43; cf. Apperson 642; Smith 138.

One of the topics most often discussed by critics of Poe has been his exceptional power of “analysis” or “abstract reason.” It is not necessary to do more than remind the student of the persistence of such terms. The most careful writers have employed them. And these terms, if they refer to anything at all more specific than general power of intellect, must refer to an analytic as opposed to a creative power, to a power of solving puzzles, of reasoning from known premises to testable conclusions, where truth is different from error. One of Poe's claims to this power I have scrutinized in a previous article, and it is my purpose now to do the same to another and bolder, the short story called “The Mystery of Marie Roget.”

It should not be inappropriate to compare two contemporary novels of approximately the following description: One novel relates the disillusions of a young provincial in Paris, the other the disillusions of a small-town man in Munich. The two novels center around the historic period of 1848. The two heroes have literary and artistic gifts, but prove more or less failures. Each of the two young men becomes interested in four women and each is incapable of making a definite choice for himself. Each fights a duel, exactly in the middle of the novel, and nobody knows exactly why. The two novels give practically complete life-stories of the extravagant heroes, and give into the bargain a full—if sometimes disguised—account of the authors' views on painting, literature, philosophy, religion, and politics.

Few periods have been more important in the history of Dutch art and letters than the decade between 1880 and 1890. Those years saw the rise of the painters of the “Hague school”—Josef Israëls, Blommers, the Maris brothers—and a reorientation of Dutch art toward the realism of the masters of the seventeenth century. A literary renaissance of some importance accompanied this artistic revolution. Dutch authors turned more and more from the insipid idealism of earlier days toward a new realism, strongly reminiscent of that prevailing in France. Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers, Zola—these were the idols of the new school. The naturalistic doctrines of Zola carried an especial appeal to the young critics and novelists, and a small but vocal group of imitators carried his banner in Holland during the years 1880–90.

William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, makes the following statement:

Lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.

The sharp division, not to say chaos, of opinion on whether the native English suffix -dom is dead or is active and freely available for forming nouns is illustrated by the following thirteen representative views, all but one of which are of the twentieth century.