We approach a centenary not, perhaps, wholly undeserving of notice on the part of this learned company. It was apparently in 1824 that those respected citizens of La-Ferté-sous-Jouarre, MM. Dupuis and Cotonet, began an enterprise which was to cause them, as is recorded, “twelve years of suffering,” and to end in disillusionment—the enterprise of discovering what Romanticism is, by collecting definitions and characterizations of it given by eminent authorities. I conjecture, therefore, that one of the purposes of the Committee in inviting me to speak on this subject was perhaps to promote a Dupuis and Cotonet Centennial Exhibition, in which the later varieties of definitions of Romanticism, the fruit of a hundred years' industry on the part of literary critics and professors of modern literature, might be at least in part displayed. Certainly there is no lack of material; the contemporary collector of such articles, while paying tribute to the assiduity and the sufferings of those worthy pioneers of a century ago, will chiefly feel an envious sense of the relative simplicity of their task. He will find, also, that the apparent incongruity of the senses in which the term is employed has fairly kept pace with their increase in number; and that the singular potency which the subject has from the first possessed to excite controversy and breed divisions has in no degree diminished with the lapse of years.

It is doubtful whether any other great literary reputation of the Renaissance has survived in so ambiguous and confused a state as that of Marc-Antoine Muret, recognized in his own time and ever since as the best writer of Latin prose in the second half of the sixteenth century. The most important event in the history of literary ideas during that period was the controversy concerning the imitation of Cicero; and in that controversy and the various conflicts connected with it Muret was more or less engaged at all periods of his career. Yet modern literary history tells us nothing intelligible of his part in it; or, to speak more exactly, it records two conflicting statements. On the one hand, he appears as the associate of Bembo, Sadoleto, Longueil in the stricter sect of the Ciceronians, a more accomplished, and not less devoted, imitator of the master. This is certainly the commoner view among those who have any acquaintance with his name; for generations he has been held up to the admiration even of school-children as the modern Cicero. How confusing it is then to find that he also holds a conspicuous place in the sketches—few and inadequate—of the movement of opposition that finally triumphed at the end of his century over the great rhetorical scheme of education. From his letters and orations one or two passages have been cited which outdo the sarcasm of Erasmus' Ciceronianas and display a latitude of classical taste which even a modern critic cannot regard without dubiety.

Although to the casual reader, and indeed to some serious critics, the Faerie Queene seems to consist only of an unsystematized accumulation of episodes bound together merely by the rich glamor of Romantic atmosphere, yet there can be no doubt that Spenser had a rather definite theory of narrative art, and that, at least along general lines, he developed his material according to a preconceived plan. He had already showed himself a literary theorist by his experiments in diction and style in the Shepheardes Calender; and the Faerie Queene itself has a certain symmetry in the arrangement of its episodes: in most of the books, a knight and a lady engage upon a quest; the knight falls into sin, usually the antithesis of the particular virtue portrayed in that book; he is saved by a sort of deus ex machina, usually in the person of Arthur; he is taught the virtue that corresponds to his sin; and he proceeds upon his quest and conquers.

In the 1801 edition of Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Works were collected for the first time seven essays republished from the British Magazine (July 1761-January 1763) where they appeared under the general heading, “On the Study of the Belles Lettres.” Grouped under this title these essays have been included in all subsequent editions of Goldsmith's Works and, so far as I know, only one editor—Peter Cunningham, whose opinion will be discussed presently—has decided against their authenticity.

In the article on the life of Henry Mackenzie in Lives of Eminent Scotchmen is contained the statement that he translated, together with two or three other dramatic pieces from the German, Lessing's Set of Horses. A search for these translations disclosed that they appeared anonymously in 1792 under the title Dramatic Pieces from the German. The little volume contains a translation of Goethe's Die Geschwister, Gesner's The Conversations of a Father with his Children, and Emdorff's Set of Horses. It is evident that the statement ascribing the Set of Horses to Lessing is inaccurate. A colleague, who has investigated Mackenzie's life and works, has assured me that Mackenzie frequently makes incorrect statements concerning his own writings so that it is very difficult to ascertain the actual facts concerning them.

“Of all the great German writers, Wieland's mind is the most French,” remarked Henry Crabb Robinson to Madame de Staël. “I am aware of it,” was her reply, “and therefore I do not think much of him. I like a German to be a German.”1 Had these two hero-worshippers become a bit better acquainted with Schiller than they were, it is easily conceivable that they might have made some such observation concerning him, substituting in the foregoing formula “English” for “French”; for, with all his characteristically German idealism, Schiller, whose “love of freedom, reverence for women, enthusiasm for the fine arts” the same Madame de Staël emphasizes, had much in common with the English temperament.

Without the last nine years of William Blake's life, and without a few letters, we should have, on one side, his writings; on the other side, the works of his biographers, and between, a great gulf fixed, where the unpremeditated record of his everyday friends and companions ought to be. But these nine years throw a bridge across the gulf, a bizarre bridge, to be sure, the foundations of which, nevertheless, go down to the rock of first-hand evidence. During them he was as companioned as, in the just preceding years, he had been neglected; during them he was known and observed by a variety of men, quack astrologers, young painters, a persistent reporter, a steady-going friend.

Probably none of Victor Hugo's works has sources more complicated than Quatrevingt-treize. Accordingly, in order so far as possible to avoid confusion, the following paper has been divided into three parts, of graduated complexity. In the first part, a study is made of minor details in Quatrevingt-treize which Hugo borrowed from Blanc, Duchemin-Descepeaux, Lamartine, Garat, Du Rosel, the official Moniteur, as well as from other sources. The second part is devoted to the principal characters in Quatrevingt-treize, Marat, Robespierre, Danton; Cimourdain, Lantenac, Gauvain; l'Imânus and Michelle Fléchard. An attempt is made to discover the origins of the principal elements of these characters, and to demonstrate, to some extent, how these elements are welded together. The third part deals with the general plan of Quatrevingl-treize.

In Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark (London, 1796) is a passage connecting two other interesting people, and not hitherto noticed so far as I find. It reads:

The period following the French Revolution was deeply interested in “the people” as a mass conception, in all that belonged to them and all that they created. It was in this period that theorists on the origin of law, customs, religion, language, literature—particularly the folk-song and the folktale—liked to advocate the doctrine of spontaneous, unconscious growth “from the heart of the people,” as the phrase went. Such conceptions of origin had their critics from the first; but they remained more or less orthodox throughout the nineteenth century, and they still have foothold in both England and America. They have, however, receded in the wake of more reserved second-thoughts about human nature, along with the recession of the “romantic” vehemence, and of the Hegelian philosophy of the “over-soul,” and of our own demagogic admiration of the undifferentiated demos.

In collecting stories and songs from the Jamaica negroes during the summer“ of 1919 and the winter of 1921, I was constantly on the lookout for traditional English ballads, some of which I hoped to find handed down in their older forms as a result of two hundred and fifty years of English occupation of the island. A fair number of secondary ballads were easily accessible, some of them preserved with an English intonation which proved them to have been memorized from cultivated English singers. Among these were the Wurlean Woman, and the ballad of Adinah sung to the same tune as the New England ballad of Springfield Mountain. But of traditional ballads of the better class, both words and music, I secured only the widespread song of Little Musgrove. Naturally I asked myself what had become of old ballad forms in Jamaica.