The Parlement of foules is a poem in three parts: the prelude before the dream, the scene in the garden of love, and the debate among the birds. Each part differs from the others in its sources, content, mode of treatment, and tone. Because of these differences many-critics have argued that the poem lacks unity. Such arguments would be more convincing if Chaucer seemed unaware of the differences and if the three parts of the poem did not, in some way, serve a common purpose. It is probable, however, that Chaucer created these differences deliberately, for he appears to have worked to heighten and exploit them. A conscious artistic purpose is behind the poem's variety. Moreover, this variety is the agent of the poem's unity; it both contains and creates the poem's ultimate meaning. To make this clear, we shall look first at some of the ways in which Chaucer sharpened the distinctions between the three parts. And then we shall consider the ways in which the parts are unified and the purpose which is served by the tripartite organization.

A fascinating and too often neglected area of literature is the medieval visions of the Afterworld, the detailed conceptions of hell, purgatory, and paradise, which were to reach a culmination in Dante's Divina Commedia. Several of these visions became widely popular, both in Latin and in vernacular versions. They have been carefully studied for their possible influence on Dante's writing. I propose to explore one aspect of them, the threefold pains of punishment, and to show how this material was used by Milton and Shakespeare.

Few critics have ever been very happy with the Excursion. Even those who support or justify Wordworth's turn to traditional attitudes have read it with no apparent enthusiasm or care. And for most modern readers who come to it after reading the Prelude, the Excursion can be no more than a painful anticlimax. It is hard for them not to suffer a sense of shock as they read its pious platitudes and realize that the poem was originally intended to embody and develop the fresh perceptions of the opening books of the Prelude. No wonder modern critics have been almost obsessed by the question: what happened to cause the narrowing and hardening of Wordsworth's attitudes? Why this timid compromise with orthodoxy rather than a bolder exploration of naturalism? And there have been nearly as many suggestions as critics. Perhaps because they have too readily accepted the Fenwick notes and taken the poem for granted as reflecting only the results of a change in the poet's attitudes, they have tended to neglect or to misinterpret the record in the poem itself of the state of mind which helped cause the change.

Zola's literary career opened in 1864 with the publication of the Contes à Ninon. Between then and 1881 he produced fourteen out of the thirty-one novels he was to write. Concurrently, he was writing almost continuously for the press; it was only after 1881 that, for reasons which I have suggested elsewhere, he gave up this activity, and for a long while desisted from all regular newspaper work. In this considerable journalistic output, attention is usually accorded only to those portions that Zola himself thought worthy to be preserved, and which he accordingly published in what are by custom referred to as his Œuvres critiques. Of the nine volumes grouped under this heading, one only, Mes Haines, contains a selection from his pre-1870 critical writing: it consists almost entirely of essays published originally in the Lyons newspaper Le Salut public in 1865 and 1866; they are interesting enough, one would think, to arouse curiosity concerning the rest of Zola's newspaper contributions during the years when he was making his name as a novelist and before he had emerged as the author of the Rougon-Macquart cycle.

For the last ten years, the elementary courses (first two semesters) in foreign languages at the University of Texas have comprised five contact hours per week. They carry four semester hours credit in accordance with the well-known formula, 1 hour/week: 1 semester hour credit; 2 laboratory hours/week: 1 semester hour credit. Coincidentally, beginning in 1946, drill sessions were provided, in French and Spanish, for oral-aural practice outside of class. The oral-aural emphasis became then the established procedure. When, in 1952, the three departments of foreign languages (Germanic, Romance, Slavic) moved into their new building, Batts Hall, the new facilities made possible further development.

German schools are gradually outgrowing the stage of chaos into which they had been plunged by the war. In a great effort the worst difficulties of the post-war period have been overcome, but conditions cannot yet be called normal. Classes still comprise 40 pupils and more. Although many schools have been rebuilt or newly built since the war, the bigger towns, which were nearly all heavily bombed, are still so short of accommodation that most school buildings have to be used in double shifts, i.e., two schools share one building, one school going in the morning, the other in the afternoon. The teaching load of a high school teacher is 25 periods (of 45 minutes each) a week. But in some respects peacetime conditions are gradually returning. Thus, the production of textbooks is approaching a satisfactory stage. There are two or three dozen different English courses for schools on the market, and a very large number of English and American texts in school-editions (with annotations). A catalogue published in the summer of 1955 enumerates 532 such editions printed in the Federal Republic of Germany, and there is nothing to prevent German schools from buying reading materials from Britain or the United States. A number of the German Länder have introduced a system by which all schoolbooks are provided free of charge.

I may as well begin by confessing that I make this report somewhat selfconsciously. For one thing, I am pensively aware that it is my last report to you as Director of the Foreign Language Program. But in addition I seem to have acquired some notoriety as a scolder of language teachers, and it's a nice question whether I should stay in character or make my valedictory a flattering if slightly insincere performance. Some of my good friends have warned me that language teachers, like professional educators, are unusually sensitive to criticism, and they have advised that, while honesty is supposed to be the best policy, I need not be too generous with it. Beyond this wellmeant counsel my own natural impulses are to close four years of work for the advancement of language study in America by having all foreign language teachers as my friends. I put only one thing ahead of such advice and such impulses, and that is the good of the cause for which I shall continue to work until next summer, and on which it is now my duty to report candidly.