For the student of fiction, the most noteworthy accomplishment of Guillaume de Lorris in the Roman de la Rose is his invention of large-scale psychological allegory. C. S. Lewis, who has taught us how to haead the poem, suggests that it is an offspring of Old French romance and the moral allegory of the Prudentius tradition: the Roman deals with the erotic content of the romances in a form made newly potent by the moral allegorists of the school of Chartres. Lewis sees an adaptation or borrowing of allegory by romance before Guillaume in Chrétien de Troyes. There, it is suggested, we can see narrative poetry taking over allegory as a tool whenever psychology is in question. The purpose of this paper is to amplify the history of psychological allegory at this point, and thereby to modify Lewis' admittedly general account. Thus, while there are excellent reasons for using Chrétien as the exemplar of courtly romance writing, it can be shown that the tendency toward allegory in the romances is considerably more extensive than his practice would indicate. The romances constitute a virtual encyclopedia of psychological personifications, including illustrations and discussions of most of the “characters” in the Roman de la Rose. More important, this tendency does not represent simply a borrowing of the forms and procedures of moral allegory. Indeed, the allegory developing within the romances is not even so much a modification of the pre-established species as an independent invention. Specifically designed for psychological analysis, it points to the unique structural achievement of Guillaume de Lorris.

From his youth William Hazlitt was fond of prow fiction and liked to discuss it with other readers. When he turned from painting to literary criticism as a career, he therefore paid considerable attention to novels and romances. Since his criticism appeared chiefly between 1815 and 1830, it largely parallels the appearance of Sir Walter Scott's novels from 1814 to 1832—an important period in the development of the novel and its reading public. This was a time when most first-ranking critics refused to take novels seriously, had not made up their minds about them, or ignored them altogether. Hazlitt contended that this “department of criticism” deserved more attention for “settling the standard of excellence, both as to degree and kind” (vi, 108). He repeatedly asserted the worth and dignity of the genre, approved its effects upon readers, and judged novels by his fundamental aesthetic principles. Although his “Lecture on the English Novelists” is well known, the full extent of his criticism of prose fiction is not generally realized. For example, he wrote four essays on Sir Walter Scott. In addition to articles on various novelists, including minor figures, there are passages on prose fiction throughout the twenty volumes of Hazlitt's writings. From this mass of criticism it is easy to reconstruct his conception of what a novel should be—the first clear and well-defined conception of fiction from a great English critic

In Henry James's story, An International Episode, two English-men visit America. One of the visitors is Lord Lambeth, son of the Duke of Bayswater and brother of the Countess of Pimlico. In New York City and in Newport, the Englishmen are hospitably entertained by Mr. and Mrs. Westgate, not because the Americans are in any way obligated to the visitors but solely because of their open-hearted habits of hospitality and friendliness. After the Englishmen have returned to Great Britain, Mrs. Westgate and a Boston friend, Miss Bessie Alden, go to London; but on their arrival there, they find Lord Lambeth's family very slow in returning the courtesies he had been shown in America. Henry James remarks that “Bessie Alden . . . saw something of . . . English society . . . and . . . especially prized the privilege of meeting certain celebrated . . . authors and artists,”' but of the Duchess of Bayswater and the Countess of Pimlico she and Mrs. Westgate saw very little. At first they saw them not at all. And after the haughty English ladies had at last made a reluctant call on the visitors from America, Mrs. Westgate remarked: “They meant to overawe us. . . . They meant to snub us.” Bessie Alden observed that “their manners were not fine.” And Mrs. Westgate replied: “They were not even good!” Shortly after being snubbed in London, the Americans departed for the continent, leaving the reader with the impression that they were far greater ladies than the titled representatives of British ladyhood who had tried to overawe them in London.

Of all the “winged words” of Goethe's Faust those of its closing lines,

have probably flown farthest, and they have always been impressive and memorable. On the other hand, one cannot help feeling that the standard interpretation of them does not do justice to their lofty position in the ultimate summary statement of the drama. The commentaries almost invariably relate these lines to the last scene only, that of Faust's salvation and elevation, rather than to the drama as a whole.

In an Epilogue to the Queen, with which Tennyson closed his Library Edition of 1873, the Laureate noted, among many threats to the “mightiest of all people under heaven,” the danger to art from “poisonous honey stol'n from France,” Readers from queen to commoner could nod their heads in pious agreement, for they shared Tennyson's Gallophobia. Deeply distressed that Swinburne should have contributed a sonnet in praise of Mademoiselle de Maupin to Le Tombeau de Gautier (1873), he could only regard those who sipped such honey as un-British to the core. Tennyson was not thinking of his contemporaries, Thackeray and Arnold, who, though they may not have seen France whole, at least had left it steadily. Rather, he reserved his strictures for those later Victorians who seemed willing, even eager, to embrace French culture, though the fruit of that embrace might be lubricity and aestheticism.

Among the best liked and most widely known sections of The Canterbury Tales is the Nun's Priest's story of the regal Chanticleer and the lovely Dame Pertelote. For a long time critics have realized that this tale skilfully reflects facets of its teller's character, but only recently have detailed attempts been made to suggest just what sort of person Chaucer intended his audience to visualize as the Nun's Priest. Since Chaucer did not include in the General Prologue a portrait of this Pilgrim, whatever view one takes of the Nun's Priest must be based on the comments to and about him by the Host (VII.2810-15, 3447-60), on his own short comment to the Host (VII.2816-17), on the Narrator's brief remark about him (VI.2818-20), and on the superb tale which he relates to the company. This is to say that any acceptable portrait of Chaucer's Nun's Priest must of necessity derive primarily from the personal interplay during the Canterbury pilgrimage.

The Old English lyric The (Banished) Wife's Lament has evoked much critical comment without producing an acceptable interpretation. Ostensibly the situation of the poem is that the wife of a lord has been made a prisoner in an oak grove at the instigation of her husband, who has been led to perpetrate this cruelty by the machinations of his kinsmen. The wife (who is the speaker) first laments her own exiles and sorrows; she continues with a description of her husband as an exile; and she concludes with a bit of gnomic wisdom to the effect that “It is woe for him who must long for his beloved with a sad heart.” But it is a strange poem, with many obscurities. Norah Kershaw has suggested that “It is perhaps an ambitious attempt to portray excited feelings which causes the difficulty of the poem. The asyndetic and not altogether logical sequence of thought, the absence of metrical form in 1.24, and the involved construction in 1. 42 ff. may possibly all be ascribed to this cause.” This does not alter the fact, however, that no satisfactory explication of the meaning of the poem has been made, not even by Miss Kershaw.

An unpublished diary which Ruskin kept during the summer of 1842 when he was conceiving the plan of Modern Pointers furnishes new information on the development of his mind at that time. Writing of this year in Praeterita, Raskin was obliged to rely on a memory weakened by age and disease. “To my sorrow, and supreme surprise,” he noted in his autobiography which he had begun in 1885, “I find no diary whatever of the feelings or discoveries of this year.” He apparently had forgotten that in 1872 he had given such a diary as a Christmas present to his American friend, Charles Eliot Norton. This important manuscript, which remained in the Norton family until 1936 and was then donated to the Yale University Library as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Whitredge, seems to have been unknown to Ruskin's editors and succeeding students of his ideas. As reliable and recent a work as Derrick Leon's biography of Ruskin makes no mention of it and follows instead the account of the events of 1842 offered in Praeterita. A comparison of the manuscript with Praeterita shows that Ruskin's memory had dramatized this year of his youth in a way that misrepresented the state of mind in which Modern Painters was begun.

During the past twenty or thirty years there has occurred in the world of scholarship a revolution, the full significance of which has perhaps not been adequately appreciated. We all know about microfilms and microprint; many of us have made use of these for special purposes; but only a few among us have had the opportunity of considering how the development of photographic processes has already transformed our work and how it is creating entirely new conditions for future scholarly research.

The American Council of Learned Societies, through its Committee on the language Program, is directly or indirectly responsible for encouraging, planning, and directing many of the projects in which American linguists are currently engaged. The members of this Committee are appointed by the Board of Directors of the ACLS; at present they are Norman A. McQuown (Chicago, Chairman), John B. Carroll (Harvard, Secretary), Bernard Bloch (Yale), Stephen Freeman (Middlebury), Archibald A. Hill (Virginia), Martin Joos (Wisconsin), Albert H Marckwardt (Michigan), and Henry Lee Smith, Jr. (U. S. Department of State), with Mortimer Graves as ACLS liaison officer and John Kepke as business manager. The following statement sets forth the Committee's view of the situation in which it works and of its own specific duties.