Attempts to establish just grounds for war are as old as civilization itself. The seriousness of the attempts, however, and the nature of the difficulties which men encountered in making their formulations have varied from age to age, in accordance with prevailing assumptions and values. The problem of rationalizing war or integrating it into the social-intellectual structure undoubtedly became most acute with the triumph of Christianity, which was committed to peace but lacked the means of abolishing war. Early Christian thinkers were much occupied with the problem of determining under what conditions good Christians might engage in war and, notwithstanding the paucity of the results, there has hardly been any relaxation of the effort in medieval or modern times.

Seit mehr als hundert Jahren haben sich Literarhistoriker, Amateure und—leider audi—Philosophen um die Erhellung der Faustenste-hungsgeschichte gemüht. Trotz unendlichen Fleißes, glücklicher Funde und archivalischer Mitteilungen ist das Ende des Rätselratens auch heute noch nicht in Sicht.

Despite its deceptively simple theme—a farmer's son wants to become a knight but comes to a grievous end and is hanged—the Middle High German poem known to us as the Meier Helmbrecht by Wernher the Gardener is not easily integrated as to its literary genre among the literature contemporary with it—probably the sixth or seventh decade of the thirteenth century.

It is now generally agreed that the prose History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, commonly referred to as the English Faust Book, is the source from which is derived Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Yet, though the main flow of Marlowe's story stems from this source, the total impression left by play and history is very different. There is great poetry to account in part for the difference. There are bursts of eloquence in the magnificent speeches on hell, on the desire for knowledge and power as great as the mind of man may conceive, on the compulsion of Helen's beauty. But these are not enough to account for the grip of the play on all who have known it through the centuries, for the overwhelming sense of the vital importance of what happens in the soul of Faustus, for the terror and pity and awe which the events on the stage produce in the mind of even the most skeptical in the audience.

During a short life of great activity, in emulation of his friend and master, Lope de Vega Carpio, Juan Pérez de Montalván (1602-38) wrote a considerable number of plays, wide in their variety of subject matter and diverse in verse structure. The study of the latter phenomenon, in imitation of distinguished treatises for other dramatists of the Golden Age, will form the chief criterion in this presentation of chronology. That a serious consideration of Montalván's versification is long overdue is evident. As early as 1919, S. G. Morley, in referring to the authorship of La lindona de Galicia, remarked: “Then, one important factor, Montalván's formula [of versification], is practically an unknown quantity . . . ” More recently, Irving A. Leonard in his article, “Montalbán's El valor perseguido and the Mexican Inquisition, 1682,” spoke of the problem of authorship in the case of a play attributed to both Lope de Vega and Montalván. It is hoped that future studies of the authorship and chronology of plays associated in any way with the name of Juan Pérez de Montalván will be facilitated by the facts presented here.

Le formalisme platonicien a survécu tant bien que mal jusqu'au XIXe siècle. L'échafaudage des Idées, dominé par le bouquet flétri du Beau, du Bien et du Vrai, s'écroula alors sous les coups des philosophes qui l'avaient miné depuis deux siècles. La cangue du platonisme cesse de peser sur les épaules du spiritualisme occidental. Du relativisme à l'existentialisme, en passant par Bergson, la tentation d'un absolu et d'un éternel stériles s'efface et le temps n'apparaît plus, selon le mot de Bergson, comme la petite monnaie de l'éternité. Le temps n'est plus la faiblesse de l'homme par rapport à Dieu. Dieu étant mort, le temps représente la dignité de l'homme par rapport aux choses. L'existentialisme chrétien lui-même considère Dieu moins comme éternel que comme présent.

In the long history of literary polemics none has been more savage or more far-reaching in its consequences than the Fleshly Controversy, which raged in Victorian England during the 1870's with Robert Buchanan on one side and Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, and the unfortunate Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the other. The literary importance of the latter three and the intensive study devoted to their careers have thrown a revealing light upon their activities in the Controversy. Robert Buchanan has fared quite differently. Although widely heralded in the 1860's and '70's as a young poet of promise, he subsequently suffered such a literary eclipse that by the time of his death he was relatively little known. Today almost everything he wrote has been forgotten and his sole claim to fame is the negative one of being the man who attacked Dante Gabriel Rossetti and brought about his premature death. This paper is devoted to an examination of his career before, during, and after the Controversy in order to throw some light upon the role he played in that melee and to show that his attack, while reprehensible, was not made without some provocation.

The student of Coleridge's thought is likely to turn with a sense of relief from the apparent confusion of his metaphysical and epistemological speculations to the relative calm of his semantics. Here, at least, one can operate within a well-defined area, presenting in an orderly fashion Coleridge's great respect for words, his insistence that they be used carefully, his concern with paradox and contradiction, his famous distinctions such as that between reason and understanding, and the background of such coinages as esemplastic. This area provides the clue to Coleridge's whole system and is full of implications which stretch far out beyond the realm of words.

Historical statements about Tristram Shandy have in the past generally been hampered by critical misconceptions about the book. As long as it was taken to be a farrago, the value of which depended on a few lucky strokes on an otherwise haphazard and worthless canvas, efforts to see it in its historical context were doomed to failure. In effect, such a hodgepodge could have no important context. It was, as critics and historians repeated endlessly, a mad, inexplicable thing, unreasoned and unreasonable, having real kinship in literature only with other mad books, most of them long since wisely forgotten. As a whole it was really nothing, and consequently as a whole it could not be related to other wholes. Thus, with the exception of such matters as the peculiar sentence structure, the minute delineation of gesture, and the depiction of humor and sentiment, there were really no artistic devices to be placed in a historical context; all one could do was to place Sterne in the historical stream of those who were delightfully inartistic.

The exact dates for the majority of the writings of John Lydgate have not been ascertained. Occasionally Lydgate tells specifically when he composed a poem by inserting into it a statement concerning the time of composition which makes the dating somewhat obvious; other poems have been dated according to style and versification, age of manuscripts, and topical allusions to historical events. The present paper discusses the dating of four of Lydgate's works—Temple of Glas, Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI—by means of the astronomical allusions in these poems.