Mit markanten Zügen hat Goethe Winckelmanns Lebensbild gezeichnet und ihm für immer den Vorteil gesichert, “im Andenken der Nachwelt als ein ewig Tüchtiger und Kräftiger zu erscheinen”; in umfassender Weise hat Justi Winckelmann, den Kunsthistoriker und Archäologen, in einer Biographie dargestellt, welche sich zu einem groszen Bilde der zeitgenössischen Kunstbestrebungen erweitert; aber die philologische Forschung hat Winckelmann bis jetzt gänzlich unbeachtet gelassen. Mit Unrecht, denn die deutsche Literatur kann Winckelmann mit eben so viel, wenn nicht mit mehr Recht für sich in Anspruch nehmen als die Kunstgeschichte und Altertumskunde. Winckelmanns Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums ist, vom kunsthistorischen und archäologischen Standpunkt beurteilt, durchaus veraltet, als Literaturdenkmal steht dieses Werk in unvergänglicher Jugendfrische da.

The student of to-day who wishes to make a study of the dolce stil nuovo is very soon brought face to face with a serious difficulty. As he reads his standard text-books, he finds in them a pretty uniform definition of the originality and characteristics of this school. But, upon looking further and consulting special books, he is confronted with recent work, both industrious and able, taking issue with the definition he has just learned. It is the object of this paper to help that student. We would try to determine what changes, if any, are forced upon the traditional view by the discoveries of the most successful of its opponents.

There is a fascination in the attempt to define the supernatural, although one is aware of the etymological contradiction implied in the effort. The definition of the Century Dictionary, “that which is above or beyond the established course or laws of nature,” does not help us much. This definition is best approached by drawing a distinction between the natural and the supernatural which may be epitomized by stating that the former is comprehended, the latter only apprehended. We know, for example, what Poe means when he speaks of the dual self in William Wilson, but we do not comprehend the methods by which that duality is to be brought about. In this lack of comprehension lies the attraction of the supernatural. It is one phase of the larger appeal of the romantic, which includes it; and it springs from that ever present demand for what is strange and new which is a part of the nature of man. It is of interest to note that in the nineteenth century, which has demanded an ever increasing exactitude in science, and in America, where commercial standards have always been definite, there has been developed to a remarkable degree a literature dealing with that which cannot be proved or understood.

The wide diffusion through Europe of our modern locution the sick man of the East is due to circumstances largely factitious. At no time has the epithet been conspicuously just, as those meddling too intimately in Turkish affairs have found to their sorrow. And we shall see herewith that at the beginning of its vogue, a half century ago, it was by no means novel. As a matter of fact, the locution gained its foothold in journalism from a striking diplomatic incident; and it has derived its vitality from that vague hostility, partly religious, partly humanitarian, and largely ill-informed, with which the commercial interests of the Christian Occident have watched Turkish affairs in Armenia and the Asiatic colonies. The expression began to have wide currency in 1854. It seems that early in the previous year the British chargé d'affaires in St. Petersburg had a conversation with the Emperor Nicholas regarding Turkish conditions. This talk was ostensibly en gentilhomme, as the phrase went, and should not properly have been reported: in diplomacy, every conversation with a sovereign is in confidence. It is quite possible, however, that the Emperor actually intended thus informally to publish his attitude toward the Porte, without entering into binding declarations or agreements. At any rate, from the correspondence of Sir George Seymour with his home office the matter crept into the public press, much in the following tenor: Nicholas, referring to the bad condition of Turkey, said: “Tenez, nous avons sur les bras un homme malade, un homme gravement malade; ce sera, je vous le dis franchement, un grand malheur, si, un de ces jours, il devait nous échapper, surtout avant que toutes les dispositions nécessaires fussent prises.” Seymour replied: “Votre Majesté est si gracieuse qu'elle me permettra de lui faire encore une observation. Votre Majesté daignera m'excuser si je lui fais observer que c'est à l'homme généreux et fort de ménager l'homme malade et faible.” The Emperor was so pleased with this metaphor that in another conversation some days later he returned to the subject in similar terms: “I am less anxious to know what shall be done with the sick man, than to arrange with England what shall not be done.” To Seymour's objection that there was “no reason to think he was dying,” Nicholas insisted: “The sick man is dying.” This sinister revelation of Russia's attitude, coming at a crisis of public interest in the East, and combined with the undiplomatic language in which it was expressed—partly too with the unconventional manner in which Seymour failed to respect the Emperor's confidence,—assured the incident and the locution wide publicity. The expression, with various modifications of form and connotation, has since been revived at every important moment in Ottoman history.

A man's notes in his favourite books must have an interest quite distinct from that of the revelation of himself disclosed in what he invents or composes of his own motion. He is taken, as it were, unawares. The receptive and responsive regions of his intelligence under the touch of another mind are revealed in the passages that strike him, as in the annotations and reflections suggested to him. The reader who comes upon a volume so annotated may promise himself a new, probably a more intimate view of its quondam owner; aridity or abundance may equally surprise him. It is, then, with a sense of adventure that he will embark upon the perusal of notes like those of Gabriel Harvey in a book of such vogue and effect as the famous Courtier of Baldesare Castiglione, “fine Castilio,” as Harvey himself calls him.

The vexed problem of Spenser's missing works, incapable as it inevitably is of absolutely certain solution, has nevertheless been treated, in a recent article by Mr. Philo M. Buck, Jr., with results that are interesting and on the whole satisfactory, though marked, as it seems at least to the present writer, by certain faults of method. Mr. Buck believes, as do various critics, that the greater number of the so-called lost works are to be found in Spenser's extant writings. He contends further that the poet, as a measure of political prudence, voluntarily suppressed them in 1580, only to draw them forth about 1591, when he was wrathful at royal neglect, and eager to level their satire at his enemy, Burghley; and most of them, Mr. Buck argues, were published in the Complaints (1591) and in the Faerie Queene. In our consideration of the article, after the inaccuracy of method has been noted, and certain minor phases of the argument have been questioned, it will remain for us to emphasize the probability of the main contention, and the wider significance it has for Spenser's method of composition, especially as regards the Faerie Queene.

Suppose that fifty or sixty years ago the idea had taken root in these United States that we ought to have a national American language; that as a free people, with a destiny of our own to carve out, we ought not to depend on a foren nation for the most important of all the instruments of civilization. Suppose, further, that some more or less competent scholar, by way of providing an American language, had carefully investigated a number of our local dialects and had made a sort of composit grammar and dictionary of them, standardizing the spelling on historical principles. Imagine, finally, a powerful and persistent effort to bring this language into use by means of legislation. Making all these suppositions, one has a rough analogy to what is now going on in the little rock-ribbed kingdom of Norway.

Modernity has taught us, with some reason, to laugh at pastorals. Nevertheless there is deep humanity in those artificial songs of shepherds and shepherdesses. With the frigid pipings of Thyrsis and Corydon we are indeed out of tune. Since, however, the pastoral fascinated Theocritus, Virgil, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Spenser, who wrote for ail time, we ought to approach the outworn form in a spirit of serious sympathy. Even proud idealists sometimes waver. Poetry must furnish, at times, an escape from life—not always the clarion call to life's struggles. Men took the pastoral in order to flee for a moment into Arcadia, to clothe in pleasant vagueness confessions of the delightful miseries of calf-love, though strife stole too often even into Arcadia and goaded the shepherds into worldly bickerings. We have the same aspirations to-day as those poets when they wrote their pastorals,—moods that are not mere toys; but because hope is edged with doubt, we trifle with our dreams in ways no less artificial than the pleasant game of pastoral-making. We have not outgrown the pastoralist's moods.

The Alexandrian followers of Aristarchus, buzzing in corners and busy with monosyllables, have left the world that they worried with their wranglings over and and , the swords that were drawn over inchoate verbs have been rust for centuries. But the bookworms of Aristarchus, the troops of Callimachus, the pack of Zenodotus return at times to earth. In order to hear this pack in full cry, we have only to recall the various emendations in Greek texts necessitated fifty years ago by the fallacious Dawes Canon that is never used with the first aorist subjunctive in the active or middle voice.

In the Publications of the Modern Language Association for March, 1909, I tried to show reason for believing that Chaucer's Legend of Medea was written later than the Man of Law's Prologue, and that hence the date of its composition must fall some time after 1390, when the poet was already engaged on the Canterbury Tales. In the following number of the same journal Professor G. L. Kittredge replied to my paper with a thorough-going denial. Professor Kittredge's name rightly carries with it so great an authority,—particularly in matters pertaining to Chaucer,—that, if I am still to maintain my position, I must consider his objections and show why I cannot hold them valid. Whatever may be the final verdict of scholars as to the date of Medea, the issue involves so many questions which throw light on Chaucer's methods of work that a full discussion of it cannot be without profit.

Of monographs and studies on the Grail there is no end but as yet an article dealing primarily with the Bleeding Lance scarcely exists. In the following pages the lance will be kept in the foreground, and the object will be to approach the grail problem from this novel point of attack.