The Rev. Mr. N. J. Halpin in 1843, followed by Professor G. P. Baker in 1894 and Mr. R. Warwick Bond in 1902, have sought to explain Endimion as the vehicle of a personal allegory setting forth a contemporary court intrigue. These commentators have been duly followed in turn, with slight variations, by the historians F. G. Fleay in 1891, A. W. Ward in 1899, and F. E. Schelling in 1908. The existence of this allegory may be regarded, therefore, as generally accepted by authorities on the Elizabethan drama. The exponents of this personal allegory agree in recognizing that Lyly intended to represent the Queen in Cynthia, a point which no one is likely to dispute. They agree further in arguing that Endimion, the lover of Cynthia, represents Leicester, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth. From this basis three varieties of the allegory have been developed, in attempts to identify a third character, Tellus, thè lady deserted by Endimion. Three ladies have been proposed, each of whom played a striking rôle in Leicester's career. Mr. Halpin suggested Lady Sheffield, Leicester's second wife; Professor Baker substituted for her Lady Essex, Leicester's third wife; and Mr. Bond set aside both in favor of Mary, Queen of Scots.

The Towneley Mysteries have two remarkable characteristics which have attracted the attention of scholars: they contain a number of plays borrowed directly from the York cycle and they also contain a number of other plays so conspicuous for their highly dramatic form that the cycle may be said to have reached in them the highest point in the dramatic development of the English Mystery. Various theories have been advanced to account for the presence of these two sets of plays in Towneley and especially for the relationship, and its extent, of Towneley and York. The two theories of greatest interest are those of Professor Davidson and Professor Hohlfeld. A third, advanced by Mr. Pollard, is practically the same as Professor Hohlfeld's, with one or two slight modifications, which hardly concern us here.

Amongst the many collections of fables which have come down to us from the middle ages none appears to have enjoyed greater popularity or to have been more widely translated than that in Latin elegiac verse nowadays entitled the Walter of England Collection. In addition to an unusually large number of extant manuscript versions of this collection in its original form, more than one hundred being actually listed, there is a host of printed editions, while translations and adaptations are to be found in French, Italian, Provençal, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Hebrew. Among so many reworkings but a single one occurs in French prose, and it is this collection, not hitherto printed, which forms the subject of the present article.

One of the earliest members of the important Scève family at Lyons was Henri Scève, great-grandfather of Maurice Scève, the leading poet of the Lyonnese renaissance. Henri, who was still living in 1471, seems to have had two sons, François and Léonard. Of François, the younger of these sons, we learn that about 1480 he suffered considerable damage à la barre du pont du Rosne tant pour la mortalité, gens d'armes, que pour les grans eaues.

In 1493, he possessed des prés et des terres labourables in the parish of Vaise. Ten years later (1503), he and his son were proprietors of the inn Ste-Catherine, which, however, was maloustru et mal prouffitant.

Although French fable literature played a prominent part in the evolution of the Æsopic Fable in the Middle Ages, no general account of its history and development has as yet been written by any modern scholar. Single collections of French fables dating from this period have been published from time to time in more or less critical editions, and certain phases of the more general field have been investigated by various scholars, but it is believed that the present paper may justly claim to be the first general survey of Old French Fable Literature within certain well-defined limits.

During the eighteenth century several attempts were made to translate the whole or parts of Butler's Hudibras into German. Josua Eiselein, who published a translation of Hudibras in 1845, gave in his introduction the only account of these translations yet written, but his record is brief and inaccurate. Hence it may not be without value to re-examine Butler's work in its German forms, and, in addition, to investigate the position of Hudibras among those works which German admiration for English literature sought to introduce into Germany.

This farce, which is here published for the first time, is found in a collection of manuscript poetry in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid with the press mark 2621. It bears number 1239 in Sr. Paz y Melia's catalogue of plays in the Biblioteca Nacional. The handwriting is of the early sixteenth century. The volume contains poems, for the most part anonymous, of the sixteenth century, in Castilian and Catalan. On the first page, in a hand of the seventeenth century, we read: “En este libro ay poesias de Jorge de Montemayor, de Juan Fernandez, de D. Luis Margarit, de D. Luis de Milan, de D. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, de N. Torrellas, de D. Hernando de Acuña, de Alvaro Gomez de Ciudad Real y de otros autores inciertos.”

The nearer the knights of Arthur's Court approach the Grail, the more illusive and intangible the holy vessel appears. In Sir Percivale's own words:

“Lo, if I find the Holy Grail itself
And touch it, it will crumble into dust.“

Thus one might say the Grail symbolizes in its evasiveness the problem of its own origin. For if its source is still to be sought, this is largely because the problem involved so easily eludes one's grasp. The difficulty is to fix the eye on the main issue, to the exclusion of secondary considerations. The Grail stories have been classed as Perceval and Galaad forms, as those in which a quest is the burden of the tale, as those in which it is the history of the sacred vessel itself.

Among the most characteristic and most positive propositions in Lessing's Laokoon are these from chapter xxi: “Ein anderer Weg, auf welchem die Poesie die Kunst in Schilderung körperlicher Schönheit wiederum einholet, ist dieser, dass sie Schönheit in Reitz verwandelt. Reitz ist Schönheit in Bewegung.” F. T. Vischer said with reference to this chapter, “Lessing hatte zuerst die Anmuth (er sagt: Reiz, wovon nachher) als Schönheit in der Bewegung definiert.” Commenting on the same chapter, G. E. Guhrauer wrote, “Reiz ist Schönheit in Bewegung, und eben darum für den Maler weniger als den Dichter bequem. Dieser Begriff, eine glückliche Bereicherung der Ästhetik, von welcher Schiller späterhin in dem Aufsatz über Anmuth und Würde einen so sinnreichen und fruchtbaren Gebrauch machte, findet sich vor Lessing schon bei Home, welchen er bei seiner Vertrautheit mit den schottischen Philosophen unstreitig gekannt hat. Insofern ist es nicht ganz genau, wenn Vischer … von Lessing sagt, dass der Begriff der Anmuth bei ihm zuerst gefunden werde.” H. Blümner rushed to the defence of Lessing and Vischer. Grace, he admitted, is associated with motion not only by Home, but also by Webb (Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting, 1764), and by Hagedorn (Betrachtungen über die Mahlerey, 1762), —“dennoch durfte Vischer mit vollem Rechte Lessing als den Vater dieses Begriffes bezeichnen, da er durch ihn erst entwickelt und in die Ästhetik eingeführt worden ist.” On a previous page (31) Blümner had pointed out that Webb's idea of grace was not his own, but went back to Home.

The wheel as an attribute of Fortune is of Roman origin, and, together with the globe which often takes its place, signifies the inconstancy of the goddess. In Roman art the wheel or globe is. represented as being held in the hand of the goddess, or lying at her feet; she is sometimes represented as standing on the globe. Motion of the wheel is not implied in its postures.

In Latin literature previous to the middle ages the references to the globe or wheel as attributes of Fortune are few in number, the earliest of them being seemingly that of Pacuvius (second century B. C.): “Fortunam insanam esse et cæcam et brutam perhibent philosophi saxoque instare in globoso prædicant volubili.” Cicero (first century B. C.) writes in Piso, 10, 22: “cumque ipse nudus in convivio saltaret in quo cum illum saltatorium versaret orbem ne turn quidem fortunæ rotam pertimescebat.”

The Marathon race was undoubtedly a happy thought on the part of the promoters of the first Olympic games of modern times—those held at Athens in 1896. A well-known member of the French Academy, M. Michel Bréal, gave the prize, and the Greeks set their hearts on winning it. A private correspondent wrote from Athens just before the race took place:—

In the Prologue to the Man of Law's Tale we are told that any one who will read Chaucer's Legend of Good Women may see—

The crueltee of thee, queen Medea,
Thy litel children hanging by the hals
For thy Jason, that was of love so fals;

but when one turns to the Legend of Medea, one looks in vain for the promised bit of sensationalism. In the closely related Legend of Hypsipyle, to he sure, the unhappy Lemnian queen prophetically prays—

That she, that had his herte yrafte her fro,
Moste finden him to her untrewe also,
And that she moste bothe her children spille.

This curious product of mediævalism, translated from some Latin treatise by an unknown hand in the latter half of the fifteenth century, carries symbolism to its last stage. It is interesting as showing how the preachers in the abbeys and cathedrals of England found, on occasion, “sermons in stones.” It would seem as if Longfellow must have read this poem; for a part of his Golden Legend, the close of Friar Cuthbert's sermon, is an accurate reproduction of the spirit of this piece.