The treatment accorded by grammarians to the passive reflexive construction as applied to personal subjects in Old Spanish is either incomplete or inexplicit. Diez, for example, gives no indication as to the extent of its use in either early or modern Spanish. Cuervo asserts that the passive reflexive is “arraigado” in the language of the early period, but cites examples with only inanimate subjects. We infer from his remarks that with a personal subject this construction came into general use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to Meyer-Lübke, its use with personal subjects was extensive only during these centuries. Hanssen is of the opinion that the passive reflexive was of little use in the early period and that with a personal subject its use was limited to the single verb uencerse. The present study will indicate the status of this construction in Old Spanish: the extent of its use as applied to persons insofar as may be demonstrated by an examination of a representative text of that period. As such a text the Primera crónica general has been chosen, because, with its plurality of authorship and great length, it represents an admirable cross-section of Old Spanish prose.

Much has been written about the influence of the early reviewers on Tennyson. Professor Lounsbury, who has made the only real printed effort at a scholarly analysis of the question, believed the influence to be very slight. I shall attempt here to collect and sift the evidence afresh and to determine as clearly as possible the part which the reviewers played in Tennyson's ten-years' silence after the publication of his first two independent volumes (1830, 1833), in his revisions and suppressions of poems in them, and in his choice of subjects and expression of ideas in the new poems of 1842.

The title suggests a number of paradoxes. The concept of the “teaching machine” represents, on the one hand, one of the most revolutionary and challenging concepts facing teachers and educators today and, at the same time, looks back to one of the oldest basic psychological concepts of learning within the history of educational theory. Socrates' instruction of the slave boy in the Meno is perfect and persuasive illustration of the system of question-response basic to the efficacy of the modern teaching machine. Socrates, as we know, sought to persuade Meno that the slave boy's knowledge of a mathematical fact came not from teaching, but from questioning, and ultimately from recovery of innate knowledge.

In 1944 Lawrence Sargent Hall (Hawthorne: Critic of Society, New Haven) showed that an important theme in Hawthorne's work was the progressivism of American democracy. No one has yet pointed out, though, how Hawthorne demonstrates this progress of American society by emblematizing the human body in his fiction. Yet emblematic bodies appear in all three of the major American novels: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance.

Virginia woolf's title for the two volumes of essays collected in her lifetime, The Common Reader, has been taken for a descriptive image of the critic as impressionist or amateur reader. In the preface to her first Common Reader, Mrs. Woolf explains her title and epigraph, taken from Dr. Johnson's “Life of Gray,” in place of a statement of purpose. Her description is deliberately casual and informal, but she provides a structure and point of view for her essays by adding that the common reader does wish to create from his reading “some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.” Though Mrs. Woolf's deceptive remarks on the function of criticism may partly account for the persistent view of her as “reader” rather than “critic,” other writers have contributed to the stereotype of Virginia Woolf as an occasional essayist and impressionist, as a literary portrait painter and miniaturist; or as an antiquarian rummaging through the attics of a rather charming but peripheral past. Unsympathetic readers have carried the belletristic image further and coupled it with the conception of her fiction as a total immersion in pure subjectivity or (in Sean O'Faolain's view) as an exercise in the novel as narcissism. Yet, in fairness to reviewers of Virginia Woolf's essays, it should be noted that both favorable and unfavorable com'ments seem to be based on a similar conception of her as an appreciator or impressionist rather than a serious critic. Thus Horace Gregory, while presenting what he feels is a just and favorable estimate of Virginia Woolf as an essayist, tends to ignore her real value as a literary critic.

On 27 September 1871 there appeared in an inconspicuous corner of the New York Tribune a piece by Mark Twain entitled “The Revised Catechism.” Obviously drawing on his Sunday School memories of the Westminster Catechism for the form of the contribution, Clemens makes use also of the Bible (a work thoroughly learned in his boyhood and never forgotten) for striking satirical effect. “The Revised Catechism” is a scathing denunciation of Boss Tweed and his associates—as accomplished a group of rascals as ever pillaged a public treasury—and at the same time an indictment of the age that permitted such men to thrive. The story of the Tammany Ring is too well known to need retelling here; but to make clear the reasons that led Mark Twain to the writing of his satire and to demonstrate the ironical character of his references, so apposite to the day and hour, it is necessary to consider briefly the part played in the exposure of the Ring by its two principal antagonists—one, the cartoonist, Thomas Nast, and the other, the New York Times.

Late eighteenth-century esteem for the moral qualities of the satires of Juvenal reflects a tradition which began with the church fathers. Renaissance critics praised Juvenal's style, which Boileau called “sublime.” Dryden, Dennis, and Johnson concurred with this neoclassical opinion. Putting Juvenal's sentiments into Christian contexts was not peculiar to the “Post-Augustans,” who continued Renaissance and neoclassical tradition. As Christian humanists, they used Juvenal's satires to supply “sentences” to add weight to their own moral sentiments.

To speak of the future of literary criticism is always to speak of the future of literature, which is a mode of language and an institution whose very being essentially touches on the possibility and fragility of its own future. “The fragility of literature,” as Richard Klein suggests, “its susceptibility to being lost,” is at the heart of all literary writing, which emerges from the absence of a “real referent” and thus sustains itself through its reference to other texts, to the archive of literary writing that is made up of figures and other literary articulations that allow us to read. Klein reminds us, citing Jacques Derrida, that literary texts may always disappear: not only because they may be forgotten but also because they are susceptible to the erasure of the archive, to apocalyptic destruction, and to the collective loss of the knowledge of how to read—as a result of new modes of media saturation or, I would add, through the collapse of readability in the age of what Hannah Arendt calls “the modern lie” (“Truth” 253). The force and fragility of literature and of literary criticism are bound up with the possible disappearance of the literary archive, which we implicitly confront in reading literature and in pursuing its forms and thoughts as literary critics.

The possibility of bettering the present curriculum in English literature will depend in great measure upon the proportion of time allowed to it. So long as the classics and mathematics retain for themselves the lion's share of time and interest, the hopes of our professors of literature will never become unduly exalted. If I may express myself with thorough frankness, the customary quota of English literature, say less than two hours per week for less than two years, is so insufficient that I cannot look upon it as capable of improvement. The study will remain perforce hurried and superficial. Now the course that I have in mind is one of two full hours (better three) throughout three entire years. It is the course which has been required since 1880 for the B. L. degree in the University of Cincinnati, viz., three years, three hours a week. The classical students are now (beginning with 1884) compelled to take two of the three years, and the Scientifics one year. Perhaps this last requirement will be hereafter raised to two years.

An interest in Whitman's sources is to be expected, partly because of Whitman's secretiveness. The extent of his indebtedness to Emerson continues to be a problem. That this influence was felt before the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 is questioned, since Walt himself and his earliest biographers say that he had not read Emerson before publishing the first edition of the Leaves. Thus, in his Notes on Walt Whitman, John Burroughs writes: “Up to the time he published the quarto edition [the 1855 edition] he had never read the Essays or Poems of Mr. Emerson at all. This is positively true. In the summer following that publication he first became acquainted with the Essays.” Whitman's friend, W. D. O'Connor, says that Walt had read Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, and that any fancied indebtedness to Emerson “is referable to the German source both had drunk from.” Though I believe that Whitman had read more of Emerson before 1855 than he would admit or would allow his friends to admit, I believe, too, that much of the resemblance between the writings of Emerson and Whitman, with reference especially to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, may be due to their “having drunk from the same source,” that source being Carlyle.

The attack of the Puritans and of the city authorities upon the amusements of London under Charles I and the Interregnum was directed primarily against plays and playhouses. The sport of bear-baiting—one of the favorite entertainments of the Londoners—was allowed to continue almost without interruption throughout the Commonwealth.

Whatever might have been the court's verdict on Pound as an American, had he come to trial in the late 1940's in Washington, his biographers and literary contemporaries have consistently affirmed not only the propriety of the epithet, but also its ineluctable pertinence. To his long-time friend and literary associate, Wyndham Lewis, his Americanism seemed to be of “primary significance.” “Pound is—was always—is, must always remain, violently American,” Lewis wrote in 1949, seeing in him a composite of the gait of Tom Sawyer, the “manly candour” of Whitman, the “tough guy” of Hemingway, and the “strenuousness” of Theodore Roosevelt. “The universality in his work is conscious but it overlies an ineradicable Americanism,” a friend and biographer, Patricia Hutchins, has recently written—a view akin to Donald Davie's conclusion a year earlier that Pound was “thoroughly aware … of himself as indelibly American.”

Dickens' Our Mutual Friend is an existential novel dealing with the struggles of the central characters to place, in Sartrean terms, existence before essence. This theme of self-definition involves characters singularly preoccupied with analyzing the deadness of past history and with rejecting the impositions of the past upon the present and the future. Boffin's historical reading and Lizzie Hexam's visions in the symbolic fire both reveal the necessity of change if there is to be an existential future. The main protagonist, Eugene Wrayburn, faced with the Shakespearean-Sartrean decision of whether or not to be in his sexual relationship with Lizzie, chooses to reject the pornographic cliches of Victorian sexuality and establish an existence for himself outside of the atrophied “Society” of the novel. Because of these decisions by the central characters to reject the dead history of the past, Our Mutual Friend is an optimistic statement of Dickens' belief in the power of the individual to regenerate a dead world.

It has long been recognized that the American formalists' rehabilitation of Alexander Pope depended on a renewed interest in rhetoric. In fact, there is a remarkable structural congruence between the formalists image of Pope's poetry and their conception of rhetoric, for both are item-centered, combinatory, and ultimately unifying. A single model of unified diversity, then, governs not only the formalist image of Pope's couplet rhetoric and theodicean scheme but formalist conceptions of rhetoric and “organic form” as well. An alternative (and complementary) model of rhetoric, however, insisting on creation as an act of structuring through differentiation rather than through unification, can help us to a fuller understanding of The Dunciad, and especially of the place of Dulness in that poem. Such a model can also generate a poetics capable of granting to satire and mock forms an appropriately primary status. (FVB)

Macaulay's essay on The Life and Writings of Addison has been signalized by his most recent biographer as probably “his soundest piece of literary criticism.” Published in July, 1843, when he was at the height of his critical and stylistic powers, the work reveals both the strength and weaknesses of its author. It takes its point of departure as a review of Miss Lucy Aikin's Life of Joseph Addison, published in 1843 by Macaulay's own publishers, Longman and associates. After paying his respects to the lady author, he brushes aside the contributions in her work with severe strictures on its errors. In the prospect that the charm of Addison's letters, many of them printed in the biography for the first time, might brings a demand for a second edition of the Life, he concludes his remarks by saying: “If so, we hope that every paragraph will be revised, and that every date and fact about which there can be the smallest doubt will be carefully verified.” While making numerous corrections in Miss Aikin's work, Macaulay failed to produce a study any less in need of such checking of facts. As will be shown, this need is most notable in his spirited account of one of the salient episodes in Addison's career—the writing and publishing of the Campaign (1704).

The critical history of Molière's Dom Juan is full of uncertainties and controversy on literary and many other grounds. Among its competent critics there seems to be no clear-cut decision for or against the play. Its enemies willingly ascribe to it a high degree of excellence, even to calling it a masterpiece. Its friends, not all of whom agree that it is such, are equally willing to find fault with much of it. Friend or foe, those who call it a masterpiece do not say with any precision what they mean: There is a marked tendency on the part of most writers to pass it over with a minimum of comment of any kind.

Le succès rapide de Julien Green n‘étonne pas: ce jeune Américain, né à Paris le 6 septembre 1900, s'est illustré dans les lettres francaises en publiant, entre 1925 et 1929, une série de romans et de nouvelles, toutes œuvres hallucinantes qui frappent par leur profonde originalité, par leur structure solide et par leur puissance. Il a reçu le prix Paul Flat de l'Académie Française pour son roman Adrienne Mesurat (1927), le prix Bookman pour la version anglaise de ce même roman sous le titre de The Closed Garden et le prix Harper pour The Dark Journey, traduction de l'original Lêviathan (1929). Si ses œuvres postérieures sont moins sensationnelles, elles n'en sont pas moins intéressantes, car elles jettent une lumière plus claire sur la personnalité et la philosophie de l‘écrivain.

In the following article I shall describe the circumstances in which Meredith wrote Evan Harrington as a serial for Once a Week, and I shall-submit some suggestions about the effect of this mode of publication upon the novel.