The English poem Widsith (composed in the 7th century) contains two passages (v. 116 and v. 119 ff.) that refer to stories known to us also from the Icelandic Hervararsaga. The present paper is primarily an attempt to determine the form and relationship of these stories as the Widsith poet knew them. Any such attempt, however, necessarily involves an examination of the Hervararsaga. This saga has been much studied, but never investigated with the Widsith primarily in mind. Even R. W. Chambers, in his monumental edition of Widsith, relegates to a few footnotes his comments on the relation of the English poem to the Icelandic saga. That there is much to be said, the length of the present paper will suffice to demonstrate! It is my hope, moreover, that my discussion will serve likewise to clear up some of the obscurities of the saga.

The caricature of the Englishman in the Middle Ages was never complete in the eyes of the French without some allusion to or parody upon his incorrect and unpleasant manner of speaking French, the French of Marlborough or of Stratford atte Bowe. A number of parodies of this sort have come down to us and are still of interest, popular caricatures of real though at times coarse humor. One of the best episodes of the Roman de Renard depicts Renart in the disguise of an Anglo-Norman jongleur affecting the outlandish accent and thus concealing his identity from his wife. Perhaps the best known of all these parodies is found in the fabliau Des Deux Anglois et de l'Anel, a conte entirely insignificant in itself, but nevertheless suggestive of the lack of esteem in which the French dialect spoken in England must have been held by the continentals about the epoch of St. Louis.

Members of the Association are requested to see that copies of monographs, studies or dissertations in the field of the Modern Languages which may appear in University series during the current year be sent to the editor of the appropriate section of the American Bibliography.

“La pitié est souvent un sentiment de nos propres maux dans les yeux d'autrui.”—La Rochefaucauld, Maximes.

“Le meilleur serait de prendre conseil de la raison.”

Pascal, Lettres Prov. 9.

Philippe de Rémi, Sieur de Beaumanoir, of Clermont County in Picardy, author of narrative and lyrical Poems, and of the Coutumes de Beauvaisis, though scarcely among the inédit, is still little known to general literary history. He is, as his first modern editor, the Count Beugnot, quoted from Nicolle, of those “qui laissent des traces et cavent ce qu'ils manient.” As Beugnot adds, “le sillon qu'il a creusé dans la jurisprudence française, pour ne pas être visible à tous les yeux, n'en a pas eu moins de profondeur.”

Spenser, realizing how doubtfully his allegory or dark conceit might be construed, wrote a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh explaining, in part, the general structure of The Faerie Queene. The poet of the Pearl, except within the poem itself, has given us no inkling of its meaning. The attempt to find that meaning has been and is yet a matter of unusual interest to scholars.

The fact that Pericles was Dot included in the First Folio has thrown discredit upon Heminge and Condell; for even if, as has been conjectured, difficulties of copyright prevented their publishing this very popular play, it is felt that they should not have claimed that they presented in their volume all of Shakespeare's dramas. Since the play could scarcely be ignored, as some of the earlier dramas of divided authorship might have been, the most natural conjecture seems to be that Pericles was generally regarded as substantially another man's play. I believe that in 1623 not only those friends and fellows of Shakespeare who had access to his papers (and who made no other mistake so far as we can determine), but many of those who were urged to buy, would think of the play as “Heywood's Pericles,” in a way that they would not think of “Fletcher's Henry VIII”—nor of any play in the Folio as being essentially the work of an important living dramatist. Most critics believe that Shakespeare was only the reviser of the piece, and assign to him Acts III-V without the choruses and brothel scenes. This leaves only 754 lines, including some we do not really prize and which may not be his. If these scenes were a mere revamping of scenes already in existence, we need not bother about the omission of Pericles from the Folio; if Shakespeare was the original composer of those scenes, and wrote the brothel scenes also, we are put to shifts to explain it. Of course no such consideration would prevent the play's being printed in quarto as Shakespeare's, for we know that in the case of other dramas no warrant at all was needed.

Among the penitentials of the middle ages, that by Thomas Chabham is of particular importance on account of its detailed classification of minstrels and players. In distinguishing different classes among these players and entertainers instead of condemning all alike, Chabham affords a notable illustration of the gradual growth in the Church of a tolerant attitude toward innocent amusements. M. Gautier, while recognizing the importance of this passage in Chabham's Penitential, raised the question whether “cette somme n'est qu'une compilation d'oeuvres antérieures, ou s'il y faut voir l'original de plusieurs autres Sommes de pénitence.” In order to decide this question it is necessary to consider such evidence as is available concerning the author and the date of the Penitential.

In a study of the Latin, French, and English versions of the allegory of The Four Daughters of God, published some years ago, I found it necessary to include also a description of two Dutch versions in order to account for certain modifications of the allegory in fourteenth and fifteenth century French forms. These arose through the introduction of what Heinzel2 calls the Processus Belial, a suit between the devil and the Virgin which is only settled when the four Virtues enter the debate.

The text printed herewith forms one in a series of nine Miracles of the Virgin which is preserved in MS 375 of the Bibliothèque nationale, folios 344r-346v, a manuscript of the late thirteenth century. It was my original intention to publish the collection as a whole, and Professor J. D. M. Ford kindly offered to print it in the Harvard Romance Series. The MS was submitted in August 1922, but it was afterwards discovered that eight of these miracles had already been printed by H. Kjellman in the Appendix to his Deuxième Collection Anglo-Normande des Miracles de la Sainte Vierge, Paris, 1922, pp. 306 ff.

Among mediaeval compendiums of devotion one of the most widely known—in England at least—was the Speculum Ecclesie, written about 1240 by Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury. The extent of its popularity is indicated by the fact that it occurs in Latin, French and English versions and that nearly sixty MSS. are still preserved which contain this treatise either as a whole or in part—twenty-nine in Latin, seventeen in French, and the others in English.

One of the minor critical problems with regard to the early quartos and folios of Shakespeare relates to those textual irregularities in which the name of an actor appears in place of that of a character, suddenly transporting the reader from the land of make-believe to the Elizabethan tiring-room, and establishing a direct line of connection between the plays and the companies for which they were written.

No systematic study of the parallels in the Orlando Innamorato and the Faerie Queene has hitherto been presented. Random references to analogues were noted by Upton,1 but most of them remain of little value as positive proof of influence.

Occleve's Lerne to Dye has been spoken of as “a really fine Ars Sciendi Mori, the most dignified, and the most poetical, thing that Occleve has left us.” It may be worth while to determine how much of this praise should be given to Occleve as translator and amplifier, how much to his original, an eloquent and famous chapter in Henry Suso's Horologium.

The importance of the appeal to Nature in the eighteenth century is well known, but the subject as a whole is so vast that it still awaits its historian. The present article aims to present in brief space the results of a study of this particular topic in the works of Voltaire. It is evident at once that in Voltaire the nature doctrine has less importance than it does in Diderot or in Rousseau or in a host of lesser writers, but this is not to say that it is negligible. On the contrary, it is much more influential in his thinking than one might at first be inclined to suspect, and it leads him to express ideas which one does not ordinarily associate with his name. Yet it is not at all surprising, on second thought, that Voltaire in this respect, as in others, should share the mental attitude of predecessors and contemporaries. Rabelais and Montaigne had appealed to nature. Fénelon had drawn for the readers of Télémaque an idyllic picture of Bétique and its inhabitants. Montesquieu's Troglodytes in the Lettres persanes make one think, not only of Rousseau, but of El Dorado in Voltaire's Candide. Then there was the Epicurean school of the Temple, with which Voltaire was in close contact when he was a youth of eighteen or twenty. In that group were men like Chaulieu and La Fare,1 who were imbued with a natural religion, which appears in Voltaire as early as 1716 and never disappears from his thought.

For well nigh a century and three-quarters the authorship of The Taming of the Shrew has been a Shaksperian problem; Warburton was apparently the first to question that it was the work of a single author. According to him The Shrew represents the work of Shakspere to the extent “that he has, here and there, corrected the dialogue, and now and then added a Scene.” This view was held by Steevens, who believed, however, that Shakspere's hand was visible in almost every scene, particularly in those scenes between tamer and shrew. In 1857 Grant White proposed the theory of dual composition: a collaborator supplied the love element of the underplot, whereas to Shakspere belonged “the strong, clear characterization, the delicious humor, and the rich verbal coloring of the recast Induction, and all the scenes in which Katharine and Petruchio and Grumio are the prominent figures, together with the general effect produced by scattering lines and words and phrases here and there, and removing others elsewhere throughout the rest of the play.” In general, White's theory has prevailed down to the present day; it was supported by that industrious student, Fleay, and Professor A. H. Tolman. On the other hand, not a few writers, on aesthetic or general grounds, have voiced the opinion that Shakspere worked unaided: notable among these is Miss Charlotte Porter. It is the purpose of the present study, by undertaking a more systematic investigation, to show that Shakspere is responsible for the entire play.

For the benefit of scholars who may conceive the idea of examining the Vatican collections in the hope of discovering hitherto unsignalled English manuscripts, it may be well to report upon the slender harvest reaped by those who have preceded them. Unfortunately, although the older Vatican catalogues, often incomplete and unreliable as they are, promise rich gleanings to the bold—and patient—the fruits thus far collected in the field of English literature seem hardly worth the labour expended in gathering them.