For centuries the Netherlands has been a cultural crossroads, where the Germanic and Romance cultures have met and mingled. For centuries, too, the Dutch have been a commercial people, trading and negotiating in lands all across the globe. No wonder, then, that a knowledge of foreign languages is a major goal in Dutch education. Changing times and the new significance of world trade in the economy of the Netherlands, combined with the realization that Dutch is not a world language, have emphasized the importance of foreign languages.

While preparing the materials in Lord Salisbury's library at Hatfield House for microfilming, Miss Caroline Merion discovered a hitherto unknown fragment of a manuscript of Chaucer's Troilus. It was sewed in the spine of the cover (one could hardly call it a binding) of a sixteenth-century rent book containing surveys of some of the property of the Earl of Essex. Probably in the sixteenth century this book came into the hands of the Cecil family, for some of the Essex property mentioned in it was transferred to Lord Burleigh in the 1560's, and in all likelihood this book has been among the Cecil records for over three hundred and fifty years. The fragment of Troilus, which I shall call the Cecil Fragment (CF), is a single page of vellum taken from an unknown manuscript of the poem, and much cut down. It now measures approximately 24½ cm. by 6½ cm., being rather wider at the bottom than the top, since the cutting was rough and irregular. Before being cut down, the manuscript page must have measured something like 28 cm. by 12 to 14 cm. Whoever cut the page apparently cut off strips from the bottom and both sides in order to use only the section in the center of the page. He obviously cared nothing for the writing on the page, for he cut off the beginnings and the ends of the lines of poetry. In spite of him, however, there are large parts of ten stanzas from Book I of Troilus which are still readily legible.

The Latin Grammar of Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, was a well-known and influential book in late Old English times; the number of extant manuscripts in which it appears in whole or in part and the range of dates represented by them indicate the extent of its currency then.Less familiar to most students today, perhaps, than his homilies and other scientific and pedagogical treatises, it is still a significant part of the corpus of Ælfric's work. Investigation of its pages extends our knowledge of methods of teaching at that time and of the particular needs of English students not yet ready for the more extensive and detailed Latin grammars of Priscian and Donatus, the standard texts of the Middle Ages, parts of which are adapted and translated in the Grammar for use in English schools. More fully and in a particular way the Grammar reveals Ælfric himself at work: his aims and methods in the translation and adaptation of original Latin works for use in England; his mastery of Latin and of English; his great skill in adapting the native English tongue to new uses. There has hitherto been no adequate account of Ælfric's procedure, with the result that his aim and method in this work have been imperfectly comprehended, and critics have tended to bestow praise and blame somewhat at random. The present study attempts to present such an account, through analysis and example, and to estimate the subsequent importance of his grammatical terminology as a contribution to the development of the English vocabulary.

The unity of Beowulf is at least secure in the person of the hero whose character and actions provide the basis for any critical examination of structure and theme. According to some, this is all that holds the epic together. Others see more than a sequence of disconnected episodes related to one person. In their view, the fights with Grendel and his dam are united to the dragon fight in the opposition of hero and king, youth and age, the beginning and ending of a life of achievement. It is in their spirit that I have attempted to take a fresh view of the subject with special reference to unity of theme and treatment. The suggestion is that this unity is to be found in the theme of redemption and judgment treated in a way which skilfully blends the Germanic hero with the Christian saint. The symbolism is not regarded as contrived or studied, but rather as of that kind which is the usual result of an author's finding an apt subject to illustrate his theme. A symbolic interpretation does not, after all, exclude a literal interpretation; it contains it. The dragon, for instance, can be both a universal symbol and a very literal and particular monster. We have surely become too literal-minded if we suppose that the audience of Beowulf could see no universal significance in the epic story because they accepted the literal truth of the narrative. The many symbolical interpretations of the Biblical narrative during the period which followed bear witness to the improbability of this view. Once the underlying theme of redemption and judgment is adopted and is seen to be the epic theme par excellence, the process of selection from myth and legend becomes somewhat clearer, and there is no longer the necessity to account for a gap between the Grendel fights and the dragon fight. The details in the fifty-year reign of the hero would have been irrelevant. An epic is surely not a biography nor a chronicle nor a mythology, although it draws upon all these.

Mr. Chairman, President Fred, President Starck, ladies and gentlemen of the Modern Language Association: I suppose on this occasion, as a member of the American Philological Association, I should be tempted to reflect upon the event in the year of the great schism, 1883, when forty youthful modern linguists, smarting under the tyranny of classical philology, struck their historic blow for freedom, and formed the Modern Language Association. Suffice it to say that after years of rivalry, we have all come to the realization that we are allies in a common cause, not only within the conventional humanities but also with our colleagues in the other areas of learning. No doubt the sense of kinship between classicists and scholars in the modern foreign languages has been enhanced by the experience of adversity. Certainly a classicist has had to learn to live with, and ultimately profit from, a perpetual “bear” market. But, happily, in recent years, the whole strategy of fighting defensive rear-guard actions has been abandoned, and a new spirit of confidence has appeared. A case in point is William R. Parker's excellent piece entitled “Why a Foreign Language Requirement?” There are also the many classicists who have sworn a mighty oath never again to utter a word of apology for the classics, but rather to start from the assumption that any intelligent and sensible man knows how important they are.

The Scandinavian names in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were part of the material collected some forty years ago by Erik Björkman and Johannes Köpke and included in their studies of Scandinavian names in England. The main object of these studies was to establish the Scandinavian origin of a given name, and incidentally to establish certain criteria by which a name might be recognized as Scandinavian. Certain other questions, however, regarding, for instance, the development of a name form over a number of years and the relative frequency of the various name forms, can hardly be answered from the collection of data accumulated by Björkman and Köpke. The purpose of the present paper is to pursue the studies of Björkman and Köpke somewhat further, and to evaluate the results derived from some newly collected data.

Many years ago Morris W. Croll's studies of seventeenth-century prose demonstrated that the so-called anti-Ciceronian movement in prose style—which included in England such writers as Bacon, Jonson, Browne, Hall, and Burton—based itself not merely on a refusal to imitate Cicero, but on certain common philosophical attitudes, chiefly Stoic and libertine, and on common rhetorical models in Seneca and Tacitus. Croll, having sketched the intellectual tradition in which these writers worked, went on to examine their writings empirically. In a brilliant essay entitled “The Baroque Style in Prose,” he outlined their chief syntactic procedures and showed how these sprang from and reflected a common aesthetic. A more recent study, The Senecan Amble by George Williamson (London, 1951), has amplified Croll's historical researches, attempting to fix the anti-Ciceronian or Senecan movement more firmly amid its tangled antecedents and its numerous consequences. Both Croll and Williamson, however, have concerned themselves primarily with stylistic theory, and with large historical sequences in which individual authors appear as points on a complex graph. It still remains to study some of the writers in question more closely as individuals, both to verify their locations on the graph and also to explore the richness and multiplicity of individual accents that compose the common style. The purpose of the present essay is a simple one: to focus attention on a single author, Ben Jonson. The evidence will show, I think, that the case of Jonson bears out Croll's findings to a remarkable extent, and that although Croll fails to mention Jonson in his article on baroque prose, Jonson has some claim to be regarded as the baroque stylist par excellence, whose highly personal, highly inflected style realizes to their fullest extent the principles of the baroque rhetoric.

Lydgate's Siege of Thebes is presented within the framing fiction of a supplementary Canterbury Tale, and, as one of the pilgrims, Lydgate tells the story of Statius' Thebaid as it had been reshaped by the romancers of the Middle Ages. Following the prologue (1-176),which is eminent as an imitation of Chaucer, Part I (177-1046) of the tale begins with the foundation of Thebes by King Amphioun and ends with the death of Oedipus and the abuse of his body by his sons, Ethiocles and Polymetus; Part II (1047-2552) relates the joint succession of the sons to the Theban throne and their contentions for supremacy; Part III (2553-4716) deals with the final destruction of Thebes as a result of their fratricidal struggles. But the poem is so long, it comprehends so many episodes, and its organization—alternating passages of narrative with passages of moralizing—is such that one critic described it as a rambling poem “with frequent moral digressions in the proper medieval manner,” in which “incidents follow one another with bewildering inconsequence,” while another asserted, to the same effect, that Lydgate in this poem “could no more deny himself a digression than could Browning.”

The methods used to teach foreign languages in France were chosen to suit the French school system. They cannot be properly appreciated unless one has some idea of the organization of that system. The following brief description is intended to give a general idea of the educational system in France.