The study of certain metrical problems brought me recently to examine more carefully than hitherto Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesie. In illustrating his points regarding verse writing Campion, it will be recalled, makes use of “diuerse light poems” of his own, and in Chapter vi, devoted to “English Trochaick verse,” he includes one entitled The eight Epigramme. While reading this I was teased by the impression of having heard the scandal there related somewhere else in one of the dramas of the time, but it was not until I had canvassed a large number of Elizabethan plots that the christening scene in A Chaste Maid in Cheapide came to mind.

Ritson in a letter to Scott, dated July 2, 1803, writes: “I have put into Mr. Longman's hands at his own request, for the opinion of some critic he is used to consult, my ‘Life of King Arthur.’” Again, in a letter of August 16, 1803 to his nephew, Joseph Frank, editor of his correspondence, he says: “I will give you .... all of my late publications, if you have not got them already; then, such as are to come: ‘the Life of King Arthur,’ which I have finished, etc.”. (Letters, II, 247 f.). Ritson died September 23, 1803. From the editor's advertisement to King Arthur we learn: “The curious work now offered to the world was prepared for the press by Mr. Ritson, with a view to immediate publication, a short time before his death.” Thus, the date of composition is clearly 1803. The book marks the culmination of Ritson's researches into the history and literature of the middle ages; it was the fruit of mature experience in a life devoted to scholarly investigation.

It is doubtful whether even in so highly subjective a literature as that of modern Germany can be found an example of more consistent concern with the writer's self and his own particular problems than is furnished by the recently published ten volumes that comprise the collected works of Thomas Mann. From the first volume, Buddenbrooks, for which the author's own family's life and home-town quite frankly furnish setting and subject matter, to the last volume, Bemühungen, whose characteristic title would imply to what pains its author has been put to present his personal reaction upon the world and its problems, there is scarcely a page or paragraph that does not treat situations or sentiments which Mann experienced in his own life. Thus, Volume IX, Rede und Antwort, shows how ready Mann is to expose himself to public scrutiny, to give an account of himself and his ideas—“Rede und Antwort zu stehen.” Similarly, Volume VIII, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, is a personal confession of faith, wrung from his heart by the untoward incidents of the war, attempting to define his relations, as a man and an artist, to his native land. And, finally, the five remaining volumes contain short stories or novels, which, when analyzed even cursorily as here, show themselves to be endless variations on the same theme, which is in its essentials the problem of Thomas Mann's own life.

In an article entitled “A Webster-Middleton Play: Anything for a Quiet Life”1 Mr. Sykes asserts “That this play is partly Middleton's there is no reason to doubt, but most of it is Webster's.”1 The purpose of the present paper is to show that Mr. Sykes has greatly overstated the case for Webster. Whether Webster or Shirley* be regarded as the collaborator or reviser, the work of Thomas Middleton is recognizable to such a considerable extent that the principal share in writing this play may hardly be ascribed to another. Surely there is an important difference between the work of the dramatist who organizes the plot and sketches the characters, and the contribution of another who by means of dialogue more closely individualizes the characters. Such seems to be the differentiation between the shares of Middleton and Webster in writing this play.

Of what song the sirens sang Sir Thomas Browne, being a quaint and theoretical old gentleman, probably had some private opinion, and of just what John Keats meant when he declared (or the urn rather obviously declared for him) that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” more than one critic has advanced a not so private opinion. The statement is so lucid and so guilelessly simple, taken alone, that it cannot be misunderstood, but put into its context it is like a man of too severe ideals in a naughty world—promptly at outs with the neighbors. It disagrees so sharply both with the ode it concludes, and the odes which follow it, that it is become what scholars in their odd language would call a “crux.” The answer is simpler than might be expected. One may very reasonably ask whether Keats ever even said “Beauty is truth,” and the answer is: No, he probably did not say it, nor anything like it.

Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution may be regarded as a prodigious cento of fragments from the memoirs and histories which made up the great bulk of his sources. Those sections which are not devoted to running commentary on the Revolution, on democracy, or on other problems, are Carlylean renditions of various dull or hopelessly biased accounts, selected for color and drama, arranged according to climax or contrast, and presented so as to secure the result desired, a “flame-picture.” “While other historians sought to blend . . . details [from memoirs] into a smooth equable narrative, as rags are fashioned into a sheet of paper, Carlyle took the rags themselves and hung them forth gay or grimy or blood-stained, dancing in air or trailing in mud.” Instead of considering Carlyle as a scientific historian we may more properly regard him as an artist, dealing with reported fact from a confusing number of directions, and handling materials which, however manifestly unreliable they themselves might be, always demanded some degree of accuracy and good faith, and which on the other hand permitted various turns of interpretation, emphasis, perspective, or moral judgment. From a great number of incoherent and carelessly inaccurate narratives, he attempted to winnow that thing which he revered with his whole soul, the significant human fact.

The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate on the basis of internal evidence that the anonymous play, The Drinking Academy, or Ike Cheaters' Holiday, which was recently printed for the first time, is in all probability the work of Thomas Randolph. As has long been known, much genuine material was omitted by Randolph's literary executors in the first and subsequent editions of his collected works. At least one lost play is known to us by title, and modern scholars—Hazlitt, Parry, and more recently Professor Moore Smith—have had notable success in recovering authentic poems and fragments from Randolph's pen. Under these circumstances there is nothing essentially unreasonable in proposing, even at this late date, to claim for Randolph a play whose authorship has hitherto been wholly unknown.

Avant même la publication des Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe un problème assez inquiétant s'est posé à propos de René. Sainte-Beuve n'a eu garde de l‘éviter et, tout en prenant des mines effarouchées, il n'a pas manqué de signaler que si René n'est évidemment autre que Chateaubriand, Amélie ne peut être que sa douce et mélancolique soeur Lucile qui, dans le parc de Combourg, engagea l'adolescent à se consacrer à la Muse. Tout ce que nous savons de la vie de Lucile de Chateaubriand indique cependant que l'histoire d'Amélie comporte une grosse part de fiction. Même si à l'origine l'amitié très vive qu'elle a toujours ressentie pour ce frère ténébreux a été teintée d'un sentiment plus trouble, elle n'est point entrée au couvent, si ce n'est fort tard et comme pensionnaire, non comme religieuse. Elle semble avoir ébauché a Combourg même un roman d'amour avec un gentilhomme Breton, parent éloigné de Malfilâtre, elle accepta en fin de compte le vieux M. de Caud et, après un court veuvage, fut sur le point d'épouser en secondes noces le poète Chênedollé. Avec cette superbe inconscience qui paraît si souvent chez lui, Chateaubriand aurait mêlé à des souvenirs d'enfance une passion romantique perverse, mais complètement imaginaire. II semble avoir trop aisément pensé que des lecteurs et des critiques moins informés de la réalité des choses et quelquefois plus malveillants, feraient d'eux-mêmes le départ de la vérité' et de l'embellissement dans son roman-poème autobiographique.

Clear distinctions between the genres, relatively unimportant in an historical study of the drama, are, or ought to be, of vital importance in a more absolute criticism. But though the term “tragedy” is loosely applied to some of the crudest as well as some of the greatest productions of the stage, and though for the last hundred and twenty-five years the term “melodrama” has been in current use, no critic has made more than a casual attempt properly to distinguish them. Indeed, such is the power of tradition that ill-formed and sensational productions of the Elizabethans or of the Restoration, because they were styled tragedies by their authors or contemporaries, continue to bear that proud title along with Lear and (Edipus tke King. It would seem obvious that a term so stretched as to include within its limits Hoffman and Hamlet, Lust's Dominion, Tke Revenge and Othello, will not serve for purposes of strict definition.

This paper does not attempt to isolate all the influences that determined Emerson's theory and practice of poetry. My purpose is rather to call attention more clearly than I did in a former paper to his obligations to Coleridge and Wordsworth. Emerson's criticism of these two men will aid us in determining not only their relation to each other, but also their position in the history of English poetry and literary criticism. Just as present-day criticism of both Coleridge and Wordsworth shifts from scathing strictures to high praise, so, too, did Emerson's. But Emerson differs from many later critics in that he took cognizance of the manifold forces that entered into their work.

The student of Anglo-American literary relations in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is continually impressed by the number and kind of American books printed or reprinted in Great Britain. A full knowledge of the facts of such publication would almost certainly throw light on the whole matter of the reception of American writings in England. From what market did the publisher receive, or hope to receive, his return? What sorts of English readers bought the different classes of works? Or were the reprints sometimes sent back to compete with the American issues? Do periods in which there were many such reprints indicate waves of interest in things American, or merely that more American works offered themselves for republication at certain times?

No foreigner learning French fails to remark the use of jeunes gens as the plural of jeune homme. The French, for whom this plural is a part of their linguistic inheritance, usually accept it unquestioningly, but in the Mélanges Antoine Thomas Professor Oscar Bloch of the Lycée Buffon at Paris notes the abnormality of the expression and seeks to explain its origin. The cause of the disappearance of a plural jeunes hommes is, he thinks, to be found in a hesitation to employ, in a combination of the two words where the separate value of each is still in evidence, the linked s. In other combinations where such a linking to hommes occurs, such as les bonshommes, les gentilshommes, we have, says Mr. Bloch, true compound words in which the separate value of the elements has been lost.

In the history of the interplay of English and French liberal thought in the eighteenth century, too much attention has been given to the supposed influence of such well-known deists as Bolingbroke and Toland, much too little to Voltaire's definite and direct borrowings from the radical and late deist, Peter Annet, whose method and style were more closely akin to Voltaire's own than were those of any other English deist. Although Voltaire was well acquainted with, and influenced by, certain of Annet's earlier tracts, especially his History of Saint Paul, it is from his Lift of David, the Man after God's own Heart, apparently more than from any other treatise from across the channel, that Voltaire borrowed directly in spirit and in detail, and translated faithfully whatever passages suited his needs. In this work, he found practically all the material for his frequent and varied animadversions on David from the beginning to the end of his Biblical criticism. Indeed, study of his use of Annet's Life of David throws light upon the extent, the nature, and the moment of the influence of the English deistic movement on Voltaire's attacks on the established religion.

Hardy's poetry has the careful articulation of the skeleton in a modern surgical laboratory. But also it has all the atmosphere of the skeleton in old ghostly legends: the sudden visitations, the faint shine and quaver, the lank pointings, the leisurely dissolving in gloom, the telltale streaks of gray on the dark earth and sky, the posturing branches, the summoning voices in the wind. All these are in the weft of his verse. A quizzical reader could assemble therefrom quite an array of theatrical apparitions. But at center his work is far from theatric. It moves with a large sincerity and simplicity.

In recent years, the value of the newspaper in the study A of literary movements in France is being recognized more than ever before. In such a study the Nain Jaune has its place, voicing as it does the literary and political views of an influential group of writers in the critical period of the early Restoration, an epoch when literary criticism and political expediency went hand in hand. A study of the literary history of such writers as Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël would not be complete without the political and social background furnished by such publications.