Friedrich Vogt fasste seine Ausführungen über Carl von Kraus' bahnbrechendes Reinmarwerk wie folgt zusammen (AfdA. 40 [1921], 126 f):

Professor Napier, discussing the Franks Casket a quarter of a century ago, concluded with these words:

George Wither was first imprisoned in 1614 for his Abuses Stript and Whipt. But he had barely escaped a similar fate a few years before as a result of an earlier edition of the same work. While in prison in 1614, he expressed his gratitude to the Princess Elizabeth for her intervention in his behalf on that earlier occasion:

For once I stood accus'd for this before,
As I remember I so long agon,
Snng [sic] Thame, and Rhynes Epithalamion.
When SHE that from thy Royal selfe deriues,
Those gracious vertues that best Title giues.
........................................
Daign'd in her great-good nature to encline
Her gentle eare to such a cause as mine;
And which is more, vouchsaf't her word to cleare
Me from all dangers (if there any were).

The authorship of the twenty-nine lines following line 1664 of Cynewulf's Christ in the Exeter Book is, in common with that of much Old English poetry, disputed. The lines are variously considered an independent poem, the conclusion of Christ, and the beginning of Guthlac. Since external evidence is, of course, entirely lacking, an effort will here be made to decide the authorship by means of internal evidence.

The thought contained in Christ IV, as the disputed lines 1665–93 will for convenience be designated in this article, is much closer to that of the concluding passage of Christ III than it is to the beginning of Guthlac. Thomas Arnold has said that the line of thought of IV agrees in no way with that which marks the opening of Guthlac, while Gollancz, who insists that IV is a prelude to Guthlac, finds it necessary to say that the ‘motives’ of IV are ‘derived from the concluding portion of the Christ.’

Several recent articles have called attention once more to the problems presented by Spenser's Mutabilitie. Two of them, by Ronald B. Levinson and Evelyn May Albright, deal with certain portions of a series of three essays which I published several years ago, and concern Spenser's use of materials drawn from various sources on the general subject of what Mr. Grierson has called metaphysical poetry. Three others, by Miss Albright, H. M. Belden, and by Miss Albright in reply to Mr. Belden, raise questions concerning the dating of the poem and its relation to Harvey's criticism of the first draft of the Faerie Queene. Since with the single exception of the problem of historical allegory, no topic in Spenser criticism is of comparable interest just now, it is important to review the present state of the inquiry and to consider what remains to be done.

It has not been noted hitherto that Chaucer, in making poetic use of the material in Ovid's Heroic Epistles, resorted for convenience to an Italian translation of the Heroides, made in the Trecento. The author of this excellent model of Tuscan prose never achieved literary fame and even the facts of his life are unknown. For information concerning him one must depend upon the meagre statements set down in his introductory note to the rendering of the Epistle of Phaedra. His name in Hebrew, he informs the reader, signifies “Bocca di lanpana”—which is to say that it is Filippo. He refers there to a patroness—“bella donna giovane . . . . il cui nome è fiorito e nominato, secondo la lingua di Francia, di quel bel fiore che l'alto Re d'Francheschi porta nelle sue celestiali insegne”—and describes her coat-of-arms together with her husband's. This Lisa has been identified on manuscript authority—and correctly in probability—as the wife of a Florentine, Simone Peruzzi. She died in 1363. Assuming that she attained to the Biblical three score and ten, one may guess that the work inspired by her in youth was made between 1320 and 1330. On Delphic manuscript evidence scholars have given the author's surname as “Ceffi”—but their conjectures cannot be accepted as fully authoritative. An Italian version of Guido's Historia Trojana was executed by a Filippo Ceffi in 1324.

For over a hundred years critics and biographers, in commenting on Dryden's interest in experimental science, have assumed that he was an active member of the Royal Society. That Dryden's name was connected with the early affairs of the Society seems to have been discovered by Andrew Kippis and announced by him in the following note to his account of Dryden's life in the second edition of Biographia Britannica.

In view of the present controversy over Spenser's Cantos of Mutabilitie, it may be worth while to examine these cantos from the purely prosodic and styltistic points of view, to see if such a study throws any light upon the time of their composition. This will not necessarily be of any value in determining whether or not they were old material revamped, but there may be some satisfaction in knowing the approximate date when the cantos assumed their present form. I have accordingly undertaken such a study, and the conclusions are given herewith.

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is a tragedy, strongly deterministic in tone, the action of which is presided over by a complex and inescapable destiny. Professor Kittredge has already given an excellent exposition of the fate which hangs over the chief characters and over the doomed city of Troy, and has analyzed the sources of the feeling that we are “looking on at a tragedy that we are powerless to check or to avert.” And Professor Root, remarking upon the high seriousness and the moral import of Chaucer's poem, says:

The remarkable construction referred to in the title, þon mā þe, þon lēofre þe, etc., was first studied by the present writer in a previous article (MLN XLI, 300-313). There, by bringing together some twenty occurrences from different OE writings, prose and poetry both early and late, it was shown that the construction was something more than the sporadic expression it had previously been thought to be. Its wide-spread use in OE and the fact that different adjectives and adverbs occurred in the construction (e.g. nēar, lēofre, betran, swīður, ēð, etc.) showed that it was not confined to one time or one place or one writer. So far as the evidence in that article went the construction was used as a subordinate conjunction equivalent to than in the comparison of inequality, following only negative main clauses.

Literary style, like human personality, is a compound exceedingly difficult of analysis, for when its more obvious constituents are made clear, there still remains an illusive element, consciousness of which leaves the analyst with the unpleasant sensation of not having reached the bottom of the matter. As the most complex phenomenon in literature, style is the resultant of all the forces, known and unknown, underlying literary development, and the method and extent of the contribution made by each of these forces are a matter of probable inference rather than of positive demonstration. For that reason, any attempt, however ambitious, to account for the style of a literary epoch must be content with pointing out those more obvious influences that are combined and reflected in speech and writing, and with ignoring other factors which may escape detection. Under the protection of this confession I shall attempt to make manifest what seems to me the most important influence instrumental in changing the luxuriant prose of the Commonwealth into that of a diametrically opposite nature in the Restoration.

In Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea and its derivative, Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale, crowns of lilies and roses are brought by an angel to the future martyrs Cecilia and her husband after she has converted him to Christianity and continence. The usual symbolism of the flowers has been settled by Messrs. Holthausen and Lowes as being chastity and martyrdom; and Mr. Emerson found the earliest occurrence, so far, of them and their symbolism in an authentic work of St. Ambrose. But there was no ground for asserting the original source to be here. Nor is it the Proper Preface for St. Cecilia's day in the Ambrosian missal, from which both legends make a long quotation; the Proper Preface merely reflects some earlier version of the legend, and its date can hardly be determined. Nor in the gospel of pseudo-Matthew (or “Liber de ortu B. Mariae et infantia Salvatoris”), which has been suggested as “probably the source of the whole medieval conception of the symbolism of the two crowns of martyrdom and virginity.” The righteous Abel is here said (cap. vii) to have received two crowns. But not to mention the fact that they are not of flowers, while one crown is for his virginity, the other is not for his own innocent death (though later so misunderstood) but for his acceptable offering to God. Further, this pseudo-gospel seems to be not older than the eighth or ninth century, and this detail is not found in its main source, the “Protevangelium of James.” The early metaphorical examples collected from Sts. Cyprian and Jerome by Miss R. D. Cornelius are mentioned later.

Until further biographical information is disclosed the problem of the personal relations of Spenser and Sidney remains open to conjecture. Mainly two objections oppose the natural assumption that the two men were intimate in personal and literary matters: first, Spenser's vagueness, or perhaps reticence, when in a letter to Harvey, October, 1579, he speaks of being “in some use of familiarity” with Sidney; and second, his unaccountable delay in joining the chorus of grief at Sidney's death. These facts, and others less important, have been cited as indicating the absence of intimacy; while on the other hand effort has been made to explain them in such a way that the pleasing picture of friendship might not be damaged.

In the present paper I propose to examine once more the documents that afford evidence as to the sound of the Old French diphthong commonly represented by ue, and to develop certain fresh conclusions to which this evidence seems to point.

Current views of this matter may be briefly summarized: Vulgar Latin long open o, broken (by a process concerning which scholars are far from agreed) into ǫǫ, gave uo (dissimilation), on which we disagree again: was it uó or úo? Both pronunciations may be defended; but it is simpler to suppose that, like Italian and Spanish, Old French had a rising diphthong here (ŭó) from the very first. At any rate, the next stage must have been *uø, next ue, then *uø once more and finally ø.

In 1843 Peter Cunningham included in a collection of verse printed for the Percy Society an anonymous poem in blank verse, To the Memory of Mr. Congreve, whose authorship Cunningham, at the suggestion of H. J. Cary, ascribed to James Thomson. This ascription was made on the following grounds: that the style of the poem was Thomson's; that the poem was originally printed in 1729 by J. Millan, who was the publisher of Thomson's Winter, Summer, To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, and Brittania; and that “these poems by Thomson are advertised among Millan's books, and at the head of his list at the end of this very publication.”