The point of these observations bearing on this subject is that conditions between authors or editors and publishers of literary texts have changed materially since the days when but a few pages of notes made up, together with the original text, or a portion of it, a textbook for school and college use. Yet, as regards the remuneration of the author or editor, despite these changed conditions, the conventional ten per cent royalty contract has remained in statu quo.

Readers of Shelley's poetry must regret the lack of a biography of the poet by his gifted second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. More keenly than any other of those among whom his life was lived, she apprehended the presence of the “divine fire” in his work. For it she endured public ignominy, poverty, exile, and more—the occasional wavering of his affections toward her—with unexampled patience. For it she set aside her own literary aspirations, themselves neither slight nor groundless, until that blow which stilled forever the voice of her beloved numbed also her genius and left her desolate. Afterwards, when that which the sea gave up had vanished in mist or been resolved to dust on the sands of Spezzia, and when that dust had been laid away near the pyramid of Caius Cestius at Rome, there remained the memory of him to be cherished, and his fame to be kept pure to succeeding ages.

Wieland's first mention of the plan of the Merkur is in a letter to Riedel dated Sept. 17, 1772:

Ich bin entschlossen, eine Art von Journal zu entrepreniren, welches quo ad formam einige Ähnlichkeit mit dem Mercure de france haben soll. Prosaische Original-Aufsätze, Litterarische Nachrichten, Recensionen und Revisionen unrichtiger Urtheile über interessante Schriften, sollen die Haupt-Artikel davon ausmachen.

Fontane confessed on several occasions to a feeling of uneasiness in the presence of scholars, for he was always aware of the irregularity and meagerness of his education and of the consequent gaps in his knowledge. Nor did he believe that he deserved an eminent position as a critic. On the other hand, his long experience as journalist and as successful novelist, together with his wide acquaintance with European literature, make the critical utterances of the mature author particularly significant. But few of the scattered critiques which appeared in various journals, especially the Vossische Zeitung, during the author's lifetime, have been brought together in the posthumous volume of the collected works, under the title Literarische Studien and Eindrücke. However, these essays, with the valuable material found in the poet's correspondence, enable one to form a very fair opinion of Fontane's conception of the novel.

The subject of prose rhythms is an ancient one. Even without going back of English usage, we find prose rhythms consciously developed, and consequently suggesting some sort of mature theory, as early as the time of Elizabeth. The rhythms of Bacon may be Ciceronian, and those of the King James Bible the habits of the translators, many of whom for the better part of a lifetime had been chanting, or half chanting, the Scriptures in their pulpits. But Lyly's rhythms are a deliberate thing, one is tempted to say, in his case, a premeditated crime. Sir Thomas Browne's rhythms a little later are plainly conscious. With De Quincey the usage has become an art with rules and classified practices.

The Don Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was written (1606-1615) in ridicule of the chivalric romance at that time so overwhelmingly popular. The sickening exaggeration of these latter-day tales of knighthood apparently not only cloyed Cervantes but excited his sense of the ludicrous as well, giving him the idea of turning upon this type of story his powers of subtle satire. Since Cervantes was a man of by no means great academic erudition, what he knew of the background of knightly romance he had doubtless secured in the everyday way of popular reading. Certain high lights must naturally enough have struck his attention in his perusal of current tales of chivalry, and such came in for especial attention in his Don Quixote. Each episode of the book has, indeed, its more serious counterpart in the literary background which inspired Cervantes to his task.

The conjunction of the centenary of Shelley's death with the present interest in things pertaining to Spain and Spanish literature makes opportune an examination of the question: to what extent did Spain interest Shelley? For that this country did interest him will be borne out by even a superficial scanning of the titles in the older editions of his poems, while a perusal of his correspondence will disclose the fact that for at least the last three years of his life Shelley was a devoted student of certain phases of Spain's history and literature.

As a critic of literature Walter Savage Landor had ideals but few principles. Such a statement is not another paradox in the life of the old lion. It means simply that we look in vain in Landor's numerous judgments on literature for a method or a body of criteria. He never formulated a system, like Coleridge; or standards, like Arnold; nor even consistent prejudices, like Carlyle. The evolution of English criticism between Dryden and Coleridge he disregarded, as indeed he seemed to disregard all consecutive philosophical thought. He did not look into the new worlds of psychological and social criticism. He was not interested in the relations of things, but rather in the things themselves. Such statements are never truer of Landor than when he studies a piece of literature, or a writer. As a critic he never saw literature in perspective-so marvellously increased in his own day-but as something directly before him,—foreshortened. Thus he judged Pindar and Wordsworth each per se; one would think he was a contemporary of both. In all his criticisms we cannot find a body of guiding principles. Personal ideals are the determinants. It need scarcely be added that these are austere and high.

Only in a few favored instances did Beaumarchais' minor poems rise to the level of true poetry. Yet it would be a misconception of their significance and historical value to decry them as devoid of importance. They illustrate his talent for improvisation, the causticity of his ready wit; they unveil the complex character of this man, who, by some, was villified as a daring and unscrupulous adventurer, and acclaimed by others as “bon père, bon mari, bon maître, ami sincère.” Ever alert in pugnacious attack or cautious defense, his irrepressible and scintillating repartee reminds one of the flash of a stiletto striking with an almost invisible but mortal wound. Everywhere in his Mémoires and plays this pungency flavors the dusty records of practical contentions or a romantic intrigue and even his minor poems are not devoid of it.

Matthew Arnold is in general so confidently clear as to the nature of his own poetry that the reader is apt to credit him when he insists upon the contemporary sources of its melancholy. But those contemporary sources will appear much dimmer when the second or third centenary of his birth (December 24, 1822) shall come round. The “two worlds” that the poet wandered between will doubtless be rather nebular on the rear horizon, and the carefully wrought stanzas concerning them may seem the “stretched metre of an antique song.” The cursory commemorating reader, when he reaches the poem on Growing Old, may toss the volume aside with the remark that “this old fellow carefully architectured his gloom, but added here too obvious a gable.” The discerning reader, however, will be in a better position than now to find, flowing beneath Arnold's verse, a profounder melancholy than the clear Arnoldian eye itself could fathom.

In a study of Chateaubriand's La Maison de France (PMLA XXXVIII, No. 1, pp. 99-114), the present writer, after examining and placing in their respective parts, books, and chapters a series of excerpts from the Génie du Christianisme, declared himself baffled by the fifth excerpt, which reads: “Je remarque qu'Horace, Virgile, Tibulle, Tite-Live, moururent tous avant Auguste, qui est en cela le sort de Louis XIV; notre grand prince survécut un peu à son siécle et il se coucha le dernier dans la tombe, comme pour s'assurer qu'il ne restait rien après lui.” This passage, which looked as though it might belong to Part III, Book 4, Chapter 5 of the Génie, was not to be found either there or elsewhere in the work, and so the writer concluded that it must have been one of Chateaubriand's London notes to his manuscript of the Génie and that it had been inserted, somewhat at random, among the excerpts from that work in the Maison de France.

In the preface of the collective edition of his poems published the year before his death, Lowell laments the fact that there is no escaping responsibility for the printed page. “Ilka mon maun dree his weird,” he reminds his reader; and he goes on to say that, but for the “avenging litera scripta manet,” he “would gladly suppress or put into the Coventry of smaller print in an appendix” a good many things that he had with much reluctance admitted into this edition. There can be no doubt that Lowell was sincere in this avowal; but it would be a mistake to infer from what he says that he made no attempt to escape the avenging fate which he declares to be inevitable. For from this final edition he took pains to exclude not only all his juvenilia, but likewise a goodly number of his verses published after he had attained to manhood, and some, even, that he had written in his mature old age. By my count, he omitted from this final collective edition a total of 181 poems that had hitherto been published. He retained in this edition a total of 260 poems (I count the “Biglow Papers” as a single poem and each of the sonnets or sonnet groups as single items); so that out of a grand total of 441 poems published up to the time of the preparation of his final edition he sacrificed a little more than forty percent.