All critics of Thomas Deloney's novels have commented on the frequent passages in which, dropping his ordinary colloquial style, he indulges in euphuistic references to alleged wonders of natural history. His editor, Mr. F. O. Mann, explains many of the references by citing a probable source like Stephen Batman's Batman vppon Bartholome (1582) and highly improbable sources like Pliny, Sextus Empiricus, Cornelius Nepos, Belleforest, and the Nuremberg Chronicle. As I have recently shown, a large number of Deloney's “facts” about natural history and of his erudite-looking anecdotes were lifted directly from Thomas Fortescue's translation, The Forest or Collection of Historyes (1571, 1576). Many others (as well as a few that I supposed to have come from The Forest) were taken from Stephen Batman's The Doome warning all men to the Iudgemente (1581) and Thomas Johnson's Cornucopiæ, Or diuers secrets … Newlie drawen out of diuers Latine Authors into English (1595).

Having thus completed the death cycle, we turn now to the metaphors of sickness, and again we must start with Werther's application to himself of what he had said of the unhappy suicide girl. He sees himself as “der Unglückliche, dessen Leben unter einer schleichenden Krankheit unaufhaltsam abstirbt. … Und das Übel, das ihm die Kräfte verzehrt, raubt ihm zugleich den Mut, sich davon zu befreien” (61.22). In Werther's case it is not just a sickness of love as with Rousseau's St. Preux. From the very outset, Werther sees himself as a sick man, his own emotionalism as a “verderbliche Leidenschaft … Auch halte ich mein Herzchen wie ein krankes Kind” (10.12–14). And so it continues after he has met Lotte: “Was Lotte einem Kranken sein muss, fühl' ich an meinem eignen Herzen, das übler dran ist als manches, das auf dem Siechbette verschmachtet” (42.4); “wenn meine Krankheit zu heilen wäre” (78.2). Hence his sympathy for the invalid in whom he sees his own case: “Müsse der trostlos umkommen, der eines Kranken spottet, der nach der entferntesten Quelle reist, die seine Krankheit vermehren, sein Ausleben schmerzhafter machen wird” (137.4–). This invalid serves as a double simile; he is like Werther himself on the one hand, he is like a religious pilgrim on the other: “das bedrängte Herz, das, um seine Gewissensbisse los zu werden und die Leiden seiner Seele abzutun, eine Pilgrimschaft nach dem heiligen Grabe tut” (137.9). Ill humor, the peevishness and jealousy of the lover, becomes the subject of discussion at the home of the vicar and is treated als eine Art Krankheit, and the question is, “ob dafür kein Mittel ist” (45.8). The moral is found by developing the simile—seek the remedy and take it: “Gewiss, wer krank ist, wird bei allen Ärzten herumfragen, und die grössten Resignationen, die bittersten Arzneien wird er nicht abweisen, um seine Gesundheit zu erhalten” (45.28). This Art Krankheit is “eine Art Trägheit” and so indolence and inertia also becomes a disease (45.16).

Adoctrine of Nature constitutes the core of the view of life held by Shakespeare. Whether or not the sonneteer unlocked his heart, it is clear that if the works of Shakespeare are considered as an integrable whole, he laid bare many results of his probings amid the secrets of Nature. The present intent is to learn by this approach something about his philosophy of ethics, art, and politics. Indications are that, like Spenser in the Cantos of Mutabilitie, he had more than an intelligent gentleman's interest in the theme.

The second English treatise on tobacco, as well as the first to oppose it, was Work for Chimny-sweepers: or A warning for Tabacconists. Describing the pernicious vse of Tabacco, no lesse pleasant then profitable for all sorts to reade. [quotation] … Imprinted at London by T. Este, for Thomas Bushell, & are to be sould at the great North dore of Powles. 1602.

Literary historians of the French Renaissance have long since conceded to Camille de Morel a place of distinction among the learned women of her time. Nor is this an empty honor in a century which, following the example of the Italian Renaissance, produced a goodly number of women whose thorough humanistic training and literary accomplishments have aroused the admiration of succeeding generations. The complete story of Camille de Morel, however, has never been told. She has been too lavishly praised by some and neglected by others, and it is only through diligent examination of the many traces which she left in sixteenth-century French literature that one can come to know her true nature and appreciate her learning while pardoning her shortcomings.

He pronounced the letter R (littera canina) very hard—a certaine signe of a satyricall witt—from John Dreyden. Extreme pleasant in his conversation, and at dinner, supper, etc.; but satyricall. MANY people still picture John Milton as a forbidding Puritan, dividing his time about equally between hounding his poor daughters and lifting his soul in ecstatic, mystic raptures to the tremendously imposing Jehovah of his poems. They remember with some disdain his pride in his studiousness, his temperance, his chastity, and other not so popular virtues. Hence they are unfair and myopic. We have no right to belittle Milton's essential humanity. His soul was not always like a star and dwelt apart; on the contrary, he led an unusually busy social and political career, coming in habitual contact with people of many types, and usually making a very favorable impression on them. He could laugh and jest and talk well; and above all he had an astonishing command of satire, begun early and developed by years of hard and constant training. If satire had held the place in the mid-seventeenth century that it occupied in the 1590's or the post-Restoration years, Milton might have been in quality what Bishop Hall pretended to be in chronology—the first English satirist. Even during a period when satire as a type was suffering a depression, his achievements are more striking than we often realize.

Die Interpretation der individualistischen Geschichtsauffassung.—In der Einleitung zu Goethes politischen Lehrjahren bemerkt Lorenz, auf die Frage, warum verhältnismässig wenig von Goethes politischem Denken, Wesen und Handeln geschrieben worden sei, habe ihm einer der besten Goethekenner geantwortet: “die geschulte Goethephilologie sei eben zu gewissenhaft, um aus Epigrammen und leichten Gesprächen die politische Grund- und Weltanschauung eines Mannes herzustellen und zu beleuchten.” Mit Recht konnte Lorenz darauf einwenden, dass die geschulte Goethephilologie, wenn sie nur Goethes Epigramme und leichte Gespräche in Betracht ziehe und seine praktisch-politische Wirksamkeit einfach ausser Acht lasse, eine grundfalsche Auffassung vom Wesen der Politik verrate. Das hinderte aber den Historiker Lorenz nicht daran, Goethes praktisch-politische Wirksamkeit weit über das gebührende Mass hervorzukehren und den Mythus eines “wahren Staatsmannes” zu schaffen. Wie die Goetheforschung seiner Zeit geht Lorenz von der individualistischen Geschichtsauffassung aus. Diese sieht in der politischen Erscheinung lediglich die Wirkung der historisch bedeutenden Persönlichkeit und muss folglich die politische Wirksamkeit, wie z.B. die Ministertätigkeit Goethes, als das Resultat des persönlichen Willensausflusses des “geborenen Staatsmannes” interpretieren. Wie erklärt sie sich aber das klägliche Ergebnis dieser Tätigkeit, die Widersprüche in seinen Handlungen, seinen Betrachtungen und gelegentlichen Aeusserungen?

In the following passage from bis Epitaphium Damonis (lines 181–197) Milton refers to two cups which he is supposed to have received from Manso, and which he describes as follows: … tum quae mihi pocula Mansus, Mansus, Chalcidicae non ultima gloria ripae Bina dedit, mirum artis opus, mirandus et ipse, Et circum gemino caelaverat argumento: In medio Rubri Maris unda, et odoriferum ver. Littora longa Arabum, et sudantes balsama silvae; Has inter Phoenix, divina avis, unica terris, Caeruleum fulgens diversicoloribus alis, Auroram vitreis surgentem respicit undis. Parte alia polus omnipatens, et magnus Olympus: Quis putet? hic quoque Amor pictaeque in nube pharetrae, Arma corusca faces, et spicula tincta pyropo; Nec tenues animas pectusque ignobile vulgi Hinc ferit; at circum flammantia lumina torquens Semper in erectum spargit sua tela per orbes Impiger, et pronos nunquam collimat ad ictus: Hinc mentes ardere sacrae, formaeque deorum.

That Henry Lawes set to music a version of Shakespeare's Sonnet cxvi “Let me not to the marriage of true mindes/Admit impediments,” has apparently never been mentioned in print. Lawes' version, which retains seven lines intact, alters seven, and adds two couplets to form three six-line stanzas, is found in John Gamble's commonplace book of songs. This volume was formerly the property of Dr. Edward F. Rimbault, but is now in the Drexel Collection of the New York City Public Library.

Through the gracious courtesy of the Hungarian authorities I have been permitted to seek for Slavonic material in the Royal Hungarian National Museum. I was gratified to find that owing to a millennium of close contacts between the Magyar and the Slav, Budapest contains much interesting material. During this search I was fortunate enough to come upon the unpublished manuscript which is here reproduced. It was found by itself and was not a part of any collection. For purposes of identification I suggest calling it Slovak Manuscript M.M.C.

The discussion of Shakespearean punctuation begun by Percy Simpson has brought out two theories of seventeenth-century punctuation—one that it is based upon principles of elocution and the other that it is based upon the grammatical structure of sentences. No one seems to have argued that the two principles must have been active simultaneously, that rules of punctuation (even those formulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which Professor Fries cites) regard both the structure and the pause.

A bibliography of restoration drama is much needed, and it is to be hoped that either Professor Allardyce Nicoli or Mr. Montague Summers will fulfil his promise to give us one. The advertisements in newspapers concerning the publication of plays are invaluable raw material for such a bibliography. Writers on, and editors of, individual dramatists have occasionally made use of them, but the great mass of advertisements has remained uncollected and unsought after. I have thoroughly searched the Burney Collection of newspapers in the British Museum and extracted therefrom announcements of the publication of plays. I have confined myself to plays or songs from individual plays, leaving out of account books on the drama or collections of songs in which no specific play is mentioned.

Unquestionably, early references to Milton and his work are valuable. Doubly valuable is the following hitherto unnoticed reply to his Of Prelatical Episcopacy; for it not only proves that Milton's pamphlet, on its merits and not because of personalities, was deemed worthy of a rejoinder, but it also serves to fix the date of Of Prelatical Episcopacy, and, incidentally, of his first pamphlet, Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline in England. The full title of the reply is A Compendious Discourse, Proving Episcopacy To Be Of Apostolicall, And Consequently Of Divine Institution: By A cleare and weighty testimony of St. Irenœus a glorious Martyr, and renowned Bishop of Lyons in France, upon the yeere of our Lord, 184. The said Testimony being so declared, pressed, and vindicated from all exceptions, that thereby an intelligent, and conscionable Reader may receive abundant satisfaction in this behalfe. Isaiah 39. 8. Let there be peace and truth in my daies. By Peloni Almoni, Cosmopolites. London, Printed by E. G. for Richard Whitaker at the Kings Armes in Pauls Church-yeard, 1641.