Let me first of all account for the title of this paper by quoting a few words from a recent editorial of the New York Evening Post:

“If time-worn phrases prevent a calm scrutiny of the facts, and a clear perception of the best fiscal policy for this nation .... let us abandon them for some fresher and truer form of words. . . . Instead of taking free trade for a watchword, if that offends any, we may say that we stand for freer trade. Instead of talking about protecting American industry, let us talk about facilitating it.”

In the epic family of Aymeri de Narbonne, by far the strangest figure is that of Aïmer le Chétif. Without sharing in the grotesqueness of Hernaut le Roux, Aïmer has a mysteriousness and the shadow of an unknown misfortune, which draw powerfully the sympathetic imagination. Evidently we are dealing with one of the greatest of ancient heroes, yet the complete disappearance of the epics that sang his exploits has buried in oblivion his peculiar claim to glory. If he has subsisted at all, it has been as a fallen deity. Indeed, the casual reader of the poems still extant in which he is mentioned, might suppose him the least of all his brethren, one of the humblest and most recent additions to the epic roll. It is in fact likely, as we shall see, that the meaning of his epithet le chétif was already forgotten seven hundred years ago.

The revenge tragedy, a distinct species of the tragedy of blood, may be defined as a tragedy whose leading motive is revenge and whose main action deals with the progress of this revenge, leading to the death of the murderers and often the death of the avenger himself.

This type, as thus defined, probably first appeared on the Elizabethan stage in the Spanish Tragedy and the original Hamlet.2 Of these two plays the old Hamlet is not extant and can only be reconstructed conjecturally; the Spanish Tragedy represents, therefore, the origin of the type. Just what the ultimate sources of the type may have been, is not a question which enters our discussion. In the Spanish Tragedy the influence of Seneca is marked as in much early English tragedy,1 and there may be some indebtedness to contemporary French and Italian drama of the Senecan sort.2 We are not, however, to examine the Spanish Tragedy in connection with the influence of Seneca but in connection with a long succession of Elizabethan revenge plays; and for such an investigation it serves well enough as a starting point. Thomas Kyd was the author of this play and probably, as Dr. Sarrazin 3 has shown, of the old Hamlet. He may safely be taken as the introducer of the revenge tragedy upon the English stage, and his work may be considered one of the many dramatic innovations of the Elizabethan period.

It is the purpose of this paper to study the unassisted work of Middleton, of Rowley, and of Massinger for the individual characteristics of these men. From the characteristics thus arrived at, the part each man probably took in the composition of The Old Law will be determined. This assignment of parts will be used as the basis for determining the probable method of composition, and the approximate date of the play.

When the critics of the middle of the eighteenth century discuss the conditions of the German stage at that time, they invariably complain of the great losses caused to it by the untimely death of several young and promising authors. Brawe, Cronegk, and J. E. Schlegel are mentioned in this way; and their names are still remembered, if their works are forgotten. Together with these we repeatedly find a name that nowadays seems almost to have dropped out of the memory of the historians of literature. Yet the young Nicolaï was just as eager to praise Johann Christian Krüger as those other three men, and regretted that he, too, by a premature death, had been prevented from fulfilling what his early productions had promised. For a long time confused with Gottsched's unlucky disciple, B. E. Krüger, Johann Christian Krüger's personality and writings only now begin to be understood.

The appropriate and frequently quoted words of Orazio

Bacci, “E speriamo che anche del Catone non si ritorni a parlare troppo presto,”1 have taken their place among those maxims

Le qua' fuggendo tutto 'l mondo onora.

The copious stream of Cato literature has flowed on undiminished, and the end is apparently no nearer than before. If, then, a new recruit is to join the procession of those who seem to honor Bacci's precept more in the breach than in the observance, it behooves him to declare at the outset that he does so only because he has material to offer which he believes to be new and of a nature to expedite the ultimate solution of the problem.

That Shakespeare read Montaigne's Essays is made probable by the fact that they were well-known to his contemporaries. He was only sixteen when the first two books were published in Paris. By the end of the century, before he had begun to write his greatest tragedies, the popularity of the work had already spread to England. Of this fact there still remain many signs: “Seven or eight of great wit and worth,” Florio tells us, had made attempts to translate the Essays; two separate entries of such a translation had been made in the Stationers' Register; “divers of his peeces” in English, Cornwallis writes, were going from hand to hand in manuscript; and Bacon had published Essays, in which not only the name, but several appropriations of thought, acknowledged and unacknowledged, show the indebtedness of their author to Montaigne.

At the end of his entertaining biography, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald scouts the vogue alleged by Sterne of his Tristram Shandy in France. “Such men as D'Holbach and Diderot might have it on their tables and affect to read a few pages, but to the mass of even educated foreigners, it must have been a book of cabalistics.” “It is very different,” resumes Mr. Fitzgerald, “with the Sentimental Journey. It has been received with delight by all Europe. The French have openly made it their own, and translated it over and over again.”

One of the earliest evidences of the existence of a legend of Saint George is found in a pronunciamento of Pope Gelasius, made in connection with the first Roman council of the year 494. In the presence of seventy bishops he endeavored to separate the canonical and authentic books of the Church from those which are to be looked upon as apocryphal. After mentioning the books of the Bible, the decisions of the councils, the church fathers, and the decrees of the Popes, he cites the Lives of Saints and Martyrs, and adds that some of these latter writings are justly viewed with suspicion, both because the names of their authors are unknown, and because their contents stamp them as being the compositions of heretics or sectarians; he then cites as examples “cujusdam Quirici et Julittae, sicut Georgii aliorumque hujusmodi passiones, quae ab hereticis perhibentur compositae.”

The people of this country are commonly supposed to be in a high degree practical, and the word is often used in praise of Americans as possessing a clear vision of the hard facts of life and as governing their conduct accordingly, so as to get the best results possible. The typical American is supposed to be a practical man, not an idealist or a misty theorizer absorbed in meditations that lead to nothing. But the same word may also be used to imply a reproach, not the less real for being covert; it may suggest that ours is a civilization which looks upon material prosperity as the highest good and cares but little if at all for whatever is intangible. That our colleges and universities attract a large number of students of capacity and industry is good evidence that the young men of this country do not all understand success in life to be synonymous with the acquisition of wealth. But it cannot be said that we have in our universities all the students we want. There is still room for a great increase in their numbers before we need feel that there is any risk for us of an intellectual proletariat.

It has commonly been supposed that the first mention of the Ruthwell Cross was in these words of Hickes, on p. 5 of his edition of Jonas' Icelandic Grammar, published in 1703 as Part III of Hickes' Thesaurus: ‘Denique infra posui in quatuor tabellis .... æri insculptum nobilissimum monumentum Runicum, quod à se Ruthwelli, vulgo Revelli apud Scotos, descriptum ad me misit in Septentrionali literatura, præsertim in Runica, singulariter eruditus, Reverendus Wilhelmus Nicolsonus, Archidiaconus Carleolensis.‘ This must have been written before June 14, 1702, since on that day Nicolson was consecrated Bishop of Carlisle. No one seems hitherto to have inquired when Nicolson himself discovered the monument, nor what he thought of it. In the following pages I shall present Nicolson's own statement concerning his discovery, his references to the Cross at various subsequent times, and finally his detailed account of a collation of his transcript with the inscription on the Cross, made two years after Hickes had published the earlier transcript. This information is contained in the first volume of Nicolson's Letters on Various Subjects, edited by John Nichols, London, 1809. and in his unpublished diary for the year 1705.

The question of the original home of the Beves saga has often been discussed, but no satisfactory conclusion has been reached. The conjectures regarding it have been various, but as yet unconvincing.

Amaury Duval 1 places the scene of the story in France at Antonne, but without giving definite grounds for this supposition. Turnbull 2 and Kölbing3 both adopt this view without argument. Pio Rajna4 was the first to suggest a Germanic home for the saga, locating Hanstone (Hamtoun) on the continent near the French border of Germany. The arguments given are unimportant, but this view of the origin has been accepted by Gaston Paris,5 although he takes exception to Rajna's wildest suppositions as to the name Hanstone. Albert Stimming6 has exposed the weakness of Rajna's reasoning, but even he leaves the question still unsettled. Later in his introduction, he gives impartially the arguments in favor of French as well as those in favor of Germanic origin, but does not regard them as sufficient ground for forming an opinion. These comprise the conjectures thus far advanced, and all are weakly supported and inconclusive.

The “dramatic guilt” or the “tragic fate” differs, it is well known, from fate and guilt in the common sense of the terms. Fate is the equivalent of blind destiny, or of the whimsical decree or the general envy or malice of the gods towards men. This Fate foredooms the victim to some crime which brings a punishment in its train, or to a wholly undeserved calamity, which the Greeks were fond of representing as foretold but unavoidable. The ill-will of the gods had perhaps been incurred by an ancestor of the victim, but was wreaked upon the remote descendant to the third and fourth generation. In this curse of the gods we may see a poetical conception of an hereditary evil. Or on the other hand, in heredity we may see a modern and very real equivalent of the Greek decree of the gods, the “moira.”

There are few questions concerning Anglo-Saxon literature which have been more widely discussed than the interpretation of the so-called First Riddle of Cynewulf. The subject was introduced by Heinrich Leo in 1857, in his celebrated monograph Quae de se ipso Cynewulfus Poeta Anglosaxonicus tradiderit. Before that time the line shad attracted little attention. As is well known, they occur in the Exeter Book, the collection of verse left by Bishop Leofric to his cathedral church in the eleventh century. Thorpe, in his edition of this manuscript, did not venture to translate them, which is scarcely to be wondered at, since both language and grammatical construction are unusually obscure. The investigations of Leo, however, with those of his followers and opponents, at once gave great interest and importance to the almost unnoticed lines. It may be well to mention briefly the principal theories which have been founded on this bit of verse, some of which rival in ingenuity the familiar attempts to establish a Baconian cypher in the works of Shakespeare.

We may surely congratulate ourselves, not alone as scholars, but also as citizens, that the Modern Language Association of America has united in harmonious and effective co-operation a large majority of the real leaders in important fields of study. Our Association is a representative body in the fullest sense of the word; its members show a growing interest in each other's work, and in the progress of science as a whole. The total results seem almost too good to be true: who could have prophesied to Professor Marshall Elliott, during the years in which he was laboring for a truly national organization, that the somewhat overworked and overburdened citizens of this department of the Republic of Letters would so generally be ready to pay their three dollars yearly; that a goodly number would be found to bring their costly contributions to the scientific treasury of the Society, and to gather from long distances for its yearly conference, at a heavy tax in time and money—and all this at a time when anthracite coal is selling at $7.35 a ton, not put in ! There is a high idealism back of this, which promises much for American civilization. If modern history teaches anything, it is the lesson of the great effectiveness of the trust-idea; the most sordid evils which affect society and our own profession are those which come from ruthless, cynical, destructive competition, that survival of the brutish age when each individual stood for himself, and against all comers. Every principle of economic administration calls for a centralization of directive responsibility in the most competent hands. The entire manufacturing industries of our country have been practically put into the control of corporations, which have ended competition among themselves: are the children of this world so much wiser, then, in their generation, than the children of light? Shall we be unable to use what the biscuit-makers, the tanners of hides, the coal-barons, and the brokers in political power employ with conspicuous success for the most sordid purposes? Such a union is the only means of preventing waste and incompetency, of restraining clumsy hands from a fatal interference with higher values; it is the best security against that familiar tragedy of American life:—the planting, with faith and courage, of a fair garden, the development of it into beauty by patient labor, only that it shall lapse into a wilderness by mere neglect. If American life be incapable of something better than a direct pursuit of the immediate ends of interested persons, we must become once for all pessimists as to the basal theory of a free and intelligent Democracy—which God forbid ! Our salvation from the vulgarity which has all but overwhelmed our political institutions, which makes itself distressingly broad in society, in the church, and in much of the intellectual aesthetic life of our people, lies in a true Aristocracy, an aristocracy anointed with the full drop of democratic oil, absolutely open without prejudice to all who have proven themselves fit to become leaders—and to none others under any plea; an aristocracy constantly rejuvenated by vigorous, daring young blood. The Modern Language Association is a living proof of the entire practicability of such a power in American life: we must not forget that the whole problem is, first of all, a civic, rather than an academic one. Whether there be really a “Monastic Danger in Higher American Education” or not, we dare not ignore the fact that education is a preparation for life. Some of us count it a positive loss to America's cultural development that during the last century our country broke so many of the ties which had bound us organically to English civilization and English educational ideals,—in favor of an attempt to recast our system upon more theoretical grounds. As Mr. Courthope recently pointed out, the invigorating and elevating influence of Oxford and Cambridge upon the English nation has been due in large measure to the fact that they have stood in vital relations to the civic life of the British Empire: that their education has been so largely the Aristotelian,—an education which has inculcated high-minded traditions that forever render impossible such base prostitution of sacred public trusts as makes the one indelible stain upon contemporary American politics. That supremely typical American, James Russell Lowell, whom our national Association had the proud honor of claiming as a most loyal President, was also the supreme example of an American scholar, a man who was the flower of American culture, and who learned at the very beginning of his career the same great conclusion which Goethe came to after the unexampled strivings of his strenuous life, that the æsthetic ideal is to be postponed to the practical one; that the welfare of society is not to be gained by detached speculation, but by the loftiest thought transmuted into labor and accomplishment. Equally praiseworthy have been the valuable public services of such academic Americans as Presidents Angell, Gilman, and Schurman; of Dean Worcester and Professor Phelps, not to dwell upon the tireless efforts of Dr. Elgin Gould in his heroic campaign for the social and political reform of the American metropolis. The sway of the gods of the market-place is bad and bitter enough, as every idealist knows, but yet there are not wanting many tokens of hope and encouragement. How reassuring was the recent clean victory of President Seth Low over coarseness and greed, and how much it means for the cause for which we are all working that there now stands at the head of the nation a man who represents, in unsullied purity, the very ideals to which we have devoted our lives:—an aristocrat of the aristocrats, to whom meanness and vulgarity are constitutionally alien and repulsive! Think not that I wander from the legitimate objects of our organization in striking the civic note at this hour: our expressed aim is “the scientific study and teaching of the modern languages and literatures in the Central States,” but the first condition of scientific activity is to secure an environment in which that activity can have its most perfect play: the one great, common foe of our whole profession is Mammon, stifling ruthlessly the poetic impulses in the hearts of generation after generation of American youth. There is only one theme for those who stand for the higher life of the spirit, and that is to sound the note of unfailing courage and serene work in the midst of the self-sufficiency and self-complacency of those who look at all this higher life with skepticism. Our aim is to work for Distinction in public, as well as scholastic affairs, and to bring about conditions in which America's choicest minds shall have some more direct and fruitful scope for their activities than the reading of Phi Beta Kappa orations and commencement addresses,—to wit, the direct service of our beloved country in its every-day concerns and interests, from which they are now so largely shut out by the assertive political boss,—our American Übermensch.