Amusés, les historiens et les critiques ont souvent prêté quelques moments d'attention à la Puce de Mme. Desroches. Se sont-ils toujours doutés que cette puce appartînt à un cycle assez riche: poèmes (et chansons) où l'auteur fait le vœu d‘être changé en quelque chose qui touche la femme aimée, ou dont elle use, ou qui la reflète: non seulement puce ou mouche, mais gants, collier, miroir, ...? On chantait, nous dit-on, voici cinquante ans: “Je voudrais être La Fleur novelle/De son chapeau.” Des couplets comiques mettaient en scène, au commencement du XIXe siècle, un Suisse allemand, un peu lourdaud, qui déclarait à sa belle, en mauvais français: “Moi, je voudrais être une mouche/Pour voler sur ta belle front.” On ferait un livre sur ce simple thème. Qu'il nous suffise d‘étudier quelques exemples.

The title-page of Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1590) presents “two Tragicall Discourses” concerning a mighty monarch who “(for his tyranny, and terrour in Warre) was rearmed, The Scourge of God.” A dozen times in the play Tamburlaine calls our attention to his title; and the last syllables of his dying breath are devoted to announcing it. “Scourge of God,” however, is no mere phrase that happened to catch the playwright's fancy; it is a definitive concept which signifies a pattern of human behavior and of divine destiny.

Because of its feeble quality and bad text, relatively few students have cared to give much attention to Marlowe's drama of contemporary France, The Massacre at Paris. But it has never been a principle of criticism that the amount to be learned about an author is always in proportion to the literary excellence of the work under study. Investigation reveals that there is at least one definite source for this play not hitherto clearly recognized as such, and that, once this fact is established, observations upon Marlowe's craftsmanship may be made, scarcely less interesting than those which proceed from similar studies of his greater plays.

The Folger Shakespeare Library possesses a number of separate plays, all from the Shakespearian Third Folio, and all bearing unmistakable signs of theatrical annotation. They were acquired by Mr. Folger from a variety of sources: the majority were bought from a bookseller in Munich, one was purchased in London, and another came with the Warwick Castle collection of Shakespeariana. There are nine plays in all: The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, but three of them—The Merry Wives, Macbeth, and Othello—are imperfect. It soon became clear that they were all from the same original volume, which, apparently, had belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps and was dismembered by him. The bindings of the separate plays—half leather, with boards of marbled paper or purplish-brown cloth—are obviously all the work of one binder, and are similar to the bindings of other books which have passed through Halliwell-Phillipps's hands. In addition, his handwriting is to be found in six of them: in The Merry Wives and Macbeth there is an inscription on one of the preliminary flyleaves, and in the other four there is a mere “C. and P.” on a fly-leaf at the end of the book.

Although Charles Sorel was the author of two of the most popular French novels in the seventeenth century, plus a number of other novels, and many scholarly works, including a history of literature, essays on morality and history, and an encyclopedia of science of philosophy, he is rarely heard of today. Born in 1602, in a bourgeois quarter of Paris, Sorel, according to his own statement, wrote his first books when he was only seventeen, and before he was twenty-four years old had written over a dozen works, most of them novels. His family income cut off at an early age as a result of his having abandoned the study of law for literature, Sorel found writing practically his only means of earning a living. In 1635, having shown an early predilection for history, he was able to secure the post of royal historiographer, left vacant by the death of his uncle, Charles Bernard. For several years he mingled with the most important political, social, and literary personages of his time, taking part in the “Querelle du Cid,” making fun of the French Academy at its inception, and attacking Mazarin in a series of comic gazettes and “mazarinades” in Parisian patois. However, as a result of his supreme egoism and his inevitable gift for making influential enemies, he was soon forced from this post and from the “grand monde” which he thereafter never ceased to criticize. Disdaining rich patrons, Sorel withdrew into private bourgeois life, living many years at the home of his sister and her husband, the assistant “procureur général,” Parmentier. Leaving his desk only to secure precise first-hand documentation for his diversified works, he spent the greater part of his time during nearly fifty years writing copiously on nearly every conceivable subject.

Le Registre d'Hubert is the only known document concerning Molière and his theater which has not yet been the subject of the most careful study. It is the book of accounts kept by the treasurer of the Palais Royal theater for 1672–73, preserved in the archives of the Comédie-Française since its foundation. I have been able to make a leisurely examination of this Registre, and I am presenting in this place all the items found in Hubert's records that are of interest to the historian of the French stage.

On October 26, 1740, Tobias Smollett, surgeon's second mate, sailed from St. Helen's aboard His Majesty's eighty-gun ship, the Chichester, one of the largest vessels in the fleet of over a hundred sail which Sir Chaloner Ogle was leading to the Caribbean. At Jamaica this huge expedition joined Admiral Vernon's squadron, already in those waters; and from there the combined forces proceeded to attack the Spanish stronghold of Carthagena, near the southern base of the Isthmus of Panama.

Die Irrfahrten des freien Individuums, die mit der Reformation begannen, wurden zugleich vollendet und abgeschlossen durch das Jahr 1789, den Beginn der französischen Revolution. Durch sie sollte der verkümmerte Untertan des absolutistischen Staates vermählt werden mit der unendlichen Freiheit der protestantischen Seele. Das Kind dieser Ehe war der Bürger, der sich freiwillig bindende, in die Gesellschaft einordnende Mensch. Die politische Freiheit existierte nicht mehr wie die religiöse und philosophische Freiheit der vorangehenden Jahrhunderte im unendlichen Raum des Geistes. Der freie Bürger steht im realen Raum des Staates; das bürgerliche Individuum findet seine Grenze in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Die Rolle des Einzelnen in der Gemeinschaft wurde das beherrschende philosophische, literarische und politische Thema des Zeitalters, das der französischen Revolution folgte. Auch die beiden tiefsten Romane der deutschen Literatur der bürgerlichen Epoche wachsen aus dem Boden dieses Problems auf und sind bis in die feinsten Fasern von ihm durchdrungen: der Wilhelm Meister Goethes und der Grüne Heinrich von Gottfried Keller. Beide führen das an Freiheit leidende Individuum in die Grenzen der bürgerlichen Ordnung. Sie sind beide Geschöpfe des Gedankenkreises der französischen Revolution, aber im Sinne der Gegenwirkung: sie sind aus dem Glauben der notwendigen Begrenzung des Menschen und nicht aus dem Geiste unendlicher Freiheit geboren.

For the persistence, since 1924, of contrasting opinions as to Jeffrey's treatment of the text of Carlyle's “Burns,” David Alec Wilson is in no small measure responsible. First, Wilson's violent partisanship apparently has led some critics of Carlyle to assume that they may disregard the Wilson Life without discrediting themselves. Second, Wilson's inadequate handling of the “Burns” episode itself has permitted continued divergences of opinion among those students of Carlyle who seem directly acquainted with the pertinent Jeffrey-Carlyle correspondence in the second volume of the Life. For, though Wilson quotes generously from this correspondence, and though he makes frequent references to details in it, he nowhere explicitly gives the conclusion to which his own fresh examination of the evidence may have led him. Wilson's inadequacy is reflected both in popular digests of his account of the Carlyle-Jeffrey clashes concerning the “Burns” and in Isaac Watson Dyer's bibliographical summary of this account.

Mary Shelley, in the note she supplied to the poem, properly characterizes The Witch of Atlas as “wildly fanciful, full of brilliant imagery,” and burgeoning with “fantastic ideas.” Rather misleading is her further statement that its source materials were borrowed “from sunrise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine, or paly twilight,” a kind of emotional garner from Shelley's rambles “in the sunny land he so much loved.” For The Witch is as literary a poem in its origins as Shelley ever wrote. It teems with images which suggest Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare, as well as Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Herodotus, and Pliny. A recent article by Professor Lowes indicates that Keats's Endymion should be added to the list of sources, with what justification Professor Clark's ensuing article makes clear.

We resort to many expedients in order to maintain the arbitrary character of English spelling. We ask that our children be drilled endlessly in school, we do homage to “the dictionary” as an arbiter of linguistic matters, and we cast a supercilious smile that cuts deep upon anyone who deviates from conventional orthography. Also among these mechanisms for maintaining our spelling is the spelling bee, and the tracing of its development—from its background in schools, through its flowering as a rural entertainment in New England and later as the principal literary exercise on the frontier, to its revival on the radio—forms a necessary chapter in American linguistic history.

Research concerning the various aspects of the life and work of Washington Irving has found its final expression in Professor Williams' monumental biography. In these volumes and in a subsequent Journal much light is shed upon Irving's acquaintance with the family of John Foster of Bedford, residing in Dresden when Irving arrived there in the autumn of 1822. Among his intimate friends of this time, none has remained so completely unknown as the oft-mentioned Colonel Livius, a cousin of the Fosters. Irving's constant association with him in Dresden and their continued friendship in Paris are indicated by many entries in his notebooks, but these reveal little beyond Livius' relationship to the Fosters and his passion for the theatre. Livius as a minor dramatist, whose Freyschütz is an adaptation in which Irving collaborated, is not completely unknown, though some confusion arises from variations in his name. In fact, some doubt is even cast upon its authenticity because of a reference to him as Barham Surás in Flora Foster Dawson's biographical interpolation. If not for his own connection with the English theatre, then because of his intimate association with Washington Irving, Barham Livius deserves further study. The following biographical sketch, supplemented by a recently discovered personal letter, assembles isolated bits of information from documentary sources in America, England, and Germany, and attempts to summarize the career of an interesting though long-forgotten devotee of the Green Room.

Students of Emerson, as well as those who have followed the reception of Shakespeare in America, have been disturbed over the words in the essay “Shakspeare; or, the Poet” from Representative Men in which Emerson seems finally to condemn Shakespeare as a “master of revels to mankind” who, after all, shared “the halfness and imperfection of humanity.” Thus Emerson's criticism, it has been said, is “deficient in sympathy,” and “the key to all he has said and written is to be found in the fact that his point of view is not that of the acceptor, the creator,—Shakespeare's point of view, but that of the refiner and selector, the priest's point of view.”

Although a great deal has been written on the relation between Nietzsche and Wagner, no detailed study has been made hitherto of the period indicated in the title of this paper. And even here a comprehensive treatment of the relation is not attempted. Only one phase of it is considered. The question proposed is: What was Nietzsche's opinion of Wagner's music-dramas when he wrote the final version of Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik? A chronological survey of Nietzche's notes, letters, and shorter essays of the period has been made, as far as they bear on the nature of tragedy in general and more specifically on its relation to music. His ideas are discussed in their development and in their relation to the theories of Wagner and of Schopenhauer on music and poetry, in the hope that at least a few of the lines in the vexed and vexing Nietzsche–Wagner record may be deciphered more clearly.