During the past fifty or sixty years in the history of Romance linguistics, the erratic development of vowels in hiatus has constituted an ever recurring problem. Scholars have been little preotcupied with the subject except in so far as it touches the history of the number words (CL dŭo) and the possessive adjectives and pronouns (CL měus, tŭus, sŭus). A study of the latter led d'Ovidio to give the first account of any extent of the development of vowels in hiatus in a Romance tongue; he limited his study to Italian. At about the same time, Karl Brugmann was investigating the mode of development of vowels in hiatus in Latin and Greek. Although he was able to establish a fairly clear system of development for the forms in the ancient languages, further studies in Romance linguistics failed to clarify the issue for the modern languages. In 1893, Menger attempted to answer, at least tentatively, some of the outstanding questions incidental to the problem and cleared the atmosphere somewhat; his treatment was, however, primarily a development of the possessive pronoun and was limited to Italian. The work of scholars such as Meyer-Lubke led to mere tabulation of forms; other treatments have considered at most a set group of words, like the possessive pronouns, in the various languages or have dealt only with the multitude of dialectal forms in an area geographically restricted. In short, the development of vowels in hiatus in the whole of the Romance territory has never been the object of a comprehensive study.

In dealing with the non-Latin stratum of the Hispanic lexicon, the Romance linguist is rarely prepared to reach definitive conclusions with respect to the etymology. His is primarily the duty of assembling the cognates, doublets, and derivatives, of determining the configuration of the word family, of establishing the range of meanings, of discovering, in figurative use, the underlying images. By linking widely disseminated reflexes and combining scattered relics of an ancient word into an organic whole, he implicitly rules out untenable etymological bases, narrows down the choice of plausible solutions, and passes on a carefully classified set of data to a fellow scholar who may have the competence to integrate the unknown word family into a lexical system familiar to him, be it Iberian, Celtic, Visigothic, or Arabic. The fruitfulness of this preliminary analysis and systematization may be illustrated with the case of Spanish desmoronar, Portuguese esb(o)roar “to crumble.”

One of the most familiar figures in Arthurian romance is the Besieged Lady, whose beleaguered castle is liberated by a young and obscure knight, and who rewards her deliverer with an offer of her love. So ubiquitous is she, in fact, that it is easy to dismiss her as an Arthurian commonplace. But even commonplaces must originate somewhere. Since the Besieged Ladies are by no means stereotyped replicas of one another, it is difficult to believe that all versions of the story derive from the earliest extant text. More probably, the story of the Besieged Lady and her troubles is a traditional narrative pattern which became a favorite with the romancers not only because of its beguiling aspects but also because of its adaptability to their concept of chivalry. A study of the more significant versions of this remarkably malleable theme will help us to discern the underlying traditions and their complex development.

Some years ago Dr. W. W. Greg in an article, “Bibliography—An Apologia”, ably presented the aims and scope of analytical bibliography. Among the phases of that science which he treated at some length was critical bibliography, the study of the transmission of texts. As a bibliographer he emphasized the value of the critical or bibliographical approach, “the humble collation of textual variations and reconstruction of scribal steps”, as contrasted to the metacritical, the intuitional and personal selection of the best or most authentic. Although Dr. Greg's concept applies to the transmission of all texts, I am limiting my study, for the sake of illustration, to a particular case.

Lucian, looking inside a gold and ivory statue by Phidias, was shocked ' to see “one tangle of bars, bolts, nails, planks, wedges, with pitch and mortar and everything that is unsightly; not to mention a possible colony of rats and mice.” And Lamb, on seeing the Cambridge manuscript of Milton's minor poems, swore never again to go into the workshop of a great artist. For behind the poem often lie the “unsightly” dictionary of rhymes, the thesaurus, the dictionary of synonyms—all the helps which collectively we call the poet's handbook. Perhaps because of its unsightliness it has never been studied, but it is obviously no less important for an understanding of the poet's craft than the planks and wedges are for the sculptor's.

Macaulay's essay on The Life and Writings of Addison has been signalized by his most recent biographer as probably “his soundest piece of literary criticism.” Published in July, 1843, when he was at the height of his critical and stylistic powers, the work reveals both the strength and weaknesses of its author. It takes its point of departure as a review of Miss Lucy Aikin's Life of Joseph Addison, published in 1843 by Macaulay's own publishers, Longman and associates. After paying his respects to the lady author, he brushes aside the contributions in her work with severe strictures on its errors. In the prospect that the charm of Addison's letters, many of them printed in the biography for the first time, might brings a demand for a second edition of the Life, he concludes his remarks by saying: “If so, we hope that every paragraph will be revised, and that every date and fact about which there can be the smallest doubt will be carefully verified.” While making numerous corrections in Miss Aikin's work, Macaulay failed to produce a study any less in need of such checking of facts. As will be shown, this need is most notable in his spirited account of one of the salient episodes in Addison's career—the writing and publishing of the Campaign (1704).

The list of eighteenth-century celebrities who were freemasons is an impressive one with the names on it of Chesterfield, Gibbon, Burke, Boswell, Burns, Mozart, Paine, Washington, Franklin, and scores of other major and minor lights in the earlier as well as the later years of the century. It is rather surprising, therefore, in view of what we know of the temperament, ideas, and career of Sir Richard Steele not to find his name there also. But although the question of his membership has often been raised, no special effort has ever been made to answer it with certainty either in the affirmative or the negative. I have gone into the subject not so much with the purpose of proving that he was or was not a freemason as with the hope of opening up approaches leading to new facts about his life. It has been an interesting pursuit which, though not yielding any documentary proof in the way of lodge minutes or membership lists, has led me to the conclusion that in all probability Steele was a freemason. This summary of my study may lead someone to suggest methods of carrying the investigation further. Possibly it may serve also to call attention to a subject which appears to have had but little study, freemasonry as a social force in the England of George the First.

Goethe's Maerchen which concluded his Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderter, published in Schiller's Horen in 1795, was enthusiastically received by all early romanticists. August Wilhelm Schlegel wrote a review of Goethe's fairy tale immediately after its publication, which represented the delight of his whole generation on the eve of the literary movement of romanticism:

… Was aber alles Belehrende und Ergötzende in den vorigen Unterhaltungen dahinten läßt, was ein sanftes Wohlgefallen in das lebhafteste Vergnügen verwandelt, ist das Maerchen, zu dem wir durch treSende Winke über das Wesen der Phantasie vorbereitet werden. Sie gaukelt uns alsdann das lieblichste Märchen vor, das je von ihrem Himmel auf die diirre Erde herabgefallen ist. Alle ihre Jugend und Fröhlichkeit scheint wach geworden zu sein … nie gab es einen liebenswürdigeren Schmerz als den der süßen Lilie; ueberhaupt erregt sie ein Gefühl, als wenn man den Duft der Blume, deren Name sie führt, in freier Luft einatmete … es ist eine Zeichnung, bei der man nicht ohne Ergötzen verweilen kann … so schwebt das ganze Märchen hin, und wer sich nicht an ihm erfreuen wollte, müßte wenigstens nicht mit unbefangnem Geist sich belustigen können oder alle Werke, woran die Einbildungskraft allein teilhat, lästig linden. Alsdann könnte es ihn vielleicht noch unterhalten, nach einem haltbaren Faden der Deutung zu suchen, welches wir noch nicht unternommen haben.

The attack on the accepted chronology of the Waverley Novels began in 1932, the year of the Scott centennial. In a letter to the Edinburgh Scotsman, Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, who had just published a successful biography, launched an assault on what she considered the most vulnerable work in the canon from the point of view of chronology, St. Ronan's Weil. Universally accepted as the eighteenth member of the series, this novel seemed to Dame Una, “after careful consideration and re-reading”, far more likely to be the first in time of composition, and because of its suggestive allusions to the period of Scott's courtship, she expressed the belief that “the major portion” must have been written, not in 1823, but in 1797–98—twenty-five years before it was actually sent to press, and sixteen years before the completion of Waverley (1814), Scott's celebrated first novel.

The action of the central autobiographical passage (lines 267–383) of Epipsychidion runs roughly as follows. The poet, in his search for love, first encountered several “mortal forms”, some of them “fair”, others “wise”, one of them “not true”; then, for some unexplained reason he entered a period of emotional crisis—“stood at bay, wounded and weak and panting” (272-275)—from which he was rescued by one whom he compares to his ideal of love as the Moon to the Sun. At first, we gather, he was enchanted with this moonlike love (276–280) but later began to realize that she was “cold” (281–307) :

And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed;
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead.

The marked loneliness of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's literary career and position must impress even a casual observer. Not that she lacked affinities with the literature of her time. It is easy to point out Romantic elements in her: her cult of the past, particularly the legends and ancient customs of her homeland; her predilection for “die Nacht-seite der Natur”, the weird, the supernatural; her occasional irony; her conviction that “Sehnsucht” is the true source of poetic inspiration. It is easy, on the other hand, to point out in her work the emergent Realism which was to succeed Romanticism (though there is more of it already present in Romanticism than is generally recognized). In conscious opposition to “einer gewissen romantischen Schule”, Annette insisted “dass ich nur im Naturgetreuen, durch Poésie veredelt, etwas leisten kann”, thus defining herself as a Poetic Realist in the very heyday of Young Germany.

The long and curious letter to a certain Dr. Stone, in which Dickens discusses his theories of dream psychology, was not published until 1938. Containing approximately seventeen hundred words, it provides us with an ample platform from which to observe the novelist's fictional use of dreams. Oddly enough, the letter, like the whole subject of Dickens' dream fiction, has not yet attracted students of Victorian fiction.

When Main Street met with a startling good reception in 1920, Lewis was writing for a public that was ready for him. The way had been prepared by Huneker and Mencken and Shaw and George Moore and a self-critical national consciousness induced by idealistic extravagances during a war. Lewis neatly capped a progression. Back of him was Dreiser and back of Dreiser were Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane and the French naturalists. This line of development, of course, is sufficiently well known. It is also well known that American novelists of the 'nineties who were influenced by the French naturalists had a hard time getting started, even though they adopted a decorous treatment of sex and unconventional situations. Crane unsuccessfully sought for three years to find a publisher for Maggie before deciding to publish it himself. Hamlin Garland waged war against sentimentality and sensationalism in order to win a public for his own incisive writings of western life. He even tried to make the controversy one between a democratic and fact-loving West and an aristocratic East tied to traditions and sentiments. In order to attract support, Norris sought to emulate the epic qualities of Zola's writings by having each novel centered about some major enterprise or feature of American life, but his novels in the early 1900's had to make their way against a considerable amount of critical disapproval.

Such appraisals as Samuel C. Chew's, that Hardy knew the Southern Counties as Gilbert White knew Selborne or Arnold Bennett the Five Towns, require no affidavits. But Mrs. Hardy's assertions that he had a knowledge of the city “like a born Londoner”, “as only a young man can get it”, and that there is more autobiography in a hundred lines of his poetry than in all his novels—such statements warrant more study than they have hitherto received.

J'aime beaucoup les premières phrases de chapitre qui vous donnent par leur tenue une pleine satisfaction de vous-même, vous délivrant en une seconde de toute appréhension d'unanimisme, de passéisme, de populisme, et habillent les personnages pour les vraies tragédies du cœur,—la première phrase de ce chapitre, par exemple. La voici, ample et réelle: Nancy Rolla, adorablement coiffée par Rose Desca, ses jambes croisées mettant en valeur de minuscules souliers en serpent de Perugia, un rouge Antoine spécial et des yeux violets composant sur son visage mat une alliance de couleurs qu'aucun pavillon national jamais ne réalisera, dans le fond de sa Bugatti, et tout en contemplant un magnifique ciel signé lui aussi, attendait Maléna que le chauffeur était monté prévenir, et se demandait pourquoi sa jeune amie l'avait convoquée si tôt—-des aiguilles de diamant marquaient dix heures à sa montre de rubis,—dans ce matin de printemps débutant dont les premiers effluves caressaient, sur une gorge ravissante, les revers et les fronces du manteau de marocain noir livré la veille par Chanel … Au moins l'on sait, avec une pareille phrase, où l'on est, dans quelle époque, quelle humeur, et la littérature atteint une vérité encore supérieure aux vérités que lui procurent les écoles ci-dessus nommées : celle du chromo.