The Latin Grammar of Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, was a well-known and influential book in late Old English times; the number of extant manuscripts in which it appears in whole or in part and the range of dates represented by them indicate the extent of its currency then.Less familiar to most students today, perhaps, than his homilies and other scientific and pedagogical treatises, it is still a significant part of the corpus of Ælfric's work. Investigation of its pages extends our knowledge of methods of teaching at that time and of the particular needs of English students not yet ready for the more extensive and detailed Latin grammars of Priscian and Donatus, the standard texts of the Middle Ages, parts of which are adapted and translated in the Grammar for use in English schools. More fully and in a particular way the Grammar reveals Ælfric himself at work: his aims and methods in the translation and adaptation of original Latin works for use in England; his mastery of Latin and of English; his great skill in adapting the native English tongue to new uses. There has hitherto been no adequate account of Ælfric's procedure, with the result that his aim and method in this work have been imperfectly comprehended, and critics have tended to bestow praise and blame somewhat at random. The present study attempts to present such an account, through analysis and example, and to estimate the subsequent importance of his grammatical terminology as a contribution to the development of the English vocabulary.

Lydgate's Siege of Thebes is presented within the framing fiction of a supplementary Canterbury Tale, and, as one of the pilgrims, Lydgate tells the story of Statius' Thebaid as it had been reshaped by the romancers of the Middle Ages. Following the prologue (1-176),which is eminent as an imitation of Chaucer, Part I (177-1046) of the tale begins with the foundation of Thebes by King Amphioun and ends with the death of Oedipus and the abuse of his body by his sons, Ethiocles and Polymetus; Part II (1047-2552) relates the joint succession of the sons to the Theban throne and their contentions for supremacy; Part III (2553-4716) deals with the final destruction of Thebes as a result of their fratricidal struggles. But the poem is so long, it comprehends so many episodes, and its organization—alternating passages of narrative with passages of moralizing—is such that one critic described it as a rambling poem “with frequent moral digressions in the proper medieval manner,” in which “incidents follow one another with bewildering inconsequence,” while another asserted, to the same effect, that Lydgate in this poem “could no more deny himself a digression than could Browning.”

When An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland was written in 1650, its readers were puzzled by the praise given to King Charles I. And readers ever since have been puzzled by Marvell's ability to deal with the burning issues of the Civil War without making his political position clear. The best-known explanation is that offered by H. M. Margoliouth:

When Dryden wrote that love and valor ought to be the subjects of a heroic play, he did not define his conception of love. He, and presumably his readers, knew what he meant. During the past seventy-five years, however, the nature of his heroic love has severely exercised those who have tried to describe Restoration heroic drama. All have agreed that this love is of primary importance, but no one has offered a consistent or completely satisfactory analysis of it. The commonest view is that it reflects the sentimental, casuistical, metaphysical Platonic cultism—especially the doctrine of the uplifting power of love—fashionable in seventeenth-century heroic romances and Caroline drama. In the belief that this theory has been overemphasized and that it is not an adequate explanation of Dryden's heroic love, I propose to attack the problem from a different point of view in the hope of finding a clear and consistent pattern in his treatment of love.

Dr. Johnson's twenty-five-year friendship with the historian, antiquary, and clubman, Thomas Birch (1705-66), is significant for several reasons. First, it covers Johnson's earliest and most obscure years in London; second, it shows him in a curious association with a man of nearly the same age whose contemporary eminence and excellent social and intellectual connections contrasted remarkably with his own during the years before the Dictionary; and third, it gave rise to a large number of little-known Johnsonian passages in Birch's various correspondences. The Birch papers in the British Museum reveal their compiler as, among many other things, a voluminous if unsystematic and usually noncommittal chronicler of Johnson's career between 1738 and 1765. As a Whig with predominant Whig connections, Birch sometimes dealt harshly with Johnson. As a weathervane of taste, he was as often content to report current gossip or the progress of Johnson's projects as he learned of them through the newspapers, or in conversation with other friends or with Johnson himself. Once, by request, he wrote a short but extremely laudatory letter concerning Johnson's Dictionary. But the few well-known documents on the Birch-Johnson friendship suggest that relations were somehow disordered. Johnson's ten known letters to Birch are peremptory, cold, and without friendly expressions; his review of Birch's History of the Royal Society, published in 1756, was distinctly unfavorable; and his rumored final verdict on Birch (“a dull writer” [Boswell, i, 159]) is perhaps more widely known than Birch's services to English historiography. Johnson was content to remember Birch for a single talent: “he had more anecdotes than any man”—they flowed “like the river Thames” (Boswell, v, 255). Sir John Hawkins quoted Johnson on Birch, and the characterization, adapted by Boswell, has been endlessly repeated at Birch's expense: “Tom is a lively rogue; he remembers a great deal, and can tell many pleasant stories; but a pen is to Tom a torpedo, the touch of it benumbs his hand and his brain: Tom can talk; but he is no writer.”

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell assaults what Blake termed a “cloven fiction” between empirical and a priori procedure in argument. In content, the Marriage compounds ethical and theological “contraries”; in form it mocks the categorical techniques that seek to make the contraries appear as “negations.” The unity of the Marriage is in itself dialectical, and cannot be grasped except by the mind in motion, moving between the Blakean contraries of discursive irony and mythical visualization.

The clarification of Goethe's concept of mathematics is important not only for an exact delineation of the extent and limits of his thought, but also in defining the relation between the humanities and the sciences. Again and again his spirit is invoked by humanists and scientists alike to define their relative positions. When the peculiar characteristics of the humanities and the sciences are brought into sharp focus, mathematics is usually the separating ingredient, and frequent reference is made to Goethe's supposedly negative attitude toward this science with a resulting unjust classification of his science as unscientific. Such arguments usually terminate upon application of two ancient remedies for deadlocked thought, the sets of supposedly logical alternatives-quality versus quantity, intuition (Anschauung) versus logic. Based on these criteria, Goethe's thought is securely if unilaterally embedded in the realms of quality and intuition, but at all costs immunized against the sinister demons of quantity and logic, which to some humanists are irritating symbols of aridity and vacuity, or even eternal foes of poetry, art, and life.

It has been generally recognized in critical works which treat Die Elixiere des Teufels that the central event in the story is the revelation of the facts contained in the cryptic document written by Francesko, “der alte Maler.”In this episode, all but a few of the innumerable mysteries which have existed previously in the story are dispelled by this highly concentrated history of Medardus' ancestry. Thus a focal point appears here on which much of the whole novel converges. Hoffmann himself (p. 274) uses this image to describe the role that the manuscript plays in the novel.

Ernst R. Curtius (1886-1956) was the first modern scholar who discussed the traditional rhetorics of the pastoral landscape with both critical insight and an astonishing historical erudition. In Chapter x (pp. 191-209) of his Europäische Liter atur und lateinisches Mittelaller (1st ed. Bern, 1949) Curtius suggests an instructive list of topographical and botanical “stage props” (“inszenierende Staffage”) traditionally employed to describe the happy rural environment of amorous shepherds and pastoral lovers. It is, of course, hardly surprising that in the intricate process of literary transmission, as outlined by Curtius, Vergil fulfills a central task: by his sophisticated use of elements from both Homer and Theocritus, Vergil unfolds, in his Bucolics as well as in the Georgies, the characteristic “pleasant landscape” (“locus amoenus”) which is later reverently systematized in handbooks of medieval rhetoric, eruditely echoed in the Renaissance, and elegantly alluded to in classicist poetry.

In 1850, mindful of Victor Cousin's second call for a re-edition of the Pensées? Alfred de Vigny made the following comment in his Journal:

Oscar Triggs feels that Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself” is Leaves of Grass in epitome. No doubt this poem illustrates Whitman's theme and purpose—and methods of attaining them—as well as any other poem he wrote. Perhaps the poem's synoptic quality is responsible for much critical work that attempts to explain the unity of the poem. But too often the critic's analysis superimposes a unity that is not explicitly sUpported by the poem or by any of Whitman's prose explanations of it. My purpose is first to demonstrate from Whitman's notations that his “indirect expression,” for psychological and democratic reasons, calls for reciprocity between the poet and the reader in order to achieve Whitman's desired result, and second to analyze “Song of Myself” in the light of the organic and COsmic unity that a reader's reciprocity gives to the poem.

An attempt to explain the almost complete n neglect of Portuguese symbolism by Spanish literary circles for twelve years after its establishment leads one to an interesting negative situation in Hispanic literature at the turn of the century. The founder of symbolism in Portugal, Eugenio de Castro, who wrote his most original poetry and achieved his greatest acclaim from 1890 to 1900, was known in Latin America in 1896 and proclaimed there as a spiritual brother of the modernista poets. The same date marked the tentative beginning of Modernismo in Spain, and yet it was not until 1902, and even then under the guidance of Latin-American writers, that Spanish authors became aware of the movement of poetic renovation which had been at their doorstep unattended for more than a decade. The time when Castro's work was introduced, the means of presentation, and the results it obtained are all commentaries on the delayed and curious arrival of Modernismo in Spain.

In a letter to a friend early in his brief writing career, Stephen Crane wrote, “I always want to be unmistakable”; and, at a later date, to another friend he explained retrospectively that “My chieftest [sic] desire was to write plainly and unmistakably, so that all men (and some women) might read and understand.”There is an irony in the critical fate that has befallen Crane's writings that perhaps that master ironist himself might have appreciated. For though the best criticism of his own time reveals a careful reading and understanding of his works, most recent criticism has seen Crane through a glass darkly.

Jean Giraudoux, if we are to believe certain of his friends, liked to claim he had never read Les fleurs du mal. Was this because of his scorn for a poet who had a conception of literary art too clearly opposed to that which Giraudoux proclaimed in his Prière sur la Tour Eiffel? The very fact that he expressed so strong a revulsion suggests rather that he had contemplated a sufficient number of the fleurs maladives to realize that Baudelaire's immodest genius offered only too many parallels to what his own was in danger of becoming. However unwonted such a comparison may at first appear, Giraudoux's early struggles with his conscience indicate a preoccupation with introspection strikingly similar to that of Baudelaire. Indeed we find in any careful examination of Baudelaire's works and character a young man who is hypersensitive about his uniqueness, a young man who so delights in finding himself different from other people that he does everything possible to further develop his narcissistic tendencies.

“Some one had blundered.” The vision of Lily Briscoe reveals that it was Mrs. Ramsay.