The “Delamere” manuscript, owned successively by Lord Cholmondeley and Lord Delamere, and now passed into the possession of Mr. Boies Penrose II, has long been known to scholars for its complete text of the Canterbury Tales. It was first brought to notice by Furnivall, who listed, as well as the Canterbury Tales, the other poems, and described the state of the manuscript.

... it has lost 34 leaves in different parts of the volume ... The MS originally began with the Canterbury Tales and was regularly signed from a to z, 23 sheets. The scribe then put three sheets of Gower's Tales before the Canterbury Tales, and numbered the MS all through from 1 to 26, making the original first sheet a, number 3.

Sir Tophas in John Lyly's Endimion merits study for several reasons. He is in some ways an adumbration of Shakespeare's Don Armado. He is, though a minor figure, probably the most amusing of Lyly's dramatis persona, a farced braggart with a curious individuality. Finally, he represents an early and successful attempt to domesticate on the Elizabethan stage not only the miles gloriosus of Latin comedy but also the capitano millantatore of the Italian theater. The notes that follow bring together materials bearing on the Latin, Italian, and English background of Sir Tophas—apart from Chaucer.

After the Redcross Knight has been rescued from Orgoglio by Prince Arthur and from Despeyre by the wise and watchful Una, he is brought by the latter to the House of Holinesse, “Where he is taught repentaunce, and The way to heauenly blesse.” There Mercy, “a matrone graue and hore,” leads him to one of the places of his purification, a “holy Hospitall” in which are employed seven bead-men who spend their days in doing godly works. The first of them, as eldest and best, has charge and government of all the house, giving entertainment and lodging to all who come and go. The second has for his office the giving of food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty. A third has in custody the common wardrobe, from which he dispenses “clothes meet to keepe keene could away,/ And naked nature seemely to aray.” A fourth is appointed for the relieving of prisoners and the redeeming of captives. A fifth cares for the sick and comforts those lying at the point of death. Still a sixth bead-man superintends the burial of the dead, lest the wondrous workmanship of God's own mould might be defouled.

One does not ordinarily associate the Elizabethan broadside with classical antiquity, although the ballads of the late sixteenth century are fairly studded with allusions to ancient literature. It is unlikely that the inquiring, responsive writers of the day should not have exhibited, in some slight way, their knowledge of the older literatures. When Thomas Newton confessed his translation of Seneca to be “an unflidge nestling, unable to fly: an unnatural abortion, and an unperfect Embroyon,” he was indicting much of the more shallow scholarship of his contemporaries. With such thorough-paced savants as Cheke and Ascham, Mulcaster and Camden, we have no business; but it is interesting to note the way in which their more lowly brethren used their learning. When ballad writers try to put their classics to good account in making a broadside doggerel of some ancient myth, the results are at once ludicrous and irritating—ludicrous in their naive distortion of source, irritating in their flagrant violation of whatever decorous beauty the original may have had. I shall attempt to sketch a few of the ways in which the popular writer's classical education influenced the most thoroughly popular of literary productions, the broadside ballad. The querulous will immediately raise the caveat that these ephemeral broadsides can hardly be dignified with the term “literary productions,” but when one considers that Surrey and Dyer, as well as Elderton and Deloney, had their poetic efforts published in this form, the distinction seems factitious.

In a recent issue of the University of Texas Bulletin, D. T. Starnes has contributed a long-needed and most useful survey of early English lexicography and has clearly outlined the many aspects of this complicated subject. It is my purpose here to offer a few notes and comments.

The late “Elizabethan” tragedy Andromana; or, The Merchant's Wife, probably written shortly after 1642 and first published in 1660, furnishes interesting evidence of the assimilation of certain material into the drama just as the Puritans were closing the London theatres. In its sources, in many of its ideas, in the way of presenting its problem, and in its mood, it reflects the influence of John Ford's studies of abnormal psychology, modelled on the case histories presented in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. The play allows a carefully documented study of this literary material and of the deepening interest in its dramatic presentation in that its story can be examined in three successive stages at three widely separated dates:

1. In the generally acknowledged source, the Plangus story in Sidney's Arcadia (1590).

2. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge (ca. 1611).

3. In Andromana (after 1642).

Superficial resemblances between George Herbert's The Temple and John Keble's The Christian Year are too obvious to escape notice. Both emanated from little country parsonages, one at Bemerton, near Salisbury, the other at Hursley, five miles from Winchester, or possibly in part at Fairford in the Oxford region. Neither author intended his work for immediate publication. “Deliver this little book,” said Herbert, “to my dear brother Ferrar, and tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master.” With the same modest self-effacement Keble planned, as one of his friends testified, “to go on improving the series all his life, and leave it to come out, if judged useful, only when he should be fairly out of the way.” Each book, furthermore, was written when clouds had gathered thick about the Church, and possibly the rationalizing temper of the nineteenth century was a more insidious foe than the stiff-necked Puritanism of the seventeenth. Inevitably, these two collections of sacred poems, the finest poetical expression of the Anglican Church, have been linked together.

According to the seventeenth-century interpretation of Ezekiel i and x, the cherubim were beings with four faces, as Milton indicates in describing the “Chariot of Paternal Deity”

This is repeated later, when Michael in his descent to the Garden of Eden is accompanied by

Im 19. Kapitel des 5. Buches seines Simplicissimus berichtet Grimmelshausen ”etwas wenigs von den ungarischen Wiedertäufern und ihrer Art zu leben.“

Hatte man in früheren Jahrzehnten geglaubt, “für dieses Erlebnis [mit den Wiedertäufern] fände sich hochstens Raum im Anschluß an seine Reise von Baden nach Wien, so daß die . . . Lücke [in Grimmelshausens Biographie zwischen 1640-45] vielleicht durch einen Aufenthalt in Ungarn auszufullen wäre,” so steht heute fest, daß von ausgedehnten Reisen abzusehen ist. Nach den neueren Forschungsergebnissen ist Grimmelshausen nicht einmal in Wien, viel weniger je in Ungarn gewesen. Auf Grund des angeblichen Mangels an personlicher Bekanntschaft mit den ungarischen Wiedertäufern soli Grimmelshausen die munsterischen Anabaptisten als Vorbild verwandt haben; oder er soil Gelegenheit gehabt haben, “die Art der Wiedertaufer in den Tälern des Schwarzwaldes”6 kennenzulernen. Außerdem erinnere “die staatliche Regelung der Arbeit und des Familienlebens bei den [ungar.] Wiedertaufern . . . stark an ähnliche Einrichtungen in Thomas Morus' Utopia und Valentin Andreas' Christianopolis. Auch einige Einrichtungen der Civitas Solis des Campanella, z. B. die Sauglingspflege,” fände sich bei Grimmelshausens ungarischen Anabaptisten wieder.

During the colonial period, Spain maintained such close contact with her American possessions that Spanish styles in writing as well as in art and architecture became the standard for the colonists. It is not surprising, then, to find that Gongorism had many ardent supporters across the seas. In Mexico, the poems of Góngora were studied in the same manner as those of the ancient classics, as is attested by Vera Tassis' account concerning Agustín de Salazar y Torres. The youthful Agustín, when less than twelve years old, recited from memory the Soledades and Poliphemo and interpreted some of the most obscure passages at a public examination held by the Jesuit School of Mexico.

During the movement to introduce French classical drama into Spain in the eighteenth century, we find that Racine's authority is cited less than Corneille's in support of theories, but that his tragedies met with greater acceptance. Racine did not loom large as a doctrinaire; his theories were revealed chiefly through the study of his tragedies and in his defenses of these in certain of his prefaces, but they did not force themselves upon the attention of Spanish neo-classicists in the form of connected discourses as did Corneille's.

If the word acrimonious may be applied to anything connected with the gentle personality of William Cowper, it might be to that part of interpretative criticism which has attempted to determine the relationship between his unfortunate obsession of damnation and his religious creed. The Rev. T. S. Grimshawe, F.S.A.—who was so scathingly denounced by Robert Southey, Esq. LL.D.—was of the firm opinion that religion was an adjunct, not a cause, of Cowper's malady: “The impression under which he labored was therefore manifestly not suggested by a theological creed, but was the delusion of a distempered fancy. Every other view is founded on misconception.” Mr. Hugh Fausset, on the other hand, speaks of the “demoralizing unreality” of Cowper's faith. More temperate critics, Goldwin Smith, for example, feel that “religion in this case was not the bane” while David Cecil, in the course of a full chapter on Cowper's madness, has said what perhaps is all that can be said on the subject with certainty: “In vain we scan the imperfect records.”

In the London Chronicle of January 18–20, 1757, the ninth number of the triweekly newspaper, is a paragraph sent by the reader Tragicomicus, who suggested that the journal needed a department about the theater and offered himself as a critic. Accordingly, in the issue of January 20–22 a feature under the title, The Theatre, was inaugurated, and this series of articles about acting and plays on the contemporary stage continued regularly until it ended with No. 37 in the issue of April 16–19. The issue of November 26–29 contained a letter from a reader, Th. C., who expressed disappointment because The Theatre had not been resumed and desired to take the place of its former author. This new writer started another series in the issue of November 29–December 1, but was soon replaced by the original critic, who began the second series of The Theatre in the Chronicle of December 3–6. No. 3 of this group is found in the issue of December 8–10, and then illness of the essayist prevented continuation. He resumed with the first number of a third series of The Theatre in the Chronicle of October 3–5, 1758: No. 6 of it appeared October 19–21. In the paper of November 7–9 another critic, N. S., wrote No. 7 of The Theatre and furnished the criticisms through No. 11 (November 18–21). Still another critic, Atticus, composed the unnumbered part of the feature in the issue of December 2–5, and finally, the original critic made three unnumbered contributions to The Theatre in the Chronicle of December 7–9, 9–12, and 19–21, 1758.

“Tous les Janus de Rome ne suffiraient pas à représenter toutes les oppositions, tous les contrastes—ou, si l'on veut, toutes les synthèses qu'il y a dans Goethe. C'est presque un jeu de les trouver en lui, et ce jeu fait même douter s'il ne s'était pas fait un système de cultiver exactement les contraires”.

In Goethes Naturphilosophie spielt das Polaritätssymbol eine bedeutende Rolle. Ewald A. Boucke, dem wir die grundlichste und umfassendste Darstellung der Bedeutung dieses Symbols auch für Goethes Weltanschauung im weiteren Sinne verdanken, zeigt im einzelnen, dafi die bei Goethe von Anfang an vorhandene vitalistisch-dynamische Grundanschauung teils in selbständig-spontaner Entwicklung, teils infolge “anregender Momente” theoretischer Art, teils infolge naturwissenschaftlicher Studien allmahlich so weit gedieh, daß er in der Einleitung in die Propyläen bereits im Jahre 1797 in der Polaritatsidee ein allgemeines Naturgesetz vermutete. Da Goethe sich das Naturgeschehen als das Resultat eines räumlich und zeitlich verlaufenden Antagonismus von dynamischen Kraften vorstellte, zugleich aber das gesamte Naturgeschehen als einheitlich-organischen Prozeß zu ecfassen strebte, glaubte er die mannigfachen Formen dieses Antagonismus unter dem Polaritatssymbol als einer prägnanten “Formel” zusammenfassen zu konnen. Weiterhin weist Boucke nach, daß Goethe sich nicht damit begnugte, naturwissenschaftliche Phänomene verschiedenster Art mit seiner Polaritätsidee in Verbindung zu bringen, sondern sie auch seit etwa 1800 gleichnisartig auf weite Gebiete des sittlichen und geistigen Lebens in Anwendung brachte.

Among the unsolved problems pertaining to Poe's life and works this article deals with two: (1) Did Poe write the anonymous article on “Our Magazine Literature” published in the New World, March 11, 1843? (2) What are the facts in the background of the bitter enmity between Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark, for twenty-six years editor and principal owner of the most popular purely literary magazine in New York, the Knickerbocker? Clues pointing toward an answer to these two questions are found in the files of the Knickerbocker.

Nothing at first glance seems more incongruous than to link the atheistic Jacobsen with the seeming piety of the Stunden-Buch, itself an outcome of the ineradicable experience of Russia as Rilke saw it. Russia was the motivation for his hitherto most feverish quest for God. It was not the calm acceptance of the “Geschichten vom lieben Gott,” which originated simultaneously with the Buch vom mönchischen Leben, but a frenzied search for a God who was to be adequate for all the future and who could be built anew by all the artists of the ages to come. Rilke's ubiquitous God is more pantheistic than he is evolutionary; being in all things, he cannot be used up by successive generations as an anthropomorphic God is. It was Ellen Key's mistake to interpret Rilke's conception of God as a finality, on the basis of the “Geschichten vom lieben Gott,” which had been dedicated to her, and to imply that he was evolutionary as Jacobsen the evolutionist had interpreted him, at the very time that Rilke's whole intensity was concentrated on his God of the future. The “Geschichten vom lieben Gott” and the “Stunden-Buch” supplement each other and should never have been considered one without the other. Rilke's God of the future does not nullify the God of the past, and there is really no contradiction for Rilke in the idea of an evolutionary God, an eternal God, and one who is to be built by all the generations to come. God is like our ancestors who have gone before us: “Und doch sind sie, diese Langvergangenen, in uns, als Anlage, als Last auf unserem Schicksal, als Blut, das rauscht, und als Gebärde, das aufsteigt aus den Tiefen der Zeit.”

Whether because of a misunderstanding of the concept of evolution or for some other reason, a change has apparently come in the attitude of poets toward nature. Mr. Beach in his recent book laments the decline of faith in the benevolence of nature and presents the general attitude of nineteenth-century poets toward it as a bridge between the age of faith and the age of disbelief.1 But since neither terminal is proved, his fundamental thesis, which he calls a tragedy of belief, is unconvincing. The consequence of the acceptance of such a tragedy was clearly foreseen by G. K. Chesterton, who recently wrote:

When first it was even hinted that the universe may not be a great design, but only a blind and indifferent growth, it ought to have been perceived instantly that this must for ever forbid any poet to retire to the green fields as to his home, or to look at the blue sky for his inspiration. . . . Even the nature-worship which Pagans have felt, even the nature-love which Pantheists have felt, ultimately depends as much on some implied purpose and positive good in things, as does the direct thanksgiving which Christians have felt. . . . Poets, even Pagans, can only directly believe in Nature if they indirectly believe in God; if the second idea should really fade, the first is bound to follow sooner or later; and, merely out of a sad respect for human logic, I wish it had been sooner.