Thomas Middleton, dramatist (1580–1627), was not by any means the literary discoverer of the rogue's fascination. Even the moral Harman had lost himself, at times, in the romantic appeal of the vagrants he pictured, and Greene, after a perfunctory moral preface to his series of Conny-catching Pamphlets (1591–92), had given himself more and more unreservedly to revealing the adventurous life of rogues.

The documentary value of the Mercure galant, the review founded in 1672, which La Bruyère considered to be “directement au-dessous de rien,” has not ceased to increase with the passage of time. Interspersed among frivolous poems, conundrums, descriptions of festivals and of styles, one finds announcements of new books, of military campaigns, and (what interests us here particularly) accounts, often filled with picturesque detail, of the foundation and the sessions of literary bodies organized in the provinces in the seventeenth century, in imitation of the French Academy. Some of these still have vigorous existence. In most instances, the Mercure is the chief source of information on these early years, and, strangely enough, has been neglected by the historians of the provincial academies.

The germ of that which follows came into being many years ago in the days of my youth as a university instructor and assistant professor. It was generated by the then quite outspoken attitude of colleagues in the “exact sciences”; the sciences of which the subject-matter can be exactly weighed and measured and the force of its movements mathematically demonstrated. They assured us that the study of languages and literature had little or nothing scientific about it because: “It had no domain of concrete fact in which to work.” Ergo, the scientific spirit was theirs by a stroke of “efficacious grace” as it were. Ours was at best only a kind of “sufficient grace,” pleasant and even necessary to have, but which could, by no means ensure a reception among the elected.

The conviction of Miss Helen Darbishire, to which she has given expression in the Appendix to The Manuscript of Paradise Lost, Book I, and later in Early Lives of Milton (xvi-xxvii), that the anonymous Life of Milton was the work of John Phillips, the poet's nephew, is so strong that, after having stated it and given her reasons therefore, she uses the suggested authorship as a certainty in the title she gives to the Life and elsewhere throughout the Early Lives of Milton. Her argument is two-fold:

1. In a manuscript of John Phillips's poem, “A Satyr against Hypocrites,” is “a page and a half of Dedication signed by John Phillips. This dedication “written in a formal Italian hand,” she believes to be his. She also believes that certain marginal notes and textual corrections are in his hand. Comparing these specimens of what she believes to be John Phillips's handwriting with the handwriting of the anonymous Life, she “was struck at once by the similarity of the handwriting” in the two manuscripts.

In the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1929) under the Spenser entry, J. C. Smith says: “The notion that E. K. is a mask for Spenser himself has been disproved by Dr. Herford.” Since 1895, when the late Dr. C. H. Herford published his edition of the Shepheardes Calender, a great many critics, as well as Professor Smith, have accepted as final Dr. Herford's conclusion that E.K., the so-called editor, is some one other than Spenser, and is probably Edward Kirke. In this paper I shall try to refute the arguments advanced by Dr. Herford and his followers, and to give supporting evidence for the affirmation in my title.

The manuscript Dedication for the music of Purcell's opera, The Prophetess, has curiously remained unprinted and apparently unobserved by the editors and biographers of Dryden since its first notice in a report of the Historical Manuscript Commission, 1881. Its almost unique interest to any treatment of the poet's literary relations, his canon, and technique is barely indicated by a contemporary notation at the bottom of the second folio: “This Epistle is the handwriting of John Dryden Esq Poet Laureat to Ch: 2, and James 2. it was the first draught of an Epistle Dedicatory to some Opera's of Mr. Purcell, and writ at his Request & for his use.” Of an accompanying manuscript, the original for an unsigned Advertisement to the printed score, it is added that: “The other is a letter from Jacob Tonson the Famous Bookseller in London.” Both pieces were published, though with extensive deletions in the case of the Dedication, in a folio volume of 1691. This work, whatever the authorship of its parts, with its Dedication and Advertisement, assumes therefore a new importance to bibliographers and students of the poet.

Thomas Middleton's Game at Chesse (1624), expressing the national hatred of Spaniard and Jesuit alike, was played nine days straight before houses packed to suffocation for the first consecutive long run in English theatrical history. With England aroused over the religious wars of the Continent and the return of Prince Charles from his unsuccessful visit to Madrid in quest of the Spanish Princess, the play appeared as a satirical allegory in the form of a game of chess, in which the English have the White and the Spaniards and Jesuits the Black men. Black secures the treacherous Fat Bishop and the White King's Pawn. Overthrow of the English Church and State seems imminent. The White Knight and the White Duke visit the Black House (Madrid), where their capture is attempted; but they checkmate the Black King and overthrow the Black forces. Its most recent editor has said that “more is known about A Game at Chesse than about any other pre-Restoration play.” Even so, some promising approaches to a fuller understanding have been overlooked.

One of the most puzzling of literary problems is the fact that John Milton, though unquestionably one of the world's great poets, spent the prime of his life in writing chiefly prose. By 1640 he had written some poems which the world has not willingly let die. But with the exception of a few sonnets (many of which are occasional poetry or mere society verse) he wrote hardly any poetry from 1640 to 1658—that is, roughly, between the ages of thirty and fifty. A careful reading of his History of Britain, however, sheds some light on this situation and reveals an important trait of Milton's which is seldom fully recognized. Coming to the History of Britain with no preconceived notion of Milton's character or purpose, one is increasingly impressed with the idea that for Milton the writing of poetry was unusually difficult, and that his mind tended more naturally to prose criticism. (I hope soon to publish a study of Milton's satire which will support this view.) To say that Milton was no poet or that poetry can be defined only as the product of un trammeled fancy is ridiculous; it is a bent, a matter of degree rather than of kind. But there is some justification for thinking of Milton as a reluctant poet.

A comparative study seems to show that Castiglione's Latin pastoral elegy, Alcon, is more closely related to Milton's Epitaphium Damonis than to Lycidas, which has often been mentioned in connection with the Italian poem. This paper undertakes only to set forth the parallels between Alcon and the Epitaphium, not to reach any absolute conclusions as to the extent of Milton's dependence.

In 1768 the first batch of certain supposed transcripts from ancient original manuscripts was shown to Messrs. Catcott and Barrett of Bristol and offered for publication by Thomas Chatterton, who alleged that he had copied them from original documents in the muniment room of the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe. He declared them to be mostly the compositions of one Thomas Rowley, a secular priest of the fifteenth century. Towards the end of 1768 Chatterton communicated with James Dodsley, the famous London bookseller, in the hope of publishing his manuscripts; but Dodsley, after a little hesitation, refused to take up the matter. Then Chatterton attempted to secure Horace Walpole's patronage, (March 1769), and for a moment succeeded; but Walpole, after a little further reflection realized the imposture. In 1770 after some fruitless correspondence with Walpole, Chatterton set out for London in person, to try his fortune; the end came very soon, August 24.

In seeking for sources of Milton's theology, scholars have gone far afield. While they have argued for Milton's dependence on Ochino, Boehme, Servetus, and even the occult Cabbalists—with little or no external evidence and only vague and general parallelism to corroborate Milton's knowledge and use of these writers—they have disregarded certain systematic theologies, which Milton knew, and which have the same general plan and purpose as the De doctrina Christiana. With one of these treatises, the present investigation is concerned: it will seek to determine the relationship of the De doctrina to Wolleb's Compendium Theologiœ Christianæ with the view of contributing something to an evaluation of Milton's originality as a theologian, and to a knowledge of his habits of borrowing and of the manner in which he worked.

As many have learned to their dismay, the materials upon which Sterne's biography is at present based offer problems of unusual complexity, problems that are due in part to the man's intricate and elusive nature and in part to his daughter and to his swarm of imitators. Sterne, it is evident, was too great a humorist ever to be quite honest either with his own or with future generations. He amused himself in his letters by deceiving his contemporaries and mystifying posterity. For many years now his devices have been familiar matter: he rewrote his letters with his eye upon the press; sometimes he made portions of a letter serve more than one correspondent; and, though lately we have known it, he readdressed a letter much after the manner of Pope in the expectation that the substituted name of Eliza Draper would make a better impression than that of an unidentified countess.

Something of a literary sensation in its day (1737), as well as a mystification, Gaudentio di Lucca has fallen into a state of progressive neglect that threatens to become oblivion. Students of utopian schemes of social organization seem to have forgotten its existence. Recent historians have either ignored it entirely or have accorded it only cursory attention. “Interesting from a certain oddity and air of ‘key’ about it rather than from much merit as literature,” is the verdict of Professor Saintsbury; while Professor Elton concedes that its author had some invention and color, and that his “ ‘news from nowhere, ‘unlike many fictions of the kind, includes adequate police intelligence.”

Of all the romantic poets Keats was the most “literary,” in the sense that almost all his work bears the direct impress of his really wide reading. With such a poet, of course, the process of borrowing, whether conscious or unconscious, means a process of transmutation also; hence the special fascination, and endlessness, of the study of Keats's sources. The following notes do not contribute to the interpretation of the poems, but they may add a little to our knowledge of the materials that were floating in his mind.

If we render to the word philosophy its true meaning of “love of wisdom,” and inject into the word wisdom a few of the qualities suggested by the French word “sagesse,” we shall find Voltaire and Diderot at the very heart of eighteenth-century philosophy. Since they were by no means wholly in agreement, a study of their personal and intellectual reactions should clarify many of the main issues and bring us a step nearer to an understanding of deism and materialism, of decadent classicism and renascent romanticism, and of the nobler eighteenth-century conceptions of reason and nature. This study will be centered around certain comments in Voltaire's hand in the margins of Diderot's works now in the Public Library of Leningrad. Voltaire's reactions, however, are so often essentially personal that it will be necessary to consider the general relations between the two men. Certain letters of Diderot recently published have thrown new light on this rather unusual friendship, in which Voltaire appears the more tolerant and forbearing. An attempt will be made also to relate the essential ideas of the two philosophers to trends in modern thought.

The purpose of this paper is to point out certain elements in the development of the rhetoric of the “classical” pentameter couplet in the middle seventeenth century and to show how the development of this rhetoric is bound up with the establishment of its formal metrical pattern. The rhetoric and metre interacted and helped to shape each other into the integral form which we know in Dryden and Pope.