In a recent article Professor J. R. Hulbert has disputed the traditional assignment of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and of the alliterative romances generally, to the West Midland dialect of Middle English. He contends that the lack of sufficient criteria for distinguishing West Midland from East Midland, and the lack of documents from the Northwest Midland area, make it impossible to determine whether Gawain was composed in the East or in the West; we are justified, he says, only in saying that it is a North Midland text. It is the purpose of the present article to refute Professor Hulbert's argument in so far as it concerns Gawain, this and the other poems of the same manuscript being the only alliterative works he discusses in detail, and to show that there is quite sufficient evidence to permit us to assign it to the Northwest rather than to the Northeast Midland dialect.

Many a man of letters who has been accounted great in his own time and whose work has had no little influence on the world's literature has ceased to be a person of any interest in later years, and his works are no longer read. Few such men have left so little record of themselves, or have inspired in these latter days of research so little interest, so little desire to make inquiry into their lives and personalities as has Nicholas Grimald. Nevertheless, John Bale, the first writer of English literary history, tells how renowned he was in that day, and calls him the foremost alumnus of Cambridge and not the least glory of his time. Indeed, he might well be regarded as such. Next to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, he was the principal contributor to the first anthology of English poetry, then known as Songes and Sonnettes, now known as Tottel's Miscellany, a book which enjoyed astonishing popularity. A second edition of it appeared within a month of the first, and eight editions appeared within twenty years. His name is here joined to those of two men who are still remembered. Another reason for the interest of posterity is that two of Grimald's poems in this volume, “The Death of Zoroas,” and “Marcus Tullius Ciceroes Death,” were the first compositions in blank verse to be published in the English language. The credit, to be sure, is commonly given to Surrey for having written the first blank verse, for although the translation in that poetic form which he made of the second and the fourth book of the Aeneid was published June 21, 1557, a little over two weeks later than Songes and Sonnettes, it must have been written at least ten years before, as Surrey died in 1547. Nevertheless, it is not improbable that Grimald's compositions in blank verse were done even before Surrey's, for in 1547 he was appointed lecturer in rhetoric at Christ Church, Oxford. Warton suggests that Grimald's verses were “prolusions or illustrative practical specimens for our author's course of lectures in rhetoric.” But he had previously been engaged in literary work for some years. His poetic drama, Christus Redivivus, which was published in 1543, was written about 1539, when, as he says in its dedicatory epistle, he was about twenty. In 1548, he published his Archipropheta, which shows him to be a master of a variety of verse forms.

The English newsbooks of the Civil War and the Restoration have long been known to be historically interesting and valuable. That they have also some slight literary interest has not been so generally recognized. Yet a quarter of a century before the first regular “journal of books” appeared in England, the noticing of books was an established practice in the English newspaper; and the notices themselves, indeed, make a certain contribution to literary history.

The attempt to contribute, however slightly, to the vast volume of writings on Rousseau is a venture which, all will agree, should be undertaken with diffidence. The character, achievements, and influence of the Great Romanticist have been studied, discussed and debated by so many eminent scholars, that, unless one has something new to offer, the careful critic will consider any attempt to reopen the complex subject as tedious as it is presumptuous. In the present instance, however, the writer feels that he has been fortunate enough to discover some material which, though of modest scope, will nevertheless prove of real interest to lovers of Rousseauiana.

The old explanation of the modern English accentuation of Old French loanwords (via Anglo-French) as due to the analogy of Germanic stress has been regarded by several investigators with suspicion. It is too summary. Jespersen is not satisfied with it because of the existence of many end-stressed words in English, such as begin, forget, and proposes several explanations of his own. Van Draat takes issue with some of these, but also regards the old explanation as incomplete. Tamson attempts to deduce some regularity from occurrences of varying accentuations in late Middle English poetry.

Few problems of literary history have tempted the scrutiny of historians more than the earliest influence of Shakespeare in seventeenth century France. In the works of two or three French playwrights of the period, they have caught a few dubious traces of possible inspiration from the great English dramatist; but the similitudes they cite are so vague and general that recent criticism has denied them any significance. Cyrano de Bergerac's Agrippine, for example, contains some philosophical reflexions that are reminiscent of Hamlet and of the Merchant of Venice. Recently, however, M. Jusserand has proved that the similarity between a few expressions in these plays is due to mere verbal coincidence, derived from their common ultimate source, Seneca. On the other hand, as against M. Jusserand's views, the probability of an influence of Shakespeare upon de Schélandre's Tyr et Sidon (1628) has been defended by M. Hankiss. (Mod. Lang. Notes XXXVI, p. 464.)

To the world of letters the legend of Hiawatha connotes Longfellow, without whose popular treatment it would be as little known as the adventures of Coyote or Raven, or a dozen other culture heroes of the Red Men. Since Longfellow's poem is the only form in which American Indian legend has reached the great mass of civilized men, the question of its authenticity must present itself to the general reader of American literature no less than to the student of literary relations. Do sixty years of active work on the part of ethnologists and folk-lorists show that Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha is truly Indian in theme, atmosphere, and spirit? To essay an answer to this question is the purpose of the present study.

Cet article est la continuation du travail publié ici-même sur “L'Histoire de l'Impression et de la Publication du Discours sur l'Inégalité, de J.-J. Rousseau,” par Albert Schinz.

Characteristic of the Italian Language is the modern use of the conditional perfect instead of the present. This interchange of tenses is not permitted by either of her two living sister languages, French and Spanish. Nor does English admit such constructions: we are not allowed to say, for example, “He said he should have done it tomorrow,” but must say, “He said he would do it tomorrow.” In Italian on the other hand, there are numerous examples of this construction as the following quotations will illustrate:

As the best method of reading Balzac is to follow, through the course of several novels, the history of some one character, so possibly there is no better way of approaching the modern French novel as a whole than by a study of the Catholic priest as there portrayed. He has appealed to practically every writer of first rank, and, moreover, purely as a character of fiction, quite aside from any significance that he may possess as indicating the faith of the author, or as exhibiting the Church and the work of her clergy. It is, accordingly, exclusively from the point of view of his rôle in literature that he is here treated. I shall take up the main themes in the ecclesiastical novel in an endeavor to indicate their relationship and to discover their general trend—an aspect of the subject that is neglected by Paul Franche in his Le Prêtre dans le roman français. I shall also continue the examination by including novels published since 1902, the date of Franche's study.

Elsewhere I have written of the actors who travelled “softly on the hoof” through the length and breadth of Shakspere's England, and I propose here to deal with their successors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They make part—perhaps a more important part than is generally understood—of the history of the drama and theatre in a period that is full of life and interest even though the greater glory had departed. To the student of Elizabethan times the ways and means of these “weather-beaten weary travellers” are significant because the strollers were, and are, the most conservative of all players. They continued the ancient and honorable traditions of the Elizabethans long after the patent theatres, the new scenes out of France, the new comedy of manners, and, finally, the new sentimentalism, had crowded the very memory of the days of the Globe and the Blackfriars and stamped the customs and devices of those great times as subjects for mockery. But the later strollers are worthy of study in and for themselves, or at least in the light of their practical contribution to the stage history of their time. To be sure, their predecessors at Stratford-on-Avon who gave Shakspere his first glimpse of the puppets dallying, came at a more opportune moment; but those who followed made the most of their opportunities. Bright-plumed “birds of passage” were they, and wheresoever they passed most men were glad of their coming. They left long trails of debt behind them, and played more than one rather scurvy trick upon their hosts, but they brought the old plays and the new away from the cramped quarters of London's theatrical monopoly into the furthest corner of the provinces. They kept England merry England still, besides crossing the ocean and establishing the theatre in the colonies—including America.

“There's printing a book of ‘Selections from R. B.‘ (Sculptor and poet) which is to popularize my old things; …” Thus wrote Robert Browning to his friend, W. W. Story, in the spring of 1862, humorously alluding to the joyous companionship in Story's studio two years earlier, when he had been spending as much as three hours daily, thumping the wet clay. Nothing but clay did he care for, “poor lost soul,”—so Mrs. Browning had at that time declared, for she grudged a little the time taken from his poetry. And this enthusiasm had been a matter of more than one winter. Very vivid is the memory of it, therefore, in 1862. “I try and see old friends,” the poet writes, in the letter already quoted, “when my true treat would be an evening over the piles of unread books, or a morning with the old coat and wet clay. Oh, the days!” Robert Browning, sculptor and poet; here is a key to unlock,—not, indeed, the heart, but at least some secrets of the brain and hand of the robust craftsman.

Carlyle tells us in his Reminiscences that, when Wat Tyler made its unlucky appearance in 1817, he with other radicals “cackled and triumphed” over Southey “as over a slashed and well-slain foe to us and mankind.” A few years later, however, he read Joan of Arc, Thalaba, and The Curse of Kehama with kindlier feeling, thought them “full of soft pity, like the wailings of a mother, yet with a clang of chivalrous valor finely audible too.” From that time on he watched for Southey's writings, especially his Quarterly articles, as for things of value; “in spite of my Radicalism, I found very much in these Toryisms which was greatly according to my heart; things rare and worthy, at once pious and true, which were always welcome to me.”

In 1799, at the very threshold of his literary career, Walter Scott published a translation of Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, containing the single short scene devoted to the judges of the Vehmgericht, who are discovered in “a narrow vault dimly illuminated, … all muffled in black cloaks.” This translation had no second edition, nor is there evidence that it was known in our southern states.

If It may be said of Emerson's Writings that

In his every syllable
Lurketh Nature veritable,

Thoreau should be given much, perhaps most, of the credit. For Emerson owed as much to Thoreau in respect to the material world as Thoreau owed to him in respect to the world of spirit. Remove the details of material nature from Emerson's essays, and you will rob them of much of their charm and power, since the author would be in perpetual danger of soaring aloft, balloon-fashion, among his “Circles” in worlds unrealised. Remove them from his Poems, where the sensuous, the concrete, is vitally necessary, and the poetry itself is gone with them. By a most happy conjunction of events, the very man who perhaps of all his countrymen had most to give Emerson, was his fellow-townsman, his friend, his companion in countless walks to the pine-groves, a valued assistant in editing the Dial, the guardian of his hearth while he sojourned abroad, and a sympathetic interpreter and critic of his inner life. Their friendship was not, of course, a free union of personalities, though we must make allowance for the stiffnesses of the Puritan tradition and bear in mind that, if Emerson would as soon think of embracing a tree as putting his arm around Henry, the forbidding Henry could be a charming Piper of Hamelin to the Emerson children, could sing his favorite “Tom Bowling” under the shelter of a rock during a shower in the presence of R. W. E. himself, and, when the mood was right, could dance with something like abandon.