De nombreuses recherches ont été faites pour retrouver les sources des romans de Voltaire, recherches fructueuses en ce qui concerne Zadig.

L'objet de ce travail n'est nullement de remonter à des sources déjà mentionnées, mais bien d'indiquer des sources possibles, ou plutôt des rapprochements de quelque intérêt, entre Ie Zadig de Voltaire et certains ouvrages qui l'ont précédé. Dans les résumés et paralléles que nous ferons de Zadig et de ces oeuvres, les expressions en italiques seront tirées des auteurs mêmes.

Daphnaida. An Elegie vpon the death of the noble and vertuous Douglas Howard, Daughter and heire of Henry Lord Howard, Viscount Byndon, and wife of Arthure Gorges Esquier. Dedicated to the Right honorable the Lady Helena, Marquesse of Northampton. (Title to the Daphnaida.)

A few years ago, in a series of articles on the theory of the natural goodness of man in the writings of Rousseau, Professor George R. Havens defended the startling thesis that, after all, Jean-Jacques was not the rebel against tradition that the world has long considered him. Professor Havens claims that Rousseau's theory of natural goodness, when properly understood, is not necessarily related to that doctrine of an “effortless morality” which is so often associated with Rousseau. Each of the three different conceptions of la bonté naturelle which he distinguishes in the works of the great Jean-Jacques, (1) primitive goodness, (2) instinctive goodness, and (3) virtue (or, “goodness as harmony with man's higher nature,”) he finds not fundamentally incompatible with the humanistic or traditional attitude toward life and toward morals.

The purchase in 1922 by the late Mr. Henry E. Huntington of the unique manuscript of the Towneley plays has given permanent domicile in the beautiful Huntington Library and Art Gallery at San Marino, California, to an invaluable document that has passed through many hands during the past century and a quarter. In its new home this document has become accessible for fresh study to many American scholars who had never before been privileged to see it.

Balzac has summed up his literary theories in the foreword to the first collected edition of the Comédie humaine, written in July 1842, almost thirteen years after he had begun his gigantic task. Critics are divided in their opinion of this document, some considering it an important manifesto of Balzac's doctrine, others regarding it as simply an afterthought intended to give an appearance of unity to a confused mass of ideas.

In her study of the relationship of the York and Towneley Plays, Dr. Marie C. Lyle directed special attention to a series of discrepancies which she found between the description of the York plays given by Burton in his list in 1415 and the extant text of these plays. Noting the fact that these discrepancies occurred in plays which incorporated material from the Gospel of Nichodemus, she undertook to account for them by supposing that these plays as we have them represent a revision, made subsequent to Burton's list, under the influence of the Middle English metrical Gospel of Nichodemus.

Le Philosophe Sans Le Savoir has always been one of the most discussed of the eighteenth-century plays. Ever since it was presented to the police censors for approval and permission to be played, it has been subjected to diversified criticism. This criticism, however, has failed to solve several questions arising from contradictory statements made at the time of the play's appearance. The original title of the play, the reason for the hesitation between the two titles, and the relation of the title to the principal character are still unsolved questions which hinder the accurate interpretation of Sedaine's work.

Recent research into the sources of the philosophical ideas incorporated by Spenser in the Faerie Queene necessitates the re-raising of an old question, never satisfactorily answered: Did Spenser read Bruno? The external evidence—Bruno's residence in England during the years 1583-5, the London publication of his Italian works, the dedication of his Spaccio and his De gl' Heroici Furori to Sir Philip Sidney—has long rendered the supposition initially attractive. Moreover the community of Neoplatonic elements in Bruno and Spenser, together with a certain affinity between the theme of the cantos of Mutability and Bruno's Spaccio, added color to the hypothesis. But in the absence of more specific documentation the suggestion of Bruno's influence upon Spenser has properly retained the status of a mere possibility. It is the primary purpose of this paper to adduce certain further considerations which in my opinion lend a considerable weight of probability to an affirmative answer to the question. Secondarily, my object is to conduct a pacific polemic against Mr. Greenlaw's thesis that certain portions of the Faerie Queene are animated by a spirit of Lucretian scepticism at odds with that Christianized Neoplatonism which has commonly been recognized as Spenser's sole philosophy. My contention is that to a right reading there exists no such antithesis as that which Mr. Greenlaw finds between the main tenor of Spenser's philosophy and the philosophical implications of the passages in question, and that a means of reconciling their apparent incompatibility and saving Spenser from a charge of inconsistency too gross even for poetic license to condone, is the postulate of a Bruno influence.

The following paper, as its title implies, does no more than make a few observations upon Marlowe's possible life as a Government Agent. In other words, it does not set out to prove any point, for the simple reason that probably we shall never find out anything for certain in the life of Marlowe as a spy, or in the life of any other spy, the doings of such people being, in the nature of the case, “wrop in a mistry.”

Toone who has followed the growth of the scientific movement in England toward the middle of the seventeenth century and the organization of the Royal Society in 1661, Edmund Waller's appearance as a charter member of the Society is no surprise. His association, while still a young man, with Lucius Cary and his philosophical friends at Great Tew placed him early in the main current of liberal thought in religion and politics which, interrupted by the outbreak of civil war, was turned aside into scientific channels. Though less intelligent and courageous than Cary and Edward Hyde, for example, Waller ran a parliamentary course which, with all his vacillation, was roughly parallel to theirs. Expelled from the House of Commons, fined and banished from England, though he was reconciled to Parliament, was made a commissioner of trade and wrote his “Panegyric to my Lord Protector” on Cromwell's death in 1658, he was taken as a sincere enough royalist when he greeted the King with a similar ode on his return two years later. That Waller was a royalist counted in his favor when it came to choosing members of the Society who were not particularly interested in science; for the scientific movement itself, carried on under the Commonwealth in informal meetings largely by mild parliamentarians and a few equally mild royalists who had managed to remain in England, became royalist in its temper so far as the honorary membership was concerned upon its incorporation as the Royal Society. At that time, problems of organization and administration were paramount, while science itself was far from technical, embracing the arts and touching language and literature themselves. The founders of the Society, therefore, solicited members from all “Religions, Countries, and Professions of Life” that they might not fall short of the “largeness of their own declarations.” That Waller was a poet in some favor at court, then, was reason enough in itself for his becoming a member of the Royal Society.

We are accustomed to refer to François Coppée as “le poète des humbles,” but it would be a mistake to suppose that he was the only poet of his time to whom this designation can be applied. Leaving out of account Sainte-Beuve and Hugo, who devoted occasional poems to the poor and the oppressed, Béranger, Maxime Du Camp, Pierre Dupont and numerous other minor poets, we must not overlook the work of another contemporary who began writing before Coppée was born. This poet is Eugène Manuel, whose life and work offer many striking resemblances with those of Coppée. It is the purpose of this study to compare the work of these two men with a view to determining whether or not Coppée was indebted to his less renowned confrere.

Time and the critics have dealt but scurvily with Charlotte Smith, since she has been completely forgotten, being neither as bad as the Minerva Press nor as striking as Ann Radcliffe. The relative position these two novelists held in the years before the publication of Udolpho has been exactly reversed, and this is perhaps an injustice since no little of Ann Radcliffe's success was due to the help and example of her rival.

From the accession of Charles II, English drama manifested a continuous strain of political satire, most of it in favor of the Court party. The Roundheads, the citizens, the Presbyterians, the opposers of the Crown, above all the foremost Liberal of the day, Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the Earl of Shaftesbury, were fair game to be attacked in a prologue, an epilogue, and even at times in a full-length character portrayal or an entire play.

The characteristic drama of the first years of the nineteenth century was, as everyone knows, absurdly romantic and sentimental. Incited by the extravagant Kotzebue and charmed into emulation by the new mélodrame from France, the first specimen of which reached England in 1802, the English playwrights supplied the stage with a variety of plots involving robber barons, victims of the Inquisition, captive maidens and sentimental villains. Frequently they seasoned these delicacies with supernatural horrors and garnished them with vaulted halls, sepulchral chambers, and dungeons.

Biblical epics like Milton's Paradise Lost, Klopstock's Messias, and Bodmer's Noah, must necessarily give prominence to the hostile, destructive spirits of evil, and inasmuch as these poems are all based on Biblical tradition it is natural that there should be a general similarity in the treatment of them. Several European scholars have maintained that Bodmer's infernal characters were influenced solely by Klopstock. The purpose of this paper, however, is to show that Bodmer borrowed repeatedly, at times almost literally, from Milton's descriptions in Paradise Lost. The evidence which I have presented elsewhere as to Bodmer's indebtedness in other respects to Paradise Lost, would seem to make it probable on general grounds that he was also indebted to Milton for his descriptions of the spirits of evil.

Two conflicting theories regarding the composition of Timon of Athens have been expounded for many years. The first, argued notably by Professor Delius, asserts that the Folio text represents Shakespere's partial revision of an uninspired old play; the second, espoused by Mr. Fleay and elaborated in recent years by Dr. E. H. Wright, assumes that the play is an unfinished draft by Shakespere filled out by later literary hack-work. The latter theory at present receives more general favour; nevertheless in 1923 Mr. Dugdale Sykes in Notes and Queries, after calling attention to certain internal relationships in the play, has attempted to revive the earlier explanation.