Of the origin and composition of the Cantus Beati Godrici and of the life of the author we have fortunately a detailed contemporary account written by one Reginald of Coldingham. As Caedmon's hymn stands at the beginning of Anglo-Saxon poetry, so Godric's “hymns” are usually regarded as standing at the beginning of Middle English poetry. In each case the tradition of poetic gift is the same: the authors were supernaturally inspired in visions. With regard to Godric's song to the Virgin, Reginald tells us “Qualiter beata dei genetrix Maria cum beata Maria Magdalene ei visibiliter apparuit et eum canticum cum cantici ipsius melo edocuit .... Est autem canticum illud idiomatis Anglici ritmiceque compositum.... Precepit quidem, ut, quociens dolori vel tedio vel temptationi succumbere formidaret, hoc se cantico solaretur, et ait: ‘Quando sic me invocabis, meum sencies instanter auxilium.’” This means a rimed vernacular song, a sort of formula, by singing or chanting which Godric would receive immediate help in times of pain, weariness, or temptation. It is short and simple—two four-line stanzas. Zupitza's text reads as follows:

Sainte Marie uirgine,
moder Iesu Cristes Nazarene,
onfo, scild, help þin Godric,
onfang, bring hehlic wiþ þe in godes ric.
Sainte Marie, Cristes bur,
maidenes clenhad, moderes flur,
dilie mine sinne, rixe in min mod,
bring me to winne wiþ self god.

Several years ago, while pursuing certain studies in the Harvard Library, there came into my hands, quite by accident, a certain “square old yellow book” of quarto size bearing on its first title-page the inscription: “Della Piacevole/ Storia/ dello ‘nvitto, e valoroso Principe/ Don Florismondo/ Libro Primo.” The second page gives the fuller title: “Istoria/ dello ‘nvitto, e valoroso Principe/ Don Florismondo/ E d'altri famosi cavallieri erranti di quel tempo; o-/ve si raccontano le loro maravigliose/ imprese, e piacevoli/ amori./ Composta da Anton Vincenzio/ Magnani./ In Trevi.” Between the words “Magnani” and “In Trevi,” below the former and above the latter, is inserted the drawing of a lily; at the top and bottom of the same are the words: “Sicut lilium inter/ spinas”; on the left-hand side: “Manibus da-/te lilia plenis”; on the right-hand side: “Sola/ fides.” On the following page is a “Tavola delle cose notabile non appartenenti alla storia nel presente primo libro di Florismondo contenute.” Among the “cose notabile” figure Alessandro Magno, Antipatro, Balena mostruosa, Cavalleria a chi obblighi, Diaspro e sua virtù, Superbia odiosa, etc., etc. Following the Tavola comes the text of Book I in twenty chapters and 216 pages, to which is appended a “Tavola dei Capi del Primo Libro della Storia di Don Florismondo”; this is followed by the Registro and the colophon. In the center of the latter is the drawing of a lily with the same quotations as on the title-page; at the bottom the author's name has been ingeniously worked into the design. Book II, which remains unfinished, is numbered to 109 pages and is in seven chapters; pages 65 to 80 inclusive have been lost.

Commonsense is a bourgeois virtue, anathema to the temperamental, a red rag to the radical. It disgusts and terrifies the aesthete: it reminds him almost too baldly of the unlegalized reasoning of his middle-class readers. The common-sense reason of the populace, sometimes personified in a critic, hounds the eccentric genius on to wilder vagaries than he would have dared to indulge in unpursued. And, in its turn, abstract reason, fearing an invasion of its prerogatives, occasionally bursts its traditional leash of self-restraint and leaps bare-fanged upon its victims. But be the critic what he may, Time, the most inexorable of critics, judges an author at last by the standards of commonsense. Reason, experience, and intellectual honesty are its component parts: sanity is its ideal.

Although much has been written of the relation of the Latin classics to English literature, comparatively little interest has been taken by scholars in the actual use of Latin as a practical instrument by English writers. During the Middle Ages it was the universal language for religious and learned works; even at a later date Bacon found it difficult to discard Latin for English, having the Essays translated into Latin on the ground that it was the more durable medium for the transmission of his thoughts to posterity.

None of the numerous studies devoted to the Don Juan tradition mention a French play of 1630 which contains certain of its elements and is earlier in date than any other extant French or Italian version, as early, indeed, as the printed Burlador itself. This striking fact deserves, I think, some consideration. Let us see first what is the prevailing opinion with regard to the origin and early history of the Don Juan legend, then what place in the list of versions should be assigned to this French play, and finally what confirmation or modification of the present theory may be deduced from the fact of its existence.

Any attempt to define the romance must necessarily undertake to determine the differentia that separate this species of narrative art from that to which it is most closely related, viz. the epic.

So far as formal or material tests are concerned, it is impossible to discover any infallible criterion by means of which the two species may be distinguished. In form both are metrical narratives and in subject-matter fictions dealing with heroic adventure and achievement. Such are the Iliad, the Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, and the Chanson de Roland as representing the epic and the Fierebras, the metrical Morte d'Arthur, the Roman de Troie, and the Roman de Thèbes as representing the romance. Again, while both may under certain conditions vary from this norm, both will be found, when they do so vary, to pass through much the same range of variation. Both the epic and the romance may, particularly when embodied in works of an alien character, be short. Short, for example, is the epic recital of the Battle of Brunanburh embedded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Short likewise are those passages of romance sometimes incorporated in the epic or drama, as the story of the lotus-eaters in the Odyssey and the stories of “the three caskets” and of “the pound of flesh” in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Similarly both the epic and the romance may, in the later stages of their development, be written in prose instead of verse. This is true of the Younger Edda as exemplifying the epic and the Huon de Bordeaux, the Merlin, and the Recueil des Histoires de Troie as exemplifying the romance. In prose is written likewise the large body of relatively late Greek romance from the Cyropedeia of Xenophon to the Heroicus of the Younger Philostratus.

Wordsworth's relation to Italy has been a subject rather neglected in the annals of English poets who have known and loved “the land of lands,” and have left us memorial records of the beauty of Italy's blue sky, the golden clarity of her air, the soft greenness of her trees, and the fame of her poets and artists. Biographers of Wordsworth have so emphasized his relation to France that the general reader is hardly aware that the poet had crossed the Alps, both in body and in spirit. He belongs with Chaucer, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Milton, Gray, Goldsmith, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Landor, Clough, and the Brownings, all of whom will ever be associated with memories of Italy. An attempt to trace the history of his acquaintance with Italy, may, it is hoped, show that he had for things Italian a really life-long sympathy. Moreover, the study may help to dispel some lingering superstitions about Wordsworth's insularity. Wordsworth was one of the most assiduous travellers of all the English poets except Byron. The difficulty of travel in the early nineteenth century should be remembered in considering the distances he traversed. He knew France, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and various regions of England, including every inch of the Lake Country.

Professor F. M. Padelford, in his recent edition of the poems of Surrey, states that “As to verse forms, Surrey's claims to distinction rest upon his establishment of the Shaksperian sonnet and his introduction of blank verse. After a variety of experiments he settled upon the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg for the sonnet and thus cast the mold for the most popular Elizabethan form. In the thought division of the sonnet he followed no fixed practice.... ”

Biographical sketches give us Thomas Campbell's opinion of Wordsworth in only a general way. Carruthers, for instance, informs us in a magazine article that he cared little for the Lake Poets, but considered Wordsworth greatly superior to the others. Again, some reminiscences contributed by an acquaintance to Beattie's biography of the poet make very nearly the same statement,—namely that Wordsworth was as much above Southey as some other poets above Wordsworth. These reminiscences, however, may be likewise from Carruthers, and there is no evidence as to the date at which Campbell expressed either opinion. In 1842, on the other hand, at a breakfast to which Campbell invited Rogers and Moore among other guests, Wordsworth was said to be a great poet. Who expressed the view and whether Campbell agreed with it is not made clear, but since we have just seen that he approved of Wordsworth, it seems likely that he concurred in the opinion.

In his “Dante as a Religious Teacher” Dr. Edward Moore makes the following significant remarks with regard to Dante's teaching on the subject of Purgatory: “Dante's conception of the nature and purpose of the pains of Purgatory stands in very marked contrast to the popular ideas of the Middle Ages, and not only to the popular ideas, but also to the teaching and practice of the Roman Church both then and in later times… This difference of attitude on the part of Dante applies not only to the general conception of Purgatory itself, but still more strikingly to the practical consequences flowing from it, in teaching respecting indulgences, transference of merits, and means of remission of, or escape from, Purgatorial penalties.” However, the eminent Dantist minimizes the significance of this difference of attitude and applies to it what he said in a preceding page concerning Dante's conception of the relation of Church and State, namely, that “it may be held to be contumacious, but scarcely heretical, to criticize and oppose what has been authoritatively declared to be essential as a practical condition for the exercise of the Church's mission.”

The legend of Don Juan with all its wonderful possibilities could not fail sooner or later to reach Russia on its triumphant march through Europe from its home in Spain. In truth we find that as early as the reign of Peter the Great (the first quarter of the eighteenth century) there was produced a Don-Yan. Only the fifth act of this is preserved, but it seems to be a Russian translation of a Polish version of Villiers' Le Festin de Pierre. For a century more there is no Russian version and it is not until the time of Pushkin that we find a really valuable contribution to the development of the legend.

The Borderers does not, and cannot, rank high among Wordsworth's poems. It is curiously lacking in the glamor, the color, the atmosphere of a remote and picturesque past by which the romantic poets are wont to impart a persuasive verisimilitude to their pictures of the Middle Ages. The characters of the play have slight individuality, and in spite of the calamities that befall them, they evoke no sympathy. Although the poem exhibits intellectual power in the handling of a philosophical problem and a finely whittled precision in the statement of ideas, yet these robust merits are unhappily wedded to the mawkish ineptitude of contemporary literature. The hero, Marmaduke, is the humanitarian freebooter of Schiller's Robbers; however, to do him justice, he does not, like Karl Moor, support young men at college with his tainted money. Herbert and Idonea present a lachrymose picture of virtue in distress; the blind old man is a sentimentalized Oedipus, and his daughter is a Greuze maiden, a girl with a broken pitcher, who has stepped out of her frame to go a-wandering; her angelic perfection only exasperates. Even the “little dog, tied by a woollen cord,” that guides the wandering Herbert, has a sentimental pedigree; he is the faithful animal of current novels—the descendant, for example, of virtuous, old Trusty, the “shag house-dog” of The Man of Feeling.

Philosophical poetry is seldom original; and ever since the assertion by Alexander Dalrymple, in the eighteenth century, that “Sir John Davies' poem on the Immortality of the Soul is chiefly taken from Nemesius,” there has been speculation as to the source of that once popular work. Grosart, in editing Davies' poems, rejected Dalrymple's statement as “absolutely untrue, an utter delusion,” and claimed for his author the merit of “deep and original thought.” But other critics have generally ignored this claim and suggested various sources for the poet's inspiration. Courthope again named Nemesius as the most probable. In a volume devoted exclusively to the study of this poem, Professor E. H. Sneath maintained that Davies was influenced by four thinkers: Aristotle, Cicero, Nemesius and Calvin. A German scholar more recently denies any influence of Nemesius, but thinks Davies derived his ideas from a study of Aristotle's De Anima modified by a reading of religious commentators, notably Thomas Aquinas. The latest and best suggestion, although it has been presented only in a brief and casual manner, is, that Nosce Teipsum is a re-statement of the Neo-Platonic tradition which permeated Christian thought in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The libary of John H. Wrenn, acquired by The University of Texas, contains an editio princeps which would seem to be of some importance to students of the history of French literature. The work in question is listed in the Catalogue of the Wrenn library, as follows:

In Laʒjanion's poem commonly called Brut there is an extraordinary profusion of epic formulas, full of flavor and charm, contributing as much as anything to the marked individuality of the poem. The same or similar phrases are used again and again, as a rule in the same or similar circumstances, or to describe the same person or action. The degree of similarity which makes a phrase a formula is impossible to define, but in the first list in each case given below is meant to be essentially close. A phrase is considered a formula when it occurs three times or more in this poem; two occurrences may be accidental, but three are becoming habitual. Other occurrences could doubtless be found, and also other formulas, but we have meant to exclude mere stock-rimes, and in general phrases so inevitable that they would not have been felt as formulas by Laʒamon or his auditors, however often repeated. Some of our items might be combined, others subdivided, for they often merge with each other; the whole matter is fluid. The most frequent form is generally taken as standard. Hundreds of less frequent or important variants are disregarded. Each formula is nicknamed by a striking word in it.