In 1896 Enrico Thovez, in an essay on L'arte del comporre di Gabriele d'Annunzio, made an open accusation of plagiarism, and supported it by pointing out numerous parallels between d'Annunzio's work and passages from Flaubert, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Verlaine, Shelley, and Whitman. Croce undertook d'Annunzio's defense, and Thovez, in a reply to Croce, became so satirical as to remark: “Mi vien da pensare al propositio di un amico mio, il quale afferma burlescamente di voler dare un' edizione delle opere del d'Annunzio ‘col testo a fronte’.” In the same essay he adds Tommasseo and Maupassant to the list of creditors.

One would have difficulty in finding a stranger case of the growth and decline of a vogue than that of Jean-Baptiste Rousseau as a lyric poet. Before a single verse of his poems had been published he was being referred to as “Rousseau, fameux poète.” When the first edition of his poems appeared, in 1712, he was in disgrace, in exile, but the poems were avidly read and soon he was being spoken of this way: “le seul poète qui nous reste dans notre siècle” and “il faut avouer que nous n'avons de véritable poète que Rousseau.” And yet the vogue of the so-called “grand lyrique français” has so declined that when the Tuffrau revision of the Lanson manual of French literature appeared (1931), with the announced intention of treating only important figures (“seuls les écrivains de premier plan ont trouvé place dans le manuel”), the hundred or more authors treated did not include Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. He suffered the indignity of not being even mentioned, not receiving a passing reference, not even a footnote.

“For the study of no English poet have we ampler material than for the life and art of John Keats. … The material for the study of Keats's biography is no less complete.” Notwithstanding this wealth of material, until quite recently at least, much confusion has existed with respect to the date of his birth, and the exact time of his death yet remains uncertain. Accuracy in these respects is desirable, not only for its own sake, but especially in fixing the date for memorials, anniversaries, and similar observances. It is confusing to find such writers as Lord Houghton, Sir Sidney Colvin, and Amy Lowell either uncertain or in disagreement upon the subject. A summary of the facts giving rise to these doubts, and an examination of the evidence from the standpoint of its probative value should be of interest to students of the life and art of Keats, and may possibly be useful in reaching a greater degree of certainty with respect to these dates.

A careful student of the Romantic poets will soon or late encounter the name of Thomas Taylor, whose chief claim to importance is that he was an extraordinarily diligent scholar and the first translator into English of all Plato's works. An inquirer will find brief and not always accurate accounts of this man in several encyclopedias; he will discover that certain nineteenth-century antiquarians wrote a number of sketches of Taylor in which fact is liberally sprinkled with fiction; and finally, he will come upon half a dozen more recent articles of a scholarly nature, including an almost complete bibliography of Taylor's books, three papers suggesting rather doubtful parallels between some passages of these and certain poems of Blake and Wordsworth, one which reprints from manuscript sources a few of Taylor's own poems, and another which endeavors unsuccessfully to demonstrate an acquaintance between Taylor and Shelley. Taylor's various translations and original works have also been cited occasionally in studies such as Professor Lowes's The Road to Xanadu. But with all this array of scholarship, imposing when it is called forth by a man so obscure as Thomas Taylor, there is still no comprehensive or accurate account of the man himself and his work. He is important, however, as the most energetic exponent of Platonism in England between the Cambridge Platonists and Benjamin Jowett, this at a time when Platonism once more became significant in literature after the eighteenth-century dismissal of Plato. Yet before we have a study of Taylor's Platonism in its relation to that of the Romantic poets, we should have a reasonably trustworthy biography of the man. For although it will not be found that Thomas Taylor was a person of hitherto unrecognized and startling importance for the student of literature, it is certain that he was known to such people as James Boswell, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Wollstonecraft, probably William Blake, and quite possibly Shelley; that his books were read by Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Emerson in America; and that he was a conspicuous figure in the intellectual world of England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since the available accounts of him are incomplete and contradictory, he deserves the services of a biographer who will simply collect and set forth the facts.

Wie Stehr aus dem schlesischen Heimatdichter ein Künder der deutschen Seele und einer der grössten deutschen Erzähler der Gegenwart geworden ist, haben gerade in den letzten fünf Jahren die Monographien von Werner Milch, Hermann Boeschenstein und Emil Freitag, sowie die zusammenfassenden Aufsätze von Heinz Kindermann R. Petsch und E. Alker zu zeigen versucht. Das Geheimnis des Zaubers, den Stehr auf den feinfühligen Leser ausübt, liegt in der Meisterschaft, mit der er gelernt hat, eine Welt zartester und tiefster Seelenregungen einzubetten in eine äussere erdenhafte Wirklichkeit, die unsere Sinne unmittelbar packt. In dieser Stehrschen Welt werden wir hellsichtiger und hellhöriger. Hinter dem Schleier der physischen Wirklichkeit tritt das Seelenhafte und Uebersinnliche greifbar an uns heran. In den verschiedenen Schaffensperioden des Dichters treten die einzelnen Sinne nicht immer mit gleicher Stärke hervor. Es ist von besonderem Reiz, nachzuerleben, wie eben zu einer Zeit, in der sich bei Stehr ein Gehörleiden entwickelt, die Tonwelt in seinen Werken lebendiger wird und der Gehörsinn zuweilen geradezu eine zentrale Stelle unter den Sinnen einnimmt. Wir denken an die Zeit von 1911 bis 1931, in der seine besten Werke, die Märchen und Romane mit legendenhaftem Einschlag, erschienen sind. Es ist die Zeit von Stehrs religiösem Finden, in der er der alten deutschen Mystik so nahe kommt, die romantische, dionysische Epoche, im Gegensatz zu Stehrs Altersperiode, die wieder mehr apollinisch eingestellt ist.

The following pages communicate certain features of the Westmorland Parliamentary campaign of 1818; the text of two articles by William Wordsworth apparently not hitherto reprinted; a number of facts regarding the publication of Wordsworth's Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland; the readings of a broadside printing of a portion of Two Addresses; the variants of the several texts of Two Addresses; the text of a pamphlet by Thomas De Quincey never reprinted, of which but one extant copy has been reported hitherto; the text of eight letters, of which only a few slight extracts have been published, addressed by De Quincey to Wordsworth, dealing with the campaign, revealing his labors on the pamphlet and other political pieces, and applying for the editorship of the Westmorland Gazette; and materials exhibiting more definitely the relations between De Quincey and Wordsworth in the period.

Balzac is said to have written in all some forty works before the Human Comedy, but many were in collaboration with other writers. We have now available, among others, Sténie, recently edited by A. Prioult, and ten novels collected under the title Œuvres de jeunesse. Monsieur Pierre Barrière claims that “il n'est presque rien dans la Comédie Humaine qui ne soit en germe dans les Romans de Jeunesse.” While this great admirer of Balzac is inclined to let his enthusiasm color his judgments, he has put forth strong arguments to prove his point. And yet he has failed to include in his evidence a study of the organization and composition of these early novels which would have strengthened his claims. The plots are often ridiculously fantastic, a characteristic, let it be said, that does not entirely disappear in La Comédie Humaine. They exist primarily as devices whereby Balzac makes the characters act and react on each other, and thus they bring out those psychological aspects that he is at the moment interested in revealing. The absurdity of the plot has little to do with the excellence of the novel. The most fantastic tale of all is probably La Dernière fée (1823) and yet this is perhaps the best of these early works.

Edmund Burke's youthful essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, first published in 1757, sets forth a theory that the impassioned language of poetry and oratory may rouse emotion without the entry of any clear images into the mind. This proposal—audacious if read by the light of the Augustan sunset, but prophetic of romanticism—has received occasional notice from historians of criticism because it anticipates Lessing's brilliant attack upon Wortmalerei in Laokoon (1766). But the way in which Burke seems to have invented his theory from scraps of Locke and Berkeley, left on the battlefield where the contest over abstract ideas had once been waged, has gone apparently unnoticed.

In 1862, eight years after the death of John Wilson, appeared his biography written by his daughter, Mrs. Mary Gordon. George Gleig in a critique of this volume in the Quarterly Review of January, 1863, unsympathetically declares that Mrs. Gordon's “story of his first love, and of its influence upon his character and prospects, is mere silliness.” Later he declares also that the disproportionate space devoted to this romantic story “is a mistake into which only a woman could fall.” There is certainly a difference, sentimentally, between reading the faded manuscript letters now in the National Library of Scotland and reading these same letters in the cold print of a book; but Mrs. Gordon's inclusion of them is not “mere silliness.” Perhaps she would have omitted them had she realized how vividly they illustrate not only her father's emotional nature, but also his inherent weakness.

Nous ne nous occuperons, dans cet article, que des groupes intervocaliques de deux consonnes (exemple: aspect).

La structure syllabique n'est pas quelque chose d'absolument fixe en franjais, dit M. Gougenheim en se plaant du point de vue phonologique. Il va de soi que ce manque de fixit s'attribue aussi bien la coupe syllabique. On ne s'tonnera done pas de ce que les traits qui ont affaire avec la description phontique du franais vitent parfois ce sujet et que ceux qui en parlent soient rarement d'accord. Nous n'avons pas la prtention de trancher dfinitivement la question mais simplement d'tablir les tendances les plus apparentes de coupe syllabique en franais moderne. Dans ce but, nous avons relev des exemples de tous les groupes intervocaliques de deux consonnes qui peuvent se trouver dans la langue franjaise et nous les avons assembls dans le tableau I qui suit.

During his Dresden days Tieck had reached the height of his fame. Not only was he the acknowledged head of the German Romantic movement but he was sought far and wide on account of his very talented dramatic readings. Foreign writers—such as H. C. Robinson, Coleridge, and Carlyle from England; Ticknor, Irving, and Cooper from America; Ampère, Marmier, and Montalembert from France—came to visit and pay homage to the famous German poet. Tieck also maintained cordial relations with Scandinavians, particularly with the Swedish poet Bernhard von Beskow, the Swedish diplomat Brinkman, and the Danish poet Oehlenschläger. It is not surprising then that such an attractive personality should receive his share of respect and attention from Germany's most important neighbor to the East, namely, Russia.

So much has been said, and on the whole so effectively, concerning Browning's use in Aristophanes' Apology of ancient authors and modern critics that a statement of the author's own contribution to the poem has become not the pointless task it would at first appear. The very thoroughness with which Browning's materials have been examined has tended to obscure the fact that this piece affords us some of our most interesting, and not our least valuable, evidence of what Browning himself thought and felt about poetry.

There is an extraordinary instance of Shelley's indebtedness to Keats, which has, so far as I know, escaped notice. It is in stanzas III–VI, VII–XI, XIV, XVII–XVIII, XXI–XXII, XXXI, XXXVIII, XLII, LIII, LV, LVIII of The Witch of Atlas. And in those stanzas Shelley has drawn upon all four books of Endymion, and twice, it would seem, upon Sleep and Poetry. That there are other similar instances is not improbable. But a bare statement of this group of facts must, for the moment, suffice.

Depuis plusieurs années on s'intéresse beaucoup à la question de l'influence de l'entourage anglo-saxon sur le français tel qu'on le parle au Canada. Les Canadiens-Français eux-mêmes ont senti toute la gravité de cette influence menaçante et, soucieux de garder leur langue française aussi pure que possible, ils ont fait de l'anglicisme le plus grand des péchés linguistiques. On voit paraître dans les journaux et les revues de longues listes d'anglicismes que le Canadien-Français ne doit pas employer. Tout cela, à notre avis, est peine perdue: le peuple continuera à trouver plus commode de dire la shed que la remise, le wrench que la clé anglaise, le spare que le pneu de rechange, et ainsi de suite.

An interest in Whitman's sources is to be expected, partly because of Whitman's secretiveness. The extent of his indebtedness to Emerson continues to be a problem. That this influence was felt before the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 is questioned, since Walt himself and his earliest biographers say that he had not read Emerson before publishing the first edition of the Leaves. Thus, in his Notes on Walt Whitman, John Burroughs writes: “Up to the time he published the quarto edition [the 1855 edition] he had never read the Essays or Poems of Mr. Emerson at all. This is positively true. In the summer following that publication he first became acquainted with the Essays.” Whitman's friend, W. D. O'Connor, says that Walt had read Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, and that any fancied indebtedness to Emerson “is referable to the German source both had drunk from.” Though I believe that Whitman had read more of Emerson before 1855 than he would admit or would allow his friends to admit, I believe, too, that much of the resemblance between the writings of Emerson and Whitman, with reference especially to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, may be due to their “having drunk from the same source,” that source being Carlyle.