Charles Reade is not a great novelist, but he is a great storyteller, a master of “brute incident.” Critics recur in praise to this or that scene or group of scenes in his fiction. They prize highly the narratives relating the voyage home of the “Agra” in Hard Cash, and the boat race and bursting of the reservoir in Put Yourself in His Place; the prison scenes in It is Never too Late to Mend; and many of the episodes in The Cloister and the Hearth; the encounter with the mother bear robbed of her cubs, the fight with the “Abbot” and his mates. Yet, as with all the Victorian novelists, it is difficult to pick out from his novels any—except, perhaps, The Cloister and the Hearth—that satisfy through and through.

The vogue of “the Picturesque” in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was considerable. The word “picturesque” came into use in the latter eighteenth century to designate “picturesque beauty.” Although very brief, a fairly good working definition for the purposes of this paper is the one first stated by the Rev. William Gilpin in 1768: “Picturesque: a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture.” Gilpin before his death was called “the venerable founder and master of the Picturesque School,” and years afterward it was declared:

in the picturesque, Gilpin is unquestionably an Oracle; and his work is a Grammar of the Rules, by which alone the beauties of the Tour can be properly understood and appreciated.

To Shelley poetry came hard. Some of his lyrics, most quick and intense, did not rise through easy inspiration. The pages of his Note Books are full of pitchings forward, startings back, travail, and keen uncertainty. Poems like The Masque of Anarchy which one might think of as being plucked in full petal out of the inspired wrath of the poet's heart grew rather against the edge of a painful gardener's knife. The “Down down” lyric of Prometheus, although fastening itself within the poet's imagination, for a long time defied creativity. The inability of Shelley at once to apprehend the artistic relationship existing between those images and rhythms which visited his mind, haunted his thoughts and hung in his memory, is with him a vital characteristic.

LOCKE'S mention in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) of the blind man who thought he understood what the color scarlet was because it was represented to him by the sound of a trumpet, startled people, like the trumpet blast or glaring color referred to, or even more like the combined effect of both loud sound and loud color. This unbelievable speculation was, however, soon substantiated by other similar observations and, henceforth, became a much repeated paradoxon of literature. The analogy between sound and color was first given a scientific foundation with Isaac Newton's Opticks in 1704. Newton in his comparison between sound and color went so far as to proclaim that the spaces occupied by the seven primary colors were similar to the relative intervals between the notes of the octave.

Nine years before the Oxford English Dictionary was finally completed, Sir William Craigie proposed his scheme of period dictionaries. Pointing to the many problems in the language still unsolved, and to the “large quantities of interesting material” daily set aside because of the limitations of space, he insisted that this was the only way to meet completely the needs of scholars in English language and of serious students of our literature. Neither he nor the others who have taken up his proposal have ever conceived of these period dictionaries as works to supplant the Oxford Dictionary. They could not because they approach the language with essentially different purposes. Sir William Craigie in his report of 1919 phrases quite clearly the relationship of these later dictionaries to their parent:

The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue is a natural complement to those of Middle and Early Modern English. It would have been unpractical to combine it with these, for several reasons. The period covered by it (mainly from 1375 to 1700) does not present any break comparable to that which distinguishes the earlier from the later period in English, and a division of the continuous Scottish material between two dictionaries would have been both inconvenient and unhistorical. The steadily increasing divergence between the two forms of the language would also lead to difficulties even in the Middle English dictionary, and would result in great confusion, and the inclusion of much irrelevant matter, in that of the Early Modern period. It would be impossible in the latter work to deal adequately with the Scottish variants of common words (e.g., ake, ald, atis, for oak, old, oats), or to give sufficient space to purely Scottish words and senses. The material for these could only be brought together by special collecting, and has in fact involved the close reading of printed books and manuscripts amounting to over 500 titles, a number of which extend to many volumes. A further very important consideration is the fact that for the successful handling of much of this material the editor must have a first-hand knowledge of the living Scottish tongue.

Few poems in French literature are better known than L'Art by Gautier and the Art poétique of Verlaine. But the fame of these poems obscures a fact to be discovered by wider reading; namely, that nine or ten living French poets have each published an Art poétique since the opening of the twentieth century. The following pages are a presentation of these modern French poems on poetry which have been brought together in the belief that they may reveal the literary fortunes of Gautier, Verlaine, and their peers, or indicate their significance to living poets.

In order to bring to the readers of the PMLA some of our new material concerning the word sonnet and to have from them suggestions and criticisms concerning our proposed methods of presenting words in our dictionary we offer here our tentative article on this particular word. A comparison of the treatment here with that given the same word in the Oxford English Dictionary will make clear, we hope, the difference in the functions of the two dictionaries. Limitations of space have made it necessary to omit even a sample of the bibliographical key which will be published with each part of the dictionary.

Professor Louis B. Wright, in a very interesting paper on “Madmen as Vaudeville Performers on the Elizabethan Stage,” cites as one of his examples the madmen's scene of The Duchess of Malfi with the following comment: