Perhaps someone will eventually undertake the heroic task of making a really systematic study of the file of the Gentleman's Magazine, in the hope of arriving at a more satisfying account of Johnson's part in it than we now have. The following observations do not represent such an attempt; they are the product of a relatively cursory inspection of some of the early volumes, and are offered with the expectation that they will raise more questions than they will answer. Still, such questions ought to be raised, in the hope that a consideration of them will in the end contribute to the higher standards of comprehensiveness and precision in Johnson studies which modern students would like to see attained.

Among Dickens' full-length novels, Barnaby Rudge has been the awkward stepchild, impossible to ignore and difficult to love. Compared to Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop, its predecessors, it is not remarkably rich in either comic invention or moving pathos. It does not glow with the high spirits of Pickwick or the warm, compassionate tolerance of David Copperfield: its best humor is edged with satire, and the pathos is often rather thin and forced. Nor, despite the crowds that swarm through its pages, does its world seem free or spacious: there is, for Dickens, an almost tight-lipped unwillingness to deviate from the intricate and rather grim progression of the story. This may be partly accounted for by the mode of publication: Dickens seldom felt at ease in the short weekly installments which did not leave space to “play around [the story] here and there, and mitigate the severity of . . . your sticking to it.” Some have thought that Dickens' imagination was constricted by subject matter he had systematically “researched” from written documents, even though some of the freest and most vigorous writing occurs in the passages based on history. Whatever the reason, Barnaby Rudge is a rather forbidding and at times even arid book, disturbing rather than reassuring despite the happy ending: in feeling as in technique, it is akin to such later “dark” and comparatively unpopular novels as Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend. But I think it is both richer and more firmly and meaningfully organized than many critics have allowed.

Ever since it was first published, Shelley's The Cenci has met with antagonism and misunderstanding. In the original instance this reaction was in part due to a prudish horror at the subject matter, which an enlightened modern reader finds hard to comprehend. However, continued resistance to the play, characterized by grudging admission that it has poetic merits but doesn't quite “come off,” suggests that something more than the theme of incest has dulled or blurred its tragic impact. One clue to The Cenci's failure to gain acceptance as “the best tragedy of modern times,” as Mary Shelley called it, might be found in its varied and often conflicting interpretations by critics and casual readers alike. That the play should be ambiguous to anyone would doubtless have puzzled Shelley. “It is,” he told Trelawny, “a work of art; it is not colored by my feelings nor obscured by my metaphysics.” It would seem, however, that his faith in his own lucidity was not justified.

In his edition of the Vie de Rancé, M. Fernand Letessier traces the composition of the work but does not touch upon the pressures that were brought to bear upon Chateaubriand as he wrote it. However, several letters that passed between Chateaubriand and Abbé Joseph Hercelin in late summer, 1843, and which were published by M. Letessier in the Revue d'histoire littéraire in 1938 have led me to believe that pressure was exerted. Head of the entire network of Trappist monasteries, Abbé Hercelin presided over his order from the remote, wooded cloisters of the Trappists' mother house, Notre Dame de la Trappe, in the Perche country of northern France, where the Breton marshes become Normandy. Chateaubriand had been scheduled to visit the establishment in June, 1843, but had had to postpone doing so because of ill health. When the visit did take place two months later, he talked with Hercelin about a book on which he was then at work. It was to deal with the Trappist monasteries' patriarch, Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé. Little more than a week had elapsed since Chateaubriand's departure when Hercelin observed in a letter to his venerable guest that “Cette religion sainte, continuée dans les bois, n'est pas connue des hommes de l'époque, mais elle va leur apparaître belle et amie de l'humanité, quand votre plume, aussi éloquente que catholique, aura écrit l'histoire de l'illustre réformateur dont vous avez vu le tombeau.” He went on to predict that because of the persuasive “unction” of his words, Chateaubriand would realize with his book a marvelous alliance between “the children of the world” and the “peaceable inhabitants of the cloisters.”

It is a pleasure today to congratulate you upon three quarters of a century of unique and distinguished national service. During all of this time your Association has been dedicated to the precept that communication is the very essence of cooperative society. You have pioneered the effort to advance literary and linguistic studies in our schools and colleges, sometimes in the face of apathy and even antagonism.

Among the surprising omissions from Rus-kin's autobiography Praeterita is any substantial analysis of the critical debate over the art of J. M. W. Turner which led Ruskin to write Modern Painters in 1843. The autobiography merely tells us that in 1836, when Ruskin was just seventeen years old, he had been aroused to a pitch of “black anger” by a review in Blackwood's of Turner's pictures, and that he had remained in this mood “pretty nearly ever since.” This ribald review, Ruskin adds, expressed “the feelings of the pupils of Sir George Beaumont at the appearance of these unaccredited views of Nature.” We learn only from his correspondence that it was a similar review in 1842 which made him resolve to write a pamphlet that would “blow the critics out of the water.”

The Goncourt Brothers tell of their visit, at two o'clock in the afternoon of 27 November 1862, to a sixth-floor apartment in the Rue Jacob where a voice rising as though from dream-like depths bade them enter a kind of “chambre de grisette, de couturière.” There, with an unlaced pair of men's boots on the floor and books heaped about everywhere, they were greeted from his bed by “un petit homme, maigre, maladif … un critique en mansarde, un homme d'un grand talent. C'est M. Montégut, l'écrivain de la REVUE DES DEUX MONDES.” He was thirty-seven then, having come from his native Limousin as a young man, already eccentric by virtue of his provincial education and Protestant background, to find his way into the Revue, where, except for brief service with other journals, he remained at his post of literary critic a long life, ending in December 1895.

The publication in 1954 of Robert Mayo's admirable paper, “The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads,” has made it seem incautious if not foolhardy to claim novelty of theme or technique for the volume of 1798. As Mayo appears to have shown, the Lyrical Ballads conformed in nearly all respects to the patterns prevailing in magazine poetry of the 1790's; the volume's “originality” lay less in any innovations it attempted than in the freshness and intensity with which it developed already familiar conventions. As for the “experiments” alluded to in the 1798 Advertisement and the 1800 Preface, they were, as the comments of Coleridge and others seem to confirm, largely experiments in language alone, and wholly within the boundaries of popular taste.

The main conclusion I draw from my study of the American high school can be summed up very quickly. Based upon personal visits to fifty-five high schools from coast to coast and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, this conclusion is that no radical change in the basic pattern of American secondary education is needed in order to make our high school as satisfactory as the best I have seen.

In a long essay apropos of Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse, G. M. Young works himself around to modern versification and to G. M. Hopkins. What should have been a development, he says, has turned out to be a catastrophe. “It is common, too, I find to look on Hopkins as the chief legislator of the new mode. For Hopkins as a poet I have the greatest admiration, but his theories on metre seem to me to be as demonstrably wrong as those of any speculator who has ever led a multitude into the wilderness to perish. Unfortunately they have been used as a justification for the cacophonies which naturally result when the metrically deaf write verse, and the metrically deaf are a very large class.” Young is not sure of the right meaning of counterpoint, but “using it as Hopkins did,” he says: “You must counterpoint to avoid monotony, but you must not silence the pattern. You can only work within limits, and if you go beyond them the result is prose. It is no use saying like the Pharisees: ‘It is Corban, a sprung rhythm’: it will not be verse.” That Young uses Hopkins as a stick to beat the moderns is merely amusing; they had their own bit of chaos and needed a form in which to express it. But when he casts a doubt on Hopkins' theories on meter and forth-rightly accuses Hopkins of “an ignorance of his subject so profound that he was not aware there was anything to know”—that is, as he would say, certainly a bone for the dog. And when, on the other hand, Sir Herbert Read, lending his authority to the defense, says that “Hopkins shows that he understood the technique of English poetry as no poet since Dryden had understood it,” it is time to apply a few tests. A beginning was made ten years ago by Yvor Winters, rather more extreme than what follows here. But granted that both Young and Winters have a strong case, it still seems best to deal patiently with Hopkins, if only because he was an impetuous novice in prosody, too impatient to think his theories through before he began to explain them.

In October 1838 Edward Bulwer-Lytton started to compose his play entitled Richelieu, in which William Charles Macready was destined to play the leading role. In his introduction to the Letters of Bulwer-Lytton to Macready, Brander Mathews states that “Macready was almost a collaborator in the composition of ‘Richelieu’ and ‘Money’,” and an examination of Macready's Diaries verifies this judgment. On 15 November 1838 Macready had read part of Bulwer-Lytton's new play and noted his dissatisfaction with it: it lacked “continuity of interest” and the character of Richelieu was “not servatus ad imum”; the play would “not do” and could not “be made effective” (p. 476). Two days later he discussed the play with its author, who at first combated his objections, and acceded to them “as his judgment swayed him,” but who, when Macready “developed the object of the whole plan of alterations,… was in ecstasies.” The actor had never seen him so excited. Bulwer-Lytton exclaimed several times that “he was ‘enchanted’ with the plan” and “observed, in high spirits, ‘What a fellow you are!‘” Macready found him “indeed delightful” and “a wonderful man” (p. 477). The Diaries contain many subsequent notations of Macready's reading, marking, cutting and punctuating the play (pp. 477–492). If not an actual collaborator, Macready acted at least as an adviser in the composition of Richelieu.

Verlaine may be one of the least intellectual of French poets, yet his “Art poétique” finds its way regularly into anthologies of French literature as the perfect symbolist counterpart of Gautier's “L'art,” the manifesto Of the Parnassians. “De la musique avant toute chose” is the advertised motto of the symbolist school of the eighties and nineties, just as the marmorean ideal was of the Parnassians of the sixties and seventies, indeed of Verlaine himself in the Poèmes saturniens (“Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Vénus de Milo?”). As in the case of any such well-worn document, there are two points of view from which it may be studied: (1) the intent of the creator of the document and (2) the overlay of interpretation which has developed around it. Let us attempt to render service to Verlaine by trying to determine his own meaning, through close examination of this and other works of the poet, as distinct from the meaning which his followers and associates read into this little “chanson.”

Fifine at the fair is not altogether such a poem as Bishop Blougram's Apology, Caliban upon Setebos, Mr. Sludge, “The Medium,” or Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. Of Browning's recorded statements of his intentions in Fifine, none is more revealing than his remark, preserved in Domett's Diary, that it was “the most metaphysical and boldest” poem he had written since Sordello. The adjective metaphysical characterizes the method of the poem as well as its themes, certain of which were a resumption, more than thirty years later, of the philosophical preoccupations of the earlier work.

To a greater degree than in the other monologues, the casuistry of Fifine at the Fair is a detail of the dramatic situation into which the monologue is set. The epigraph which Browning placed before the poem, a fragment of a scene from Molière's Don Juan, provides an analogue for the comedy which occasions the long discursive argument. In Molière's scene, Donna Elvira reproaches Don Juan for his faithlessness and sarcastically supplies him with a defense, an avowal of deathless devotion to her. Fifine at the Fair is its unnamed hero's rationalization to his wife, Elvire, of his interest in Fifine, a gypsy dancer whom they see at the Fair, and the main line of his defense is that proposed by Donna Elvira in the epigraph. Almost from the beginning of the poem, however, the defense strains against its dramatic limits, as the speakerdigresses on truth and error, good and evil, art and nature, to develop a relativistic philosophy of human knowledge, of moral principle, and of artistic judgment—“abstruser themes” he calls them midway in the poem, recognizing his own shift in emphasis. His philosophy of relativism, with its underlying sensationalism, provides justification for his interest in Fifine, and the sophistry of his special pleading for the truth of opinions that are convenient to his will is an extension of the hypocrisy of his avowals to Elvire. The monologuist develops both his philosophic themes and his account of the situation which gives rise to them in a highly metaphoric language which is wholly unlike the dialectical arguments of Browning's more typical casuists.

Entre los numerosos escritos del siglo 18 que son dignos de ser mâs conocidos y estudiados estân los de la pluma del P. Antonio Eximeno. Dos obras suyas, la Apologia de Cervantes y el Don Lazarillo Vizcardi, tienen un in-terés especial porque representan dos modali-dades particulares que tomo el cervantismo en el pensamiento del P. Eximeno. Antes de la expulsion en 1767, era conocido Eximeno por sus brillantes investigaciones filosoficas y cientificas, por ejemplo, su Observatio transitus veneris per discum solarem (Viena, 1761). Como maestro de Retorica y Poesia, y profesor y director de la Real Academia de Artilleria de Segovia, adquirio también renombre. Fué estimado, asimismo, por sus poesias (en latin y en castellano) y sus ser-mones. En Italia logra dominar el toscano, lengua en la que escribe gran parte de sus obras después de 1761. Para Eximeno, como para otros tantos de sus distinguidos compatriotas, en el destierro se amplia no solo el horizonte geogrâfico y linguistico, sino también el cultural. En la basilica de San Pedro en Roma, escuchando una misa de Jomelli, tiene Eximeno una verdadera “revelacion” intelectual que le impulsa al gran matemâtico a rechazar las matemâticas como fundamento vâlido para la musica y a insistir en que solo los acentos de la voz, el habla, y la poesia pueden considerarse como la base de toda composicion musical. La musica y la poesia, regidas por el buen gusto del poeta y del compositor, han de pintar los afectos humanos, imitando constantemente la naturaleza. En Roma, uno de los grandes centros musicales de la época, se dedica Eximeno al estudio teorico de la historia, la estética y la prâctica de la musica y funda su sistema estético-musical sobre la lingüistica y la prosodia. Participa en las aca-demias italianas bajo el nombre arcadio de Aristoxeno Megareo, y entra con toda la fuerza de su vigorosa personalidad, en polémicas te-oricas con el idolo y maestro de los musicos italianos, el doctisimo P. Martini. La obra de Eximeno que levanto acerba oposicion entre los musicos de Italia fué su Del origen y reglas de la música

When critics compare an author's early works with those of his maturity, it is usually to emphasize his final achievement. In one extreme case, such a comparison has even been urged as a source of moral uplift for struggling authors. When Charpentier brought out in 1880 a new printing of Zola's first novel, La confession de Claude, a critic advised young writers to read it and take heart, since the fact that the author of Nana could have written anything so abysmally bad twentyyears before proved beyond question that lamentable beginnings did not mean inevitable failure. Too seldom have critical comparisons of this kind gone beyond this demonstrative act, and one might reasonably question their worth when they fail to do so, for after all, if a work is a masterpiece should not that fact be discernible from the work itself?

Lionel Stevenson has written persuasively of Shelley's influence on Tennyson and has traced the “high-born maiden” in Tennyson as a symbol of Shelleyan origin. By following the figure through Mariana, The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, Lady Clara Vere de Vere, Locksley Hall, and The Princess, Stevenson has found that the maiden is transformed from a weary, isolated, usually suffering figure in the early poems into a “matter-of-fact literary stock-character” in the later poems, like Elaine in the Idylls; and he has suggested that the figure conforms with Jung's archetypal image of the anima. This is very convincing, but, it seems to me, Stevenson has forgotten that host of maidens—Lilian, Madeline, Margaret, Adeline, Rosalind, Eleänore, Kate—who, unlike Mariana, are not suffering damsels at all, but strong, often cruel, haughty ladies who capture the imagination of the poet and who command his devotion but give nothing in return. These maidens, who at first glance might appear to be nothing more than insensible and flirtatious women, occur with persistency in the 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, and continue to turn up, in suggestion at least, throughout the first part of Tennyson's poetic career. Like the isolated maidens whom Stevenson has pointed out, they are significant in a study of Tennyson because of the frequency with which they occur and because of the change which they underwent after the publication of the poet's first volume. They are, I believe, a variation on the femme fatale figure and draw their inspiration from Keats, especially from La Belle Dame Sans Merci.