Tels que des flots dans un grand fleuve, nous avons chacun un petit mouvement et nous faisons un peu de bruit dans le large courant qui nous emporte; mais nous allons avec les autres et nous n'avançons que poussés par eux … Si inventeur que soit un esprit, il n'invente guère; ses idées sont celles de son temps, et ce que son génie original y change ou ajoute est peu de chose. (H. Taine, Essai sur Tite Live)

Many efforts have been made to identify the Rosalind of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender. The following conjecture approaches the problem from a study of Mr. Douglas Hamer's article in the Review of English Studies for July, 1931, entitled Spenser's Marriage, which reaches the conclusion that in April, 1580, Spenser was newly married.

In 1923, in an article in Modern Philology on Spenser's handwriting, Mr. H. R. Plomer verified previous identifications of Spenser's secretary hand. He published several photographs and listed sixteen documents, four of which are signed by Spenser. He also noted the distinctive features of Spenser's secretary hand: the sloped writing, the long-drawn-out f and s, the p which looks like an overgrown x, and the individual way of writing the capitals B, I, and E.

The value of John Donne's poetry has ever been acknowledged to the extent that, together with Spenser and Jonson, he has been conceded leadership in the English Renaissance. Until recently, however, the Dean of St. Paul's has only casually been touched upon as a prose writer of pronounced merit. This neglect Coleridge hinted at when, in his Table Talk, June 4, 1830, he wrote: “Why is not Donne's volume of sermons reprinted at Oxford?” Of all Donne's prose, the sermons seem to me to be most important. Meritorious as they are for content (which does not interest us here), Donne's sermons best display his mature ability as a man of letters, wherefore as a master of English homiletic style Donne deserves his place among the leading writers of his day.

The only adequate and trustworthy account of Fielding's théâtre is that given by W. L. Cross in his three-volume biography, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven, 1918). Yet, in my opinion, three of Fielding's plays, The Letter-Writers (1731), The Modern Husband (1732), and Eurydice Hiss'd (1737), have received inadequate treatment from Professor Cross, for he has failed to indicate their sources properly.

On mentionne avec raison l'épicurisme de Voltaire mais il ne faut pas toutefois oublier qu'au point de vue de la morale seule, il est assez difficile de tracer les différences qui devraient exister entre le sage épicurien et le sage stoïcien. Ces deux doctrines, aussi bien que le péripatétisme représenté par Aristote, le pyrrhonisme transformé plus tard en scepticisme, l'éclectisme de la Nouvelle-Académie expliqué par Cicéron, font partie du bagage philosophique légué à l'Europe par la pensée grecque et romaine. Voltaire a été influencé par ces doctrines à différents degrés et l'étude présente sur “Zadig” va montrer combien Voltaire a su lire, comprendre et même pratiquer quelque peu la pensée stoïcienne en la mélangeant naturellement avec d'autres.

The poets of the early nineteenth century are thought of primarily as lyrists; and yet, in the case of all the leading figures, especially the two most popular, Scott and Byron, the bulk of their work is narrative, and for the most part metrical tales. These narratives vary widely in subject-matter and atmosphere: sometimes, as in Crabbe, the purpose is simply to tell a realistic story; sometimes as in Wordsworth, to point a moral or adorn a bit of autobiography; sometimes, as in Coleridge and Byron, to give the reader a new and exotic shudder; or, as in Scott and Keats, to delight with the mysterious and forgotton past; or, as in Shelley, to inculcate a social doctrine. At first sight, this prevalence of narrative seems to be an utter departure from the preceding hundred years, in which satire and didacticism are supposed to have extinguished the versified tale; but a closer examination, especially of minor writers, shows that the eighteenth century had an unbroken tradition of such writings. The existence of this tradition has generally escaped attention, partly because the works of such minor poets are hard to find, and partly because the genre was of rather dubious repute, being akin to the “ballad” of the time, and was hardly included in the literary “kinds” generally accepted by critics and theorists.

The problem of ascertaining whether Diderot or Rousseau was responsible for the original inspiration of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts has been a vexing one to biographers and students of both men. Though the famous paradox belongs to Jean-Jacques by reason of his exploitation of it, the question is none the less one of exceeding interest. Rousseau's work, as Lemaître remarks, is but a reflection of his life, the incidents of which “sont à peu près toutes des oeuvres de circonstances. Et la grandeur de conséquence fait qu'il devient émouvant de les voir sortir de si petites causes et si accidentelles.” And it is to the accident of Diderot's intervention that the initial impulse, which was to have such momentous consequences, is frequently attributed. “Il y a tout lieu de croire que c'est lui qui suggère à Rousseau la fameuse réponse à la question posée par l'Académie de Dijon,” affirms the author of a recently published work.

It is plain to the attentive reader of Goldsmith that he was not only in the habit of repeating favorite phrases, but also that he returned again and again to a few favorite ideas. Many, if not most, of these ideas, I maintain, were, if not already formed before he left Ireland, at least predetermined by the traits of character and of mind that he developed there.

James Gillman's Life of Coleridge may be called the first and the official biography. Allsop's and Cottle's volumes, which preceded it, were fragmentary and miscellaneous; and although Gillman's death in 1839 left the work incomplete, bringing the story of Coleridge down only to about 1817, it was not superseded for fifty years. It was necessarily a main source for Traill, Brandl, and Caine, who wrote their accounts in the 1880's; for Leslie Stephen in his sketch for the D.N.B., written in 1887; and for Campbell in his “Biographical Introduction,” of 1893, which still remains the fullest and best treatment. Gillman's Life is now little read, but it has had important influence on our conception of Coleridge. It is therefore worth while to consider what Gillman did—and what he did not do.

It is time that three things should be stated emphatically: (1) while at Oxford Hogg was fully as radical as Shelley and was Shelley's genuinely sympathetic coadjutor instead of his amused companion; (2) Hogg and Shelley were equally responsible for The Necessity of Atheism; and (3) it is more than probable that Hogg wrote the first draft of The Necessity. The first of these has been vaguely hinted at by Shelley's biographers; the second has been hazily confined by them to Hogg's writing of the Preface to The Necessity; the third has never been mentioned. The facts are abundant and reliable; but Hogg's Life of Shelley, in spite of its known inaccuracies and misinterpretations, has prevailed.

In the The Newcastle Magazine, xv (Jan. 1825) I discovered the satire which all students of Hogg know he wrote, but which is thought never to have been published, John Paterson's Mare. In this satire, Hogg allegorically presents the friends and enemies of Blackwood's Magazine (somewhat as he had done in the Chaldee Manuscript), and incidentally introduces, most interestingly, Jeffrey's critical treatment, in the Edinburgh Review, of such contemporaries as Joanna Baillie, Tom Moore, Ritson, Byron, and the Lake Poets.

The last of The Waverley Novels was finished in 1831. If, therefore, anyone be offended by the inaccuracy of my subtitle, I rest my defense upon the precedent set by Sir Walter himself. I cannot claim for this paper that it presents any new facts, but the low esteem in which The Waverley Novels are held a hundred years after their appearance seems to warrant some reflections upon their nature and our tastes.

Whenever a poet allows us to follow his creative processes, we are grateful—even though he may be no supreme artist but merely a solid craftsman. An account of the manner in which William Cullen Bryant composed his poems will therefore interest students not only of American letters but of poetry at large. From youth to old age, Bryant believed that great poetry and indeed all true poetry has its origin in the emotions of the poet.

Professor randall stewart, while editing Hawthorne's American Notebooks from the manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library, called my attention to the initials “N. B.—R. L. R.” in the following note and asked me if I could tell him to whom they referred. The present paper is a belated attempt to answer his question.

Mi Pesadilla,“ alleged to be ”the last tale by Edgar Poe,“ appeared in El Mundo Ilustrado of Mexico City in its issue of March 9, 1902. The translator does not reveal his identity nor does he offer any further information concerning the source of the original. The title is not suggestive of any tale in the Poe canon, and a reading of the story must convince one that it could not be an extravagantly free version or adaptation of any of Poe's known tales. The supposition that ”My Nightmare“ might be another positive contribution to the Poe canon—a tale inedited and lost until its miraculous reappearance in a Mexican review a half-century after Poe's death,—must be discarded as highly improbable.

Frequently it has been said that, of all the Naturalists, Alphonse Daudet was the most kindly received in England. Such a statement tends to place emphasis on the very element of Daudet's work which English critics did not favor during his lifetime—namely, Naturalism. It is the purpose of this study to trace the sentiments of British reviewers and critics in the literary periodicals from 1872 to 1897 towards the works of Daudet and to show that there Daudet's naturalistic qualities hindered rather than aided his reception. Daudet possessed other distinctive qualities which were in accord with English literature of the period —qualities which saved his works from the fate of other French novels of the time. Yet Daudet did not immediately acquire a kindly public abroad. If his early works, including the Tartarin, had at first created little stir in France, in English reviews before 1874 but one solitary mention of them was made, though these same works were later to become Daudet's most widely read books across the channel.

The Spectator of July 10,1886, voiced the general opinion of the then limited group acquainted with Russian literature when it hailed Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky as not only the greatest of Russian writers, but also the most important among contemporary realists. Such enthusiasm seems at first oddly inconsistent with the prevailing popular literary taste, particularly when we remember that these Russian novelists were rather closely identified with the French naturalistic movement—-a movement bitterly assailed by the Victorians. Moreover, their writings, representing virtually the only Russian literature to appear in English translation before 1900, came at a time when the controversy over Balzac had barely subsided and when those over Baudelaire, Zola, and Ibsen had excited a tempest, not only in the literary world, but also from the pulpit, press, and platform—even within the halls of Parliament. The history of Russian realism in England prior to 1900 thus throws into bold relief the essential differences between it and French realism as these two movements appeared to the English, and affords a deeper insight into the Victorian conscience with its troubled concern over art and morality.

En 1894, M. Binet, qui venait de fonder L'Année psychologique, eut l'idée de s'adresser à quelques-uns des auteurs dramatiques de son temps pour leur demander des renseignements sur la façon dont ils concevaient leurs pièces et les composaient, espérant ainsi “éclaircir la question si importante, si mal connue, si peu étudiée, de l'imagination créatrice.”

The year 1935, celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Bach, that great writer of a type of “program” music that for years was never suspected of being such, is an opportune time for a closer study of attempts made by literary men at criticizing and evaluating program music. Even for the great Bach there were no real “program notes” to suggest the attempts to portray definite stories and incidents in his organ chorales until Albert Schweitzer unearthed his clearcut attempts at writing program music, or music based upon facts or with a story. Bach seemed to feel that the music should actually tell the story without further use of words than those of the simple chorale tune he was developing.