To have been elected to the presidency of this great Association of men and women of good will, of knowledge, talent, and rare discrimination, constituting what is probably the biggest congeries of first-class brains in this country, is the crowning honor of any teacher's career and an awe-inspiring experience. Your president for 1960, as he prepares to vanish into oblivion after his one address in sovereign capacity, first wishes to express his gratitude to those who selected him, and his apologies for the pretentious title announced. In this country, from the beginning and throughout her entire history, action has prevailed. Yet the nation has never showed much aversion for words. Politicians, preachers, college presidents, generals, men of affairs spreading relaxation through warmed up after-dinner anecdotes, members of those faculty committees to whom, in these days of trial and error and perseverance in error, the Almighty seems to have relinquished the running of the world, all indulge their propensity for eloquence. Those whom Homer might have called the shepherds of people, in Moscow and Havana and equatorial Africa, strike back at our garrulous nation with massive retaliation. Torrents of words may flow in the sumptuous hotels where our Association once a year congregates late in December (just before the inebriating vigil through which we shall pray for a virgin year to wash out our unfulfilled promises and our harrowing regrets over unwritten articles). But your President is severely restrained by the petrifying gaze of the Executive Secretary, and prevented by tradition from falling back upon the worthiest of all themes for any academic address: the eulogy of his predecessor. His predecessor, whose steel whip sheathed in velvety skin had long guided this Association, is comfortably assured of immortality as it is. An in domitable Samson Agonistes whom no Delilah or Pamela can ever betray, he hardly needs our words of gratitude, however deeply felt, to pursue his wrestling, in Washington, with the “innumerable force of spirits armed / that durst dislike” the power of foreign languages in the dubious battle now raging on our planet.

In spite of its language which is admittedly difficult and in spite of certain problems of literary history which beset it, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has never been considered hard to interpret as a work of art. The apparent obviousness of its genre and its combination of apparently straight-forward narrative and notable passages of description do not lead one to suspect that complicated problems of intention or meaning are lurking beneath its vivid and attractive poetry. Piers Plowman, everyone agrees, is a difficult poem and has, at least since the sixteenth century, been recognized as such. Those who are attracted to it are stimulated to probe its significance and to elucidate its mysteries. No such stimulus comes to the much larger group who enjoy and study Sir Gawain, for, although much has been written on it, it has always been con. sidered a relatively uncomplicated, beautifully organized, and masterfully presented obvious poem. Yet the more one studies Sir Gawain and ponders on its charms and organization the more one begins to wonder and speculate. Of course in one sense all literary or artistic masterpieces are miracles and occasion for wonder, but above and beyond the pleasure and surprise which come from great achievement and the feeling of perfection, some works create a peculiar sense of intellectual puzzlement as to the author's intention and tone and even on a more prosaic level as to the tie between a work and its milieu: intellectual, artistic, and social.

Under their number 1881, Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins listed ten manuscripts which contain the romance of Titus and Vespasian written in couplet form. Since the publication of the Index, however, at least two more manuscripts of this work have come to light, the Earl of Derby (Knowsley Hall) codex and another recently acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library. The present investigation concerns the latter manuscript, for which the following description may be supplied:

M 898, collection: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Manuscript on vellum (5 5/8 ⋉ 3 7/8 inches). Collation: a-m8 n5, wanting al = 100 leaves. 20 lines. Written (black ink with chapter headings or résumés in red, and rubrication in blue) in England in the fifteenth century. Bound in nineteenth-century brown morocco by F. Bedford. With the book-plate of Sir Henry Hope Edwardes (his library was sold at Christie's, 20 May 1901).

The importance of Gawin Douglas' Eneados, the first English translation of the Aeneid, has been acknowledged since the sixteenth century. In 1530 David Lindsay wrote of Douglas' “worthy workis . . . And, speciallye, the trew Translatioun / Off Uirgill,” and forty years later Barnabie Googe ranked the Scots poet's translation above that of his English successor, Surrey,

The Noble H. Hawarde once,
That raught eternall fame, With mighty style did bring a pece
Of Virgil's worke in frame, And Grimaold gave the lyke attempt,
And Douglas wan the Ball, Whose famous wyt in Scottysh ryme
Had made an ende of all.

In 1934 Mr. Padelford issued, as a newly recovered work, The Axiochus of Plato, which Cuthbert Burby had published in 1592 as a translation by “Edward” Spenser. Later Mr. Freyd and Mr. Swan maintained that the translator was Anthony Mundy. This problem, arising long after my own book on Mundy appeared, has led me to scrutinize any possible connection between the two poets. Although they had many opportunities for becoming acquainted, attention focuses upon a friend whom they may have had in common—one Edward Knight. In 1579 that writer, heading his verses “Ε. K., Gentleman,” prefixed them to Mundy's Mirrour of Muta-bilitie, registered 10 October. A book by Knight, The Trial of Truth, was registered 13 November. Can he have been Ε. K., the mysterious editor of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, registered 5 December?

Entre las polémicas literarias que hallaron campo propicio en la España del siglo XVII, ninguna fue acaso tan enconada como aquélla a que dió lugar la publicación del Para todos del doctor Juan Pérez de Montalbán. No bien salían de las prensas de Madrid los ejemplares del debatido libro, en mayo de 1632, cuando todo un alud de sátiras, libelos, ataques y contraataques vino a caer sobre su joven autor, victima inocente de las reyertas en que se habían visto envueltos Góngora, su maestro Lope, y sus amigos Luis Pacheco de Narváez y fray Diego Niseno. La mas célebre de estas sátiras (y, al mismo tiempo, la más despiadada, y la primera, cronológicamente, entre las que han llegado hasta nosotros) es la Perinola de Quevedo que, aunque no corrió de molde hasta el siglo siguiente, alcanzó en seguida gran difusión manus-crita, como se echa de ver por sus numerosos textos del mismo siglo XVII que han llegado hasta nosotros. De ella, al decir de un contemporáneo, “en brève tiempo se sacaron tantas copias que en cualquiera taberna y bodegón, con ser excesivo su número, se hallaban a pares.”

Ever since Thomas Warton, nearly two hundred years ago, decided that the Theatrum Poetarum of Edward Phillips contained “criticisms far above the taste of that period” and therefore revealed “many touches of Milton's hand,” scholars have sought evidence to substantiate this opinion. Sir Egerton Brydges, in 1800, delcared in the preface of his abridged edition of the Theatrum that “the very expressions of Milton break out in every page,” and only recently Harris Fletcher, who has made a minute study of Milton's reading, wrote that “perhaps as much as nine-tenths of the work was almost beyond doubt done by Milton.” A careful study of the sources and methods of composition of this book has convinced me that not only did Milton have no hand in the work but that even his influence, if any, was negligible. Actually, the Theatrum was a hasty, careless piece of hack work, derived for the most part from a few convenient reference works, with a minimum of effort on the part of the compiler.

Pourquoi et dans quelle mesure les pensées de Pascal peuvent-elles paraître à la fois si vivantes et si présentes, mais à certains égards si lointaines? A une époque où la multiplication des formes de la violence nous interdit à la fois de nous évader dans le beau rêve d'une Cité de Dieu et de trouver un sens clair à l'histoire des hommes, et où triomphent plus que jamais, en même temps, le dogmatisme et le sentiment de la futilité, il est intéressant d'examiner les pensées de Pascal précisément parce que Pascal, le plus fortement peut-être de tous les penseurs politiques, nous montre comment et pourquoi la vie politique est en même temps et surtout indissolublement futile et sérieuse; tout l'intérêt du problème—et son caractère tragique—venant précisément du fait qu'il est impossible, selon Pascal, de sortir du cercle vicieux du sérieux et de la futilité. Ce n'est pas parce que vous passerez, nous dit Pascal, d'une monarchie à une République, ou d'une République à une autre République, que les choses passeront du futile au sérieux ou du sérieux au grotesque; vos opinions peut-être changeront, car la concupiscence et l'imagination vous égarent—ou servent vos passions—mais pas la nature, l'essence de la vie politique. Urbi et Orbi, l'homme ne change pas, et la politique vaut ce que vaut l'homme, c'est-à-dire rien, ou peu de chose.

In the monographs and articles dealing with America and the New World in German literature Friedrich Schlegel is usually ignored. There are of course many gaps in our knowledge of America in German literature, as Harold Jantz pointed out in Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß (Berlin, 2nd ed. revised, 1960); the case of Friedrich Schlegel is a striking example. If he is mentioned, as in Paul Weber's America in Imaginative German Literature (1926), Hildegard Meyer's Nord-Amerika im Urteil des deutschen Schrifttums (1929), and in the recently published Amerika im Spiegel des deutschen politischen Denkens (1959) by Ernst Fraenkel, he is represented only by two quotations dating from the last few years of his life. The first treats of the familiar notion that the center of culture might move westward and that the United States would take over the role traditionally played by Europe. In 1792 Herder had asked “O Muse, nimmst du westwârt [sic] deinen Flug?” and in 1818 Platen wrote in his “Colombos Geist”: “Denn nach Westen früchtet die Geschichte, / Denn nach Westen wendet sich der Sieg.” Friedrich Schlegel suggested in 1820 that the shift was conceivable but that it would not take place in his time. Weber, Meyer, and Fraenkel stress SchlegePs underlining of the future, not his concession that the possibility existed. The second quotation is from the seventeenth lecture of the Philosophie der Geschichte (1829) in which he characterized North America as the breeding ground of destructive political principles which initiated an epidemic of revolutions.

Although traditionally “The Fall of the House of Usher” has been regarded as a “horror” tale, close examination reveals that it possesses many characteristics similar to those which Poe termed “ratiocinative” in other stories. In 1936 Arthur Hobson Quinn, after defining the tale as “arabesque,” pointed out briefly its systematic duplication of theme in the treatment of Usher, of his house, and of his relation to his sister. More recent scholarship has concentrated upon reclassifying the story and upon exploring the subconscious or even Freudian recesses of Roderick's nature, particularly as these concern his attitude toward his sister Madeline. In the present study I propose to continue Quinn's investigation of the structure and form of the story, including recurrent ideas and character relationships. My thesis is that behind the mood and the characterization of “The Fall of the House of Usher” exists a pattern of thought and of thematic development as rigorous in its way as the more sharply denned rationality of “The Purloined Letter” or “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and that a study of this pattern explain the significant themes of the story.

According to Sir Charles Tennyson, Carlyle met Tennyson at the Sterling Club as early as 1839, if not earlier. Previously, Sir Charles says, Carlyle had heard much about him from John Sterling, who had helped to found the Cambridge Apostles' Club, of which Tennyson had also been a member. D. A. Wilson, however, in his multi-volumed life of Carlyle says that the two first met in Carlyle's garden at Chelsea in the autumn of 1840. Sir Charles is more nearly right. Wilson's date is too late, for on 5 September 1840 Carlyle wrote to his brother: “Some weeks ago, one night, the Poet Tennison [sic] and Matthew Allen were discovered here, sitting smoking in the garden. Tennison had been here before, but was still new to Jane,—who was alone for the first hour or two of it. A fine large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free-and-easy: who swims, outwardly and inwardly, with great composure in an inarticulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke; great now and then where he does emerge: a most restful, brotherly, solidhearted man.” From the very first the friendship seemed to flourish. “He seemed to take a fancy to me,” Tennyson later told a visitor at Farringford in speaking of Carlyle's favorable treatment of him in the early forties. In those years Carlyle's reputation had already been firmly established by his French Revolution and his lectures; but Tennyson had not published the two volumes of 1842 which were to do much to give him fame. Both had found the road to fame a long, steep, and difficult one. Both had lost manuscripts: Carlyle that of the French Revolution, volume one; and Tennyson that of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Both had been battered much by hardships and disappointments. Carlyle, who was fourteen years older than the poet, had struggled over a much longer period before being acclaimed by the literary world. But the period of their fame would also be a long one, and in terms of rough chronology they enjoyed their fame during the same years.

In 1865 Émile Montégut, literary critic best known for his long association with the Revue des deux mondes, contributed a major article in two parts to the Moniteur universel on the subject of one of its most distinguished collaborators, Théophile Gautier. In composing this article Montégut had been faced with a problem that might never have occurred to a less conscientious and original critic. His material, after long meditation, was well enough defined. Its content centered around the interpretation of Gautier as a dual nature, “âme gauloise” and “âme contemplative,” and revealed much that was most characteristic of its author as a critic: his concentration on contemporary writing, his interest in defining various forms of the Romantic imagination, his concern with dilettantism as both a strength and a weakness, his frankly personal approach to his subject, an approach based on the belief that in literary criticism there can be no “instrument unique” and that each critic should seek out those aspects of an author with which he has some affinity, hoping that the true meaning and unity of the work will emerge for the intelligent reader from a symphony of individual impressions on the part of numerous critics.

The section of A Vision entitled “Dove or Swan” sets forth in brilliant prose a panorama of Western history that is almost without incoherence or irrelevance. Civilizations seem to rise and fall in nearly strict harmony with Yeats's wheels and gyres—and we suspect a yielding to what Henry Adams called the historian's most serious temptation: “if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.” But Yeats might retort with another romantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?” For, despite conflicting statements of intention, Yeats too was primarily committed to the task of illuminating universal experience. With many other poets of the last two centuries he turned to history for his material—even as historians often turned to poetry for their method. “Dove or Swan” was useful to him as an intermediate stage between the raw data of history and the dense symbolism of his poetry. But it is also important in itself as a typically romantic achievement: a vision of history as art.

Literature reflects a fascination with the enigma of man's identity. Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going?—these questions recur, are answered, and yet require always re-asking and new illumination. Contemporary fiction projects man's quest for identity against the background of a fragmented and confusing world where the need for self-definition grows urgent because the social supports of the past are weakened and the opportunities for new and strange definitions in the present are enlarged. In a world that exhibits instability as a norm and social fluidity as an ideal, no clearcut self-image can emerge and receive assuring consent. The search for identity in modern literature takes on the form of a pursuit—a curious pursuit, because the object is often undefined and unvisualized. Joyce's Bloom wandering the maze of Dublin streets, Camus' Meursault arrested in the blaze of Algerian sun, Saul Bellow's Henderson invading untrampled African jungle, crying “I want, I want,” but unable to articulate a predicate—these characters are impelled by a sense of inner void to pursue their identity as whole and self-conscious beings. Undefined to themselves they are all “strangers” seeking the touchstone of some objective reality that can validate their existence or of some assertive self-knowledge that can acquaint and unite them with themselves. The image of man as divided and a stranger recurs in the looming novels of the century, in the works of Proust, Kafka, Camus, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf; it is beautifully crystallized in the recognition scene at the end of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as the hero's revelatory self-encounter. The failure of Proust's narrator to recognize his image in the mirror, his sense of masquerade and strangeness, the jading of his sensibilities as all seems degraded and lost, and then the unexpected swift revelation which unifies and gives meaning to his life—these have become recurrent experiences in contemporary fiction as it tries to illuminate the jagged course of man's search for identity in the modern world.