While preparing the materials in Lord Salisbury's library at Hatfield House for microfilming, Miss Caroline Merion discovered a hitherto unknown fragment of a manuscript of Chaucer's Troilus. It was sewed in the spine of the cover (one could hardly call it a binding) of a sixteenth-century rent book containing surveys of some of the property of the Earl of Essex. Probably in the sixteenth century this book came into the hands of the Cecil family, for some of the Essex property mentioned in it was transferred to Lord Burleigh in the 1560's, and in all likelihood this book has been among the Cecil records for over three hundred and fifty years. The fragment of Troilus, which I shall call the Cecil Fragment (CF), is a single page of vellum taken from an unknown manuscript of the poem, and much cut down. It now measures approximately 24½ cm. by 6½ cm., being rather wider at the bottom than the top, since the cutting was rough and irregular. Before being cut down, the manuscript page must have measured something like 28 cm. by 12 to 14 cm. Whoever cut the page apparently cut off strips from the bottom and both sides in order to use only the section in the center of the page. He obviously cared nothing for the writing on the page, for he cut off the beginnings and the ends of the lines of poetry. In spite of him, however, there are large parts of ten stanzas from Book I of Troilus which are still readily legible.

It WAS Josephine Miles's “Eras in English Poetry,” published in this journal in September 1955 (LXX, 853-875), that stimulated me to study her method, to appraise her findings, and, finally, to endeavor to carry farther and perhaps to sharpen her approach. This paper reports such findings and such conclusions as have, thus far, eventuated from this endeavor.

George Gascoigne was more than “the first conscious purist in his art.” With wit and energy he sought to solve a wide range of urgent Elizabethan literary problems. To his credit stand the first English prose comedy, translation of the first tragedy from the Italian, the first mask and regular English satire, the first critical English treatment of prosody.

My Purpose in this paper is to understand the allegory of The Faerie Queene more fully by examining the relation between the first two books. It has been commonly observed that these books are parallel in structure. In each, the Knight who represents a particular virtue (Holiness, Temperance) leaves the court of the Faery Queen with a guide (Una, the Palmer), and later defeats two chief antagonists (Sansfoy and Sans-joy, Pyrochles and Cymochles); upon being separated from his guide, he enters a place of temptation (the house of Pride, the cave of Mammon), and later falls. Then being rescued by Arthur and united with his guide, he enters a place of instruction (the house of Holiness, the castle of Alma) and finally fulfills his adventure (killing the Dragon, destroying the Bower of Bliss). Such paralleling has been considered part of Spenser's design expressed in the Letter to Ralegh, to write twelve books in which twelve knights, as patrons of the twelve virtues, undertake parallel adventures assigned by the Faery Queen. That the later books do not follow this repetitive structure has been variously explained as the need to avoid monotony, to modify the design according to the virtue being treated, or simply—all too simply—as a change of plan. It was left to A. S. P. Woodhouse to explain for the first time the basis of the parallel structure of the first two books. He suggests that the two orders of nature and grace which were universally accepted as a frame of reference in the Renaissance are here carefully differentiated: “what touches the Redcross Knight bears primarily upon revealed religion, or belongs to the order of grace; whatever touches Guyon bears upon natural ethics, or belongs to the order of nature” (p. 204). It follows that the parallel structure is designed to bring into relief differences which depend upon these two orders. He finds that this difference leaves its mark chiefly upon the education received by the two knights: the Redcross knight shows the bankruptcy of natural man who must utterly depend upon heavenly grace whereas Guyon shows how natural man realizes the potentialities of his nature by ruling his passions through reason (pp. 205-206). At times, he insists more strongly than does Spenser upon an absolute separation of the two orders: Guyon's reference to “the sacred badge of my Redeemers death” confuses the separation, as does the Palmer's benediction: “God guide thee, Guyon, well to end thy warke.” Even more confusing is Guyon's invocation to Christ for His Mercy at the moment when, like Longinus, he levels his spear against the Cross: “Mercie Sir knight, and mercie Lord, / For mine offence and heedlesse hardiment, / That had almost committed crime abhord” (ii.i.27). However, thanks to Woodhouse's article, there seems no doubt now that the distinction between the two orders of nature and grace provides a necessary frame of reference for understanding the parallel structure of the first two books.

On 29 May 1736, Doctor Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, presented to Mistress Mary Harrison a copy of Medulla Historiae Anglicanae: The Ancient and Present State of England. Being a Compendious History of All Its Monarchs,from the Time of Julius Caesar. Written by Dr. Howell. And continued by an Impartial Hand to the Death of His late Majesty King George I (9th ed., London, 1734), in order to “encourage her to read usefull and improving Books.” Such high sententiousness is probably a suitable pose for a man almost seventy to assume when formally endowing a girl in her mid-twenties with an epitome of English history. Yet even at seventy Swift would have enjoyed placing an ironic inscription on the flyleaf of a book, especially one like Howell's, biased by Whiggery; and if Mistress Harrison ever read this improving volume, she would have discovered some of Swift's characteristic marginal vituperation. Since these notes have never been printed, few people besides Mary Harrison have had the opportunity these past two hundred years of reading Swift's animadversions on certain aspects of English history.

Aliterary analysis of the Eldorado episode in Candide should undertake to answer three interlocking questions: (1) What is its philosophic meaning in relation to the whole? (2) By what artistic devices is that meaning conveyed? (3) How successfully has Voltaire fused form and substance? To date no such analysis exists. Questions 2 and 3 have been handled either scantly or not at all. Question 1, while much more frequently and for the most part satisfactorily treated, has in a few instances produced divergent interpretations springing from divergencies of critical approach. It is the purpose of this essay to elaborate an analysis of the episode which will, among other things, provide a standard for evaluating the partial answers thus far offered.

Even before he had brought to completion the great thirty-five-volume Encyclopédie—by the publication in 1776-77 of its Supplément in five volumes, and in 1780 of Pastor Mouchon's Table analytique et raisonnée in two volumes—a now relatively forgotten Parisian bookseller, publisher, author, and translator, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, had already begun preparations to put out a new Encyclopédie, to be called the Encyclopédie méthodique, ou par ordre de matières. Unlike Diderot's original, this Encyclopédie was to be composed of a collection of individual “dictionaries,” each one dealing with a different subject. Although the entrepreneur was aware from the start of the magnitude of the task, he could not foresee the many difficulties and delays which were to beset the undertaking before it was to be finally completed by his daughter, fifty years later, as “la collection la plus vaste qu'ait jamais produite la librairie française.”

When Coleridge, after looking over the third edition of Lyrical Ballads with its enlarged preface, confided to William Sotheby (13 July 1802) his troubled belief that between Wordsworth and himself there lay “a radical Difference” of opinion about poetry, he was recognizing a disagreement that must have dated almost from his earliest talks with Wordsworth. Writing to Robert Southey two weeks later (29 July), Coleridge proposed to “go to the Bottom” of the difference in a forthcoming volume of critical essays. When the proposal finally matured, in scattered chapters of Biographia Lileraria—fifteen years later—Coleridge declared it as a main object “to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continuées, controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction.”

In common with other such enduring works of art as The Faery Queen, Gulliver's Travels, and Alice in Wonderland, Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market has many levels of meaning. At the narrative level it offers a charming and delicate fairy tale to delight a child—if a somewhat precocious one. At the symbolic and allegorical level, it conveys certain Christian ethical assumptions. At the psychological level, it suggests emotional experience universally valid.

David Garnett achieved a triumphal entry into the citadel of fiction with two short fantasies, Lady into Fox (1922) and A Man in the Zoo (1924). The former was awarded the James Tait Black Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. The latter was welcomed by eagerly waiting reviewers, who expressed their delight that he could follow a tour de force, the most dangerous of beginnings, with a work showing intellectual solidity and range as well as virtuosity. Both books have kept their places of esteem in modern fiction.

The interplay of illusion and reality as the subject matter of literature has, in the modern context, often been considered the particular invention and virtually exclusive province of Pirandello but, as one critic has aptly said in this connection, “it is so far from being a peculiarly Pirandellian theme as to be perhaps the main theme of literature in general.” In the case of Spanish literature in particular the reversible relationship of the real and the imaginative, of art and life, has been responsible for the Pirandellian type of inversion centuries before the advent of the Italian playwright. Américo Castro has written of Cervantes and Pirandello, while Angel del Río traces as far back as the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor of Juan Ruiz “a feature which, if not exclusive, is quite characteristic of Spanish literature … the intervention and even the personal appearance of the author in the work.” Significant, however, as is the appearance of what Joseph Gillet calls the “autonomous character,” the presence in a work of a fictional character who claims equality with his creator or of an author who projects himself into his work as a fictional being is only a symptom, or at best the result, of a general aesthetic which is the expression of a profound metaphysical concept. In short, it is the reflection of a particular concept of reality, the expression of a way of life. This is the conclusion of Américo Castro in the particular case of the Libro de buen amor in his study of which he arrives at the conviction that “the poet's manner of entering into his literary reality and installing himself in it, is characteristic of the Arabic way of life” (p. 406). The functional fluidity of the art of the work is that of the arabesque, of endless open lines alternating between “ins” and “outs” (p. 413). This aesthetic in turn is the product of a vision of the world in which things have no fixed, immutable position—as they do in the Occidental world, constructed out of the Greek idea of the substantial being of things—but are as real in the experience of the conscious person as in the imagination of the sleeper (p. 416). Consequently, in the literature which expresses this interpretation of reality, nothing is thought of or represented as absolute existence, bounded by either a real or ideal limit (p. 439). In the oriental concept of reality, Castro sums up, everything is interpenetrable and interchangeable (p. 439, n. 68).

No major French writer in the nineteenth century, with the questionable exception of Baudelaire, had closer and more enduring personal relations with painters than Zola. At the bottom of this was an element of luck: the good fortune that gave him Paul Cézanne as school fellow at Aix. Cézanne is commonly credited with having first tutored Zola in the appreciation of modern art by conducting him round the Salon des Refusés in 1863. It was mainly through Cézanne that Zola first came into direct contact with painters: with Pissarro, who had been a fellow student of Cézanne when the latter was attending the Académie Suisse in 1861; and subsequently with Bazille and Monet who in 1865 were sharing a studio which Cézanne and Pissarro would occasionally visit. Pissarro and Bazille were regular guests at the Thursday evening gatherings that Zola inaugurated when he set up house with his future wife in 1866. A series of staccato, memory-laden notes, put on paper twenty years later, recall the atmosphere of those days: “A Paris. Nouveaux amis… . Arrivée de Baille et de Cézanne. Nos réunions du jeudi.—Paris à conquérir, promenades, dédain. Les musées … les cafés.” Of the cafés Zola had here in mind, history has preserved the name of one only, the Guerbois, in the Batignolles district. His wife, long after his death, contested the tradition that makes Zola a one-time pillar of this establishment (“a-t-on assez parlé de ce café Guerbois où mon cher mari n'allait presque jamais”), but we are not obliged to see in this declaration more than a misguided attempt to censor what accorded ill with the cherished image of her husband as the respectable, home-loving citizen. Rather, it was the bohemian but unsociable Cézanne whose appearances at the Café Guerbois were infrequent. Zola would have listened here to critics such as Duranty (whom he had seen before, during business hours, at Hachette's) and Philippe Burty, and to a number of painters totally unknown at that time to the wider public—Bazille and Fantin-Latour, Degas, a formidable debater, Monet, rather shyer in argument, Renoir, sceptical and amused at Zola's downrightness, Pissarro, the eldest of them all, the father of a family lodging outside Paris, the Belgian Alfred Stevens, the American Whistler. One of the “regulars” was Antoine Guillemet, a young landscape painter who in 1866 took Zola to visit Manet at his studio. Here the debutant author of La confession de Claude heard from the master the story of his artistic apprenticeship and was able to study the canvases on which he was working. The seeds of a lifelong friendship were sown, the first fruits of which were the special article on Manet which Zola inserted as part of his first Salon in L'Evénement (7 May 1866), and the later study written for the Revue du XIXe Siècle and republished separately as a brochure in 1867.Manet's gratitude for these “remarkable” articles was expressed in two cordial letters and, possibly, in the offer to illustrate a de luxe edition of the Contes à Ninon} This particular project went adrift, but later in the year Zola began sitting for his portrait, which Manet completed in time for the 1868 Salon. Thanks largely to Dau-bigny's intervention, the group of painters later to be known as the Impressionists were well represented in that year's exhibition. Zola reviewed their work in a further series of articles, this time in L'Evénement illustré. Though his expressions were a little more sedate than those he had used in 1866, there was no perceptible slackening in his fervour for Manet (discussed 10 May) or for Pissarro and Monet (19 and 24 May). Cézanne's submissions were, that year as formerly, rejected, so that Zola lacked a pretext to give him critical encouragement even had he wished to. Further proof of Zola's popularity among the so-called Batignolles school is provided by the evidence of two large canvases painted early in 1870, in both of which he features: Bazille's picture of his studio, where Zola is seen chatting to Renoir, and the more formally grouped “Atelier aux Batignolles” by Fantin-Latour.

Did Henry James or someone else invent the international novel? Did it originate naturally from his vantage point in observing the behavior of his countrymen abroad or did he take an existing type of narrative and from his favorable position bring it to a perfection of which his predecessors were incapable? Although it is widely recognized that “the international theme … was … peculiarly his,” there has been only one answer suggested to these questions, despite their obviously great critical importance. “Mr. James is not quite the inventor of the international novel,” William Dean Howells observed many years ago in his introduction to Daisy Miller. He had previously ascribed the invention of this type of fiction to the Baroness Tautphoeus, “an English woman living in Bavaria,” whose first novel, The Initials, was published in 1850. “The Initials is first of all a love story,” Howells had written in his Heroines of Fiction, “and then it is an international love story, and perhaps the earliest of the modern sort, which Americans rather than the English have cultivated.”

Two readings of crucial lines, one dependent upon the other, are typical of attempts to solve the riddle embodied in T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. The term “empty” in the lines “The hope only/ Of empty men” is usually taken as synonymous with “hollow,” and the “multifoliate rose” is taken as a haven of escape, acceptable to hollow men, but intellectual and spiritual death for others. As a result, the concluding portion, “Life is very long,” of the final section is assumed to be spoken by the same “hollow men” whose aimlessness is symbolized in the first part of the poem.