There is no agreement among Shakespearian critics with regard to the organic unity of Twelfth Night. Dr. Furnivall in one place believes that “the leading note of the play is fun.” In another place he says less aptly that “the lesson is, sweet are the uses of adversity.” Morton Luce records his “impression that the perfect unity of Twelfth Night lies in the wise good humor that pervades the play.” Schlegel is representative of a group of critics who believe that “love regarded as an affair of the imagination rather than of the heart, is the fundamental theme running through all the variations of the play.” Most commentators, however, have agreed that the leading thought of this play may be discovered in its title; that the words Twelfth Night, or What You Will, are themselves the key-note of the play; that Shakespeare's first thought was to provide a comedy suitable for the festival. No one of these critics has thought that an organic idea has been more than incidental in this creation of pure mirth. So purely comic are its scenes, and so entirely sufficient are all of its incidents, that critics have not gone behind its gay life to look for an underlying moral law.

I wish to call attention to a work of national importance, which, in the judgment of those best entitled to an opinion, should be accomplished within the next decade, if it is to be well done. As is doubtless known to everyone here to-day, there has been in progress for many years a plan to prepare and publish an adequate dictionary of our American vernacular speech. But the details of the undertaking, the plan that should be followed, and the special reasons for making more rapid progress are matters that have received comparatively slight attention, even in this Association of representative American scholars.

In October, 1803, Kleist secretly left Paris and traveled alone and without the customary passports to the northern coast of France, to the vicinity of Boulogne-sur-mer. In and near this city Napoleon I. was assembling a vast army, with munitions and transports, for the ostensible purpose of making a descent upon England. Kleist wished to enter this army and share its fate on English soil, in the hope of a soldier's death.

It has been tacitly assumed that the Mirour de l'Omme lived only in its name (and even in that somewhat equivocally) until the discovery of the single extant manuscript in 1895. To suggest that the poem not only did not die when it was born, but that on the contrary it was well known to Spenser, and that it gave to the Faerie Queene one of its most famous purple patches—such a suggestion, one may readily grant, would occur offhand to no one. Yet there is weighty evidence in support of just this contention, and that evidence it is the object of this paper to present. That the case is one which challenges somewhat sharply our established preconceptions, and that it must rest on firm ground to command assent, I am thoroughly aware.

A short Defence of two Excellent Comedies, viz. Sir Fopling Flutter, and The Conscious Lovers; in answer to many scandalous Reflections, on them both, by a certain terrible Critick, who never saw the latter, and scarce knows anything of Comedy at all.

Lovers of Milton's poetry occasionally note with regret signs that his great epic is losing its influence upon the mind of the race. Hence, any attempt to revive interest in Paradise Lost deserves the sympathetic attention of students of literature. Such an attempt is the article of Professor E. N. S. Thompson, The Theme of Paradise Lost, printed in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, March, 1913. As I venture to differ from the writer, however, in a number of important particulars, I shall attempt to formulate what seems a more comprehensive view of the meaning of Milton's epic.

In Morris's Historical Outlines of English Accidence, § 155, occurs this statement: “…in Old English Ye was always used as a nominative, and you as a dative or accusative. In the English Bible this distinction is very carefully observed, but in the dramatists of the Elizabethan period there is a very loose use of the two forms.” Similarly Lounsbury: “Ye in the language of Chaucer invariably denotes the nominative; you the objective; and this distinction will still be found observed in the Authorized Version of the Bible.” Emerson: “This is the use in Chaucer, and in the English Bible of 1611, the language of which, however, is based on the translations of earlier times.” Smith: “This distinction is preserved in the King James Version of the Bible: Ye in me, and I in you; but not in Shakespeare and later writers.”

Though no new light seems forthcoming on the nature of the accusation made by Cecily Chaumpaigne against Chaucer, the names of the witnesses (to her release) are not without interest. Of the five witnesses, four were prominent men in their day. Of the fifth, however, nothing has hitherto been known.