Of Leigh Hunt's service to Shelley no adequate study has been made. We naturally look for it in Dowden's Life of Shelley (1886) or in Dr. Miller's Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats (N. Y., 1910). Unfortunately, both of these works contain serious misstatements regarding the Examiner, and Dowden's Life, also, is apparently responsible for the mistaken notion that John Wilson deserves the chief place among Shelley's contemporaries for publicly recognizing his genius. Yet a review of the criticism which appeared during Shelley's lifetime shows that Wilson's appreciation (and that of most other critics, for that matter) was confined to vague and unimportant assertions of Shelley's “genius,” offset by disapprobation of his views on almost every subject he wrote about. Early extravagant views expressed by the poet, although modified later, were not forgotten by adherents of the Establishment and the Crown. His published opinions and the rumors regarding his conduct interfered with general approval of his work as a poet. Leigh Hunt soon saw that the attacks on Shelley were induced chiefly by his misunderstood philosophy and the scandalous stories circulated about his conduct, and accordingly set about explaining his theories and defending his life. But in this effort to defend and interpret Shelley, Hunt in his generation stood practically alone, at least as far as the organs of criticism were concerned.1

Charles Reade's masterpiece, The Cloister and the Hearth, gives an admirable picture of life in the Fifteenth Century. The reader wanders along deserted roads and through deep forests; he sees the inside of cottages, monasteries, inns, caves, and palaces; he makes the acquaintance of peasants and nobles, churchmen and artists, hermits and robbers. The life so opulently pictured is not limited to one country, but flows through Holland, Germany, Burgundy, and Italy.

Although Wordsworth professed contempt for Macpherson's “translation” as a worthless forgery, it can be shown that he was familiar with the subject-matter, the spirit, and, in places, with the exact phraseology of Ossian; that he borrowed an Ossianic word or two when he needed it; that many of his poems deal with themes relating to the Ossianic poems, or present images or lines to which parallels may be found in Ossian; and that in his passionate love of the mountain wilderness he came very near the spirit of the blind bard of Selma.

It has been the accepted opinion that Keats's first volume received very little attention at the time of its publication in 1817. This is no doubt due to the fact that until recently the only review known was that by Leigh Hunt published in three parts in the Examiner for June 1, July 6, and July 13, 1817. In 1917, Sir Sidney Colvin1 brought to light two others, namely that in the September issue of the Eclectic Review and that in Constable's Scots and Edinburgh Magazine for October, 1817. It has been my good fortune to discover two additional reviews which seem to have been overlooked by students of Keats, although they are apparently the earliest published.

The American sonnet before the Civil War is not a rich field. Few of our literary men had written in this difficult and conventional form. Some, like James Gates Percival and William G. Simms, wrote poems of fourteen lines in such eccentric variations as to defy classification. A few, like Jones Very or Park Benjamin, hid an occasional fine sonnet among numerous negligible ones. Some, like David Humphreys and Washington Allston, achieved mere mixed echoes of English originals. Among the major poets before the War, Bryant wrote five and Lowell twenty-seven sonnets. Longfellow, whose great period of sonnet writing was yet to come, had written but nine sonnets in 1861. Compared with these poets, George Henry Boker stands alone, both for the quality and quantity of his work. By his contemporaries he was regarded as the greatest American sonnet writer. The Book of the Sonnet,1 a collection of American and English Sonnets, edited by Leigh Hunt and S. Adams Lee, is dedicated to Boker. Both in the text and introduction he is given more space than any other American. The editors' phrase, “such sonnets as those of Wordsworth in English and George Henry Boker in American literature” indicates the height of his contemporary reputation. The Philadelphia Press, December 22, 1881, tells the story of Boker's confusion, when as a young man, he attended a dinner addressed by Daniel Webster, who, in the midst of his discourse, acknowledged Boker's presence and recited his beautiful “Lear and Cordelia” from start to finish, to illustrate a point.

Coleridge, more than any other man in the England of his time, sensed what were the significant currents of thought then in the civilized world, although his recognition of many of these ideas seems instinctive rather than conscious. Coleridge was often a prophet who saw as in a glass darkly. But though darkly, he saw—or, at least, felt.

Miss Austen, in a letter to her sister Cassandra dated December 18, 1798, writes thus of a circulating library about to be opened, presumably at Steventon, on January 14:

As an inducement to subscribe, Mrs. Martin tells me that her collection is not to consist only of hovels, but of every kind of literature, etc. She might have spared this pretension to our family who are great novel readers and not ashamed of being so; but it was necessary, I suppose, to the self-consequence of half her subscribers.

In classifying the feet of English verse and their variations we may remove some of the difficulties, and some of the divergencies in the conclusions, by a scientific defining of the terms stressed and unstressed syllables. For simplicity we may confine the discussion at present to iambic feet.

Theodor Fontane's interest in English literature dates back to his boyhood years in Swinemünde. Here he first became familiar with the name of the arch-magician Walter Scott, a favorite with his father and at that time the most brilliant luminary in the literary firmament. Keen admiration for the great Briton the poet retained throughout his life. Clear reflections of this enthusiasm may be discerned in his first novel, the broad historical canvas Vor dem Sturm (1878), and also to a lesser extent in several of his later works.1

In the history of English metrics the verse of the popular ballad occupies a strategic position. From it one may look backward toward Anglo-Saxon verse, and forward toward many developments of modern times. This investigation has been conceived in the belief that solution of some problems of ballad metrics not only will be of value in connection with the ballads, but also will open a new line of approach for the study of other verse, both more ancient and more modern. The principles here worked out will be found applicable, I believe, to popular verse in general; it is impossible, however, to cover the whole field, and the present investigation has accordingly been confined to the material in Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, as the best-known, most readily available, and on the whole most authoritative collection. At the same time no effort has been made to scrutinize very carefully the canon. The battle of the ballads is not our battle. Trojan and Tyrian are alike to the metrist. Be a poem Christmas carol, song, border ballad, minstrel ballad, or ballad par excellence, there is no necessary peculiarity of its meter, and the evidence here presented will go to show that as a whole Child's material is indeed reducible to a single metrical norm. The few exceptional cases will be pointed out in their places, but in general examples can be drawn indiscriminately from any of the different types.

In his admirable paper upon the sources of Browning's Childe Roland, Mr. Harold Golder shows from what a rich storehouse of nursery tale, poetry, and romance the poet drew for many of the incidents that go to make up that poem. Childe Roland is such a synthetic poem that the problem of finding satisfactory sources for it is not simple. Nor is it made easier by Browning's stubborn insistence that the only true source of the poem is the line from King Lear. But it has been impossible to be content with Browning's statement, and critic after critic has ransacked ballad, fairy tale and legend to find the origin of the simples which the poet has compounded in his poem. In the light of Browning's statement, the problem becomes one of “establishing a subconscious connection between Edgar's maudlin words and the material from which Browning obviously drew”; in other words, we must find for the sources of Childe Roland materials so familiar to Browning at the impressionable time of his life as to have become a part of his own mental character, and further, the materials must be such as would definitely suggest the images which appear in the poem.

One cannot read through the mass of discussions of the problem of shall and will published during the past century nor even those written since 1900 without being impressed by the wide diversity of the points of view and the definite conflict of the opinions and conclusions thus brought together. Even among those articles that can be grouped as expressing the conventional rules there is considerable variety and contradiction, not in the general rule for independent declarative statements (that a shall with the first person corresponds with a will with the second and third) but in the other rules concerning questions, reported discourse, and subordinate clauses. That there is a considerable body of literary usage which conflicts with the conventional rules is indicated by the many pages in these articles devoted to pointing out instances in which “the best of our authors” have violated the rules.

In an interesting paper which appeared in March, 1924, Miss Hélène Harvitt discussed “How Henry James Revised Roderick Hudson.” The investigations on which this article was based were made in Paris where original American editions were presumably not available, for we are told that “All quotations from the revised version of Roderick Hudson refer to the Macmillan edition of 1921, those from the first edition, to that of 1883 (2 vols).” If the author had been able to refer to an American edition published after 1882, she would have noticed the two copyrights (one issued to the publishers in 1875, and one to the author in 1882) and the “Note” (which has a page to itself): ‘Roderick Hudson’ was originally published in 1875. It has now been minutely revised, and has received a large number of verbal alterations. Several passages have been rewritten.“ That is, she would have seen that the text which she quotes throughout her article as from the first edition, comes in reality from a thoroughly revised later version.

It is generally known that the timely discovery in Paris of specimens of Japanese color-prints and watercolor painting in the late sixties had an immediate influence on the French Impressionist painters. However, it is not always noted that the writers who supported this school of painting: Baudelaire and Zola, Manet's special friends; the Goncourt brothers who admired Degas; Clemenceau and Théodore Duret, knew certain aspects of Japanese art, and were collectors of curios. Japanese stories and legends entered Europe at about the same time as the color-prints, descriptions of Japanese life are numerous in the magazines of the period. The first poem in French about Japan appears to be this sonnet by Catulle Mendès, which he dates back in his Œuvres complètes to the volume Philoméla (1863).

The distinction in use between the verbs ser and estar constitutes one of the thorniest points in Spanish grammar. It is not discussed in a thoroughgoing way in any treatise. Most of the native Spanish grammars, as Bello-Cuervo, are weak on this particular subject. Users of language are always guided primarily by instinct, not by rule, and we shall see that in the present case the instinct of Spaniards is delicate and especially difficult to reduce to formal law.