Possibly none of the “dark conceits” woven into the fabric of Spenser's allegory appear so impenetrable to modern eyes as the topical allusions. They were obscure in the sixteenth century, but served in consequence to catch immediate attention and interest. Today, when clues are difficult to recognize, when modern readers lack the easy familiarity with everyday events and personalities which Spenser took for granted in his public, much of the topical meaning of the Faerie Queene has been lost. Occasionally, however, some of the allusions are recognized and the range of meaning in the poem is thereby extended. It has been observed recently that the Mutability cantos may refer to the problem of the succession. If a fairly convincing case could be made for this suggestion, it would be possible to appreciate anew how Spenser delighted his readers by adroit reference to topics forbidden in open debate. The following discussion is offered not as proof, but rather as a suggestion with enough likelihood to call for consideration.

Most of the scant attention paid by critics to the poetry of Thomas Campion has been sidetracked by two considerations which, however interesting in themselves, have little to do with his real poetic accomplishments. One of these considerations is that he was a musician and almost alone among his contemporaries composed settings for his own poems; the other is that he played some part in the guerilla warfare waged by a few Elizabethan writers against rhyme. Before we can make a fresh adjustment to his poetry, we must dispose of the first and reckon with the second.

In the study of the origins and development of French eighteenth century thought, the importance of Isaac de la Peyrère has been strangely overlooked. I say “strangely ”advisedly since not only was La Peyrère a person of some prominence in his day, but through his works, was one of the first to disseminate certain critical arguments which were to prove popular with deists in both France and England, and which find their highest degree of success in Voltaire's Essai sur les mœurs, La Bible enfin expliquée, and the Dictionnaire philosophique. Accordingly it is the purpose of this article to investigate La Peyrère's place among his contemporaries, the subsequent fortune of his ideas, and to attempt to evaluate his importance in the formation and development of critical deism in both France and England.

Various attempts have been made to disentangle the shares of the three authors to whom the Eastward Ho is assigned on the titlepage—Chapman, Ben Jonson, and Marston. “J.C.” in a notice of Eastward Ho contributed to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (September, 1821) made a few vague suggestions. Jonson had not the chief part in the writing; it has no bold delineation of character, no highly wrought finish of dialogue, and none of his peculiar richness of humour. “Neither, on the other hand, is it distinguished by his hardness,” such as overelaboration of character. “The style bears more resemblance to that of Chapman,” but Jonson probably first sketched the plan and revised the whole; he can be traced in the character of Touchstone and in the concluding scenes.

It is customary for the President of the Association to deliver an address as part of the annual program. For the most part my predecessors have used this occasion to discuss a subject of scholarly concern lying within the range of the speaker's competence, and the records of our annual meetings include a number of erudite papers of this character which were, or should have been, of interest to the audiences and which as published material have continuing significance for scholarship in widely diversified fields. By tradition, however, this occasion is for the President, who is in a few days to give place to a successor, a sort of moriturus saluto and he is therefore free to discuss any subject that he thinks of importance for the welfare of the organization. Several of my predecessors in office have departed from the erudite tradition and dealt with questions of contemporary import or of practical importance for the programs of the Association. The crisis in national affairs, which has its bearing on all forms of co-operative undertaking, leads me to follow this precedent and take up a matter, the significance of which for the future of higher learning in our country has not, I think, been realized or adequately discussed. It is the problem of the relation between nationalism and scholarship and, more specifically, the development of an American national scholarship in the humanities.

Francisco Xavier de Oliveira, also known as “Cavalheiro de Oliveira,” an obscure Portuguese official of the eighteenth century, is to most students of Romance literature a mere name, often confused with other Oliveiras, like Fernâo, the heretical grammarian; Alberto, the Brazilian poet; Olivesaira Martis, the dramatic historian; etc.

In one of those bursts of candor, for which he was famous, Merck once told the German poet: “Was du lebst, ist beßer, als was du schreibst. ”Late in life Goethe was to confirm this half-truth when he remarked to the faithful Eckermann: “Ich habe in meiner Poesie nie affektiert. Was ich nicht erlebte und was mir nicht auf die Nägel brannte und zu schaffen machte, habe ich auch nicht gedichtet und ausgesprochen. Liebesgedichte habe ich nur gemacht, wenn ich liebte. ”The very naturalism—in the Goethean sense—which, during the Strassburg period, he and his youthful friends proclaimed, partly out of the fervor of their own revolutionary souls and partly out of enthusiasm for Rousseau's Pygmalion (Dickt, u. Wahr., iii, 51) is anchored in this conviction:

Freundschaft, Liebe, Brüderschaft,
Trägt die sich nicht von selber vor?

With the exception of Rousseau, Diderot, and of course Voltaire, what appeal had French literature (bejahrt und vornehm) for them to whom life was a thing to be experienced and not remembered?

Two hundred years ago, in April, 1744, there was printed in London a long didactic poem in blank verse, The Art of Preserving Health, which brought its author, Dr. John Armstrong, considerable literary reputation during the following century in England, Italy, and America. In this work there are occasional passages of very pleasing poetry, but the goddess Hygeia, whom Armstrong invoked with all due fervor, failed to inspire him to create an enduring masterpiece on such themes as air, diet, and exercise. Consequently, during the last century there has been little interest in his poems and essays, or in his life, personality, and friendships. There is, of course, A. H. Bullen's short article in the Dictionary of National Biography, which added little, however, to Robert Anderson's memoir, or to Robert Chambers' account, and more recently Mr. Iolo A. Williams paid tribute to The Art of Preserving Health and published a bibliography of Armstrong's works. But there is no likelihood that Armstrong's writings will be much read or discussed in the future except by literary antiquarians and special students of the eighteenth century.

On August 18, 1756, acting prudently through an intermediary, Dr. Théodore Tronchin of Geneva, Rousseau sent to Voltaire a long letter in refutation of the latter's pessimistic Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne, which, provoked by the terrible earthquake at Lisbon on November 1, 1755, had been the cause of heated discussion among orthodox and unorthodox at Paris and Geneva during the preceding six months. Rousseau's letter has come to be known as his Lettre sur la Providence.

Dr. Johnson praised the style of the author of Letters from the Dead to the Living in reviewing a miscellany of his day. “The essayists,” he declared, “imitated, or tried to imitate the copiousness and luxuriance” of Mrs. Rowe's writing, and “laboured to add to her brightness of imagery, her purity of sentiment.” The poets, he continued, “had Dr. Watts before their eyes.” Elizabeth Rowe also observed Dr. Watts. In his preface to her Devout Exercises of the Heart, Watts remarked:

Though there is not one complete copy of verses amongst all these transports of her soul, yet she ever carried with her a relish of poesy even into her sacred retirements. Sometimes she springs her flights from a line or two of verse, which her memory had impressed upon her heart: sometimes from the midst of her religious elevation she lights upon a few lines of some modern poet, even Herbert as well as Milton, etc. tho’ ’tis but seldom she cites their names. At other times the verses seem to be the effusions of her own rapturous thoughts in sudden melody and metre; or at least I know not whence the lines are copied; but she most frequently does me the honor to make use of some of my writings in verse in these holy meditations of her heart. Blessed be that God, who has so favored anything my pen could produce, as to assist so sublime a devotion.

The indebtedness of our earliest American fiction to old world models has been made plain on numerous occasions. The Power of Sympathy, commonly regarded as our first novel, and the works which immediately followed, obviously owe much to Samuel Richardson; our earliest professional novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, has been branded at once a disciple of Godwin—his Arthur Mervyn a lineal descendent of Caleb Williams—and a member of the Gothic School. Sterne's name, and the influence of his Shandean sensibility this side the water, have been bruited about. Yet, so far, one immediate and important source, the French Heroic Romance—those great folios of Scudéry, Gomberville, La Calprenède, and their compeers, translated, imitated, and avidly read in the mother country—has been almost totally overlooked.

The Deserted Village is avowedly a didactic poem. Goldsmith wrote it as a solemn warning to England that the fate of Auburn was merely an example of what might happen to every other village of the land. But modern critics have touched upon this theme only very lightly, and where they have gone into it at all, their interpretations have in some cases led to a misunderstanding of the poet's analysis. On the premise that Goldsmith wrote and his contemporaries read the poem as a treatment of current social issues rather than just as a description of a simple rural community, I propose here to re-examine it as a social document. In so doing, I shall raise and attempt to answer three questions on which there seems to be no general agreement among scholars but which must be answered satisfactorily if we are to comprehend fully The Deserted Village. These questions are (1) just what message was the poet really trying to transmit to his readers? (2) how completely does the poem express his actual convictions? and (3) what inspired him to consider the condition he was describing as not merely unfortunate but fatal to the health of the nation?

When in the summer of 1881 Sidney Colvin settled back to enjoy the praise of friends and reviewers for his short biography of Walter Savage Landor, his pleasure was rudely interrupted by a letter to the Athenaeum from a correspondent in Italy, headed “A Protest.” The correspondent, Mrs. Eliza Lynn Linton, objected (quite unjustly, as Colvin's pained reply pointed out) to his “curiously grudging spirit” in nelgecting her part in Landor's later life, and insisted on the “one honour which I regard as the most precious in my whole history, and the public recognition of which, when occasion offers, I claim as my right. I mean my long and close friendship with Walter Savage Landor.” Twelve years previously, when Forster had first published his biography of Landor, he too found himself beset for the same reason with a series of ill-tempered reviews by the same hand, one of them beginning, “The Life of Walter Savage Landor has yet to be written.” One can only guess how Mr. Malcolm Elwin's recent volume, Savage Landor, would have pleased her. Certain it is that Landor's friendship with her is worth tracing in detail, especially since his letters to her, for the most part unpublished, provide an important source of information about the last years of his life, and one which not even this most recent biographer has touched.

The intention, in the following pages, is to identify the authors of all literary articles appearing in the Quarterly Review during the period (1826–53) in which John Gibson Lockhart was editor. The project rests mainly on the authority of the Contributors' Book kept by the house of John Murray, publishers of the Review, at 50 Albemarle Street, London. The full name of each contributor is given when it could be secured from the Dictionary of National Biography or from Boase's Modern English Biography. In several instances this separate information was unobtainable, and the form employed is that recorded in the Contributors' Book itself—which rarely does more than give the initials of first names. When, as in a few cases, the identity of the author of an article is unknown or doubtful, the fact is so stated.

Many contemporary critics are returning to the old credo that human reason “is often unreasonable.” This probably helps to explain the current revival of that famous study of emotional and intuitive responses, the Émile (1762) of Jean Jacques Rousseau. In as much as contemporaneous English reactions to that work have never been extensively studied, I present my findings.