The belief that we have in the non-Shakespearean verse of the First Quarto of Hamlet an extensive portion of the lost play commonly and I think rightly attributed to Kyd throws discredit upon the originality of Shakespeare, and I hope to show in this paper that it is based upon an impossible theory of composition. So much has been written upon this subject that I must assume familiarity with such matters as the references of Nash and Lodge to the early play, omit mention of many conflicting points of view, and proceed at once to the more recent discussions of the particular problem before us.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century one of the most notable scholars and editors in the field of the older Scottish literature was the learned and energetic John Pinkerton, who began to publish his own poetry at the age of eighteen, brought out several volumes of poems and ballads before he was twenty-five, wrote valuable contributions to the history of Scotland, published two collections of old Scottish poetry, as well as editions of Barbour's “Bruce,” etc.,—and then after 1800 went off into entirely new lines in his “Modern Geography,” “General Collection of Voyages and Travels,” “New Modern Atlas,” and even a “Petralogy.”

In composing Samson Agonistes, Milton took from the Bible only his chief characters and his catastrophe, that is Samson's being led away from the prison to entertain the Philistines and his destruction of their theatre. The events which Milton presents before and after his catastrophe do not appear in the Bible, and none of them follow necessarily from anything narrated there. Careful investigation has shown further that Milton made no important use of any other version of the story of Samson. Accordingly, the question arises how did Milton develop the plot of Samson Agonistes?

Although Bulwer-Lytton, in the preface to Richelieu and in various footnotes, acknowledges certain sources for his drama, notably two French novels, he nowhere records any obligation to French dramas. At the same time he remarks that in handling historical data he has availed himself of that “license with dates and details which poetry permits and which the highest authorities in the Drama of France herself have sanctioned.” This statement in his preface raises a two-fold question: Who were the “highest authorities” whom Bulwer had in mind, and to what extent was he indebted to them? In such an inquiry no less than three French dramatists offer material for consideration.

“A happy ende,” thus runs the burden of a song by one of the “uncertain” authors of Tottel's Miscellany—“A happy ende exceadeth all.” It is a sentiment, so we are often reminded, by no means unknown to the greatest of the Elizabethans. Indeed, according to the concensus of critical opinion, All's Well That Ends Well would seem to be the false divinity that, from first to last, shaped the ends of all too many of Shakspere's comedies. Thus, Mr. H. C. Hart, in the Arden edition of Love's Labour's Lost, states that that play disintegrates (has “broken down”) by the time the last scenes get under way; and Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, speaking, in effect, for a host of others, holds that the ending of The Two Gentlemen of Verona “blows all character to the winds.” “For stage effect Valentine must surrender his true love to his false friend with a mawkish generosity that deserves nothing so much as kicking.” A more or less similar judgement has been pronounced upon some of the great romantic comedies, the problem plays, and the dramatic romances. As You Like it, for instance, is marred, according to Swinburne, by that “one unlucky smear on one corner of the canvas . . . . the betrothal of Oliver to Celia,” a “sacrifice” (like the concluding marital sacrifices in Much Ado, All's Well, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, and other plays) falsely motivated by “the actual or hypothetical necessity of pairing off all the couples” so as “to secure a nominally happy and undeniably matrimonial ending.”—“In the fifth act,” says Hartley Coleridge, “ladies have no discretion”—nor gentlemen either, if we may believe his fellow critics. By the fifth act, as Quiller Couch would have it in the outburst already referred to, “there are no Gentlemen in Verona”; and so, allowing only for change of scene, as the case may require, to Messina, Roussillon, Vienna, Sicily, or Ancient Britain, says many another commentator. “Kill Claudio,” the command of Beatrice to Benedick, springs out of a fine and humanly altogether excellent moment of white-hot anger, but Coleridge and Dr. Johnson would do as much in cold blood for Angelo in Measure for Measure. Helena (in All's Well), says Lounsbury, is “untrue to her sex” in pursuing and finally marrying Bertram; and “frankly unfeminine,” according to Professor Brander Matthews' account of the conclusion of A Winter's Tale, is Hermione's forgiveness of her husband “without one word of reproach.” Hartley Coleridge, finally, urges that “the exhibition of such madness of heart” as that of Leontes in this play—to which instance Mr. G. C. Macauley adds that of Posthumus in Cymbeline—“should be confined to the sternest tragedy,” since such sinners could “surely never again be worthy of a restoration to happiness.” And all this sacrifice of poetic justice and psychological truth, this “holocaust of higher and better feelings” (to quote Swinburne once more) is exacted by our “theatrical idol,” the conventional happy ending: “the liquorish desire to leave the board of fancy with a palatable morsel of cheap sugar on the tongue.” In a word, the unhappy happy ending (“nominally happy and undeniably matrimonial”)—this really would seem to have been the fatal Cleopatra for which Shakspere lost his sense of humor—not to mention his artistic conscience—and was content to lose it.

The British Museum possesses two sets of Shakespeare's plays which were annotated by S. T. Coleridge. Coleridge's copious marginalia were utilized by his nephew, H. N. Coleridge, for Literary Remains, but with a great deal of rewriting, which was in part, but only in part, necessary. Of the fragments here printed, the first has not, I believe, appeared before; the second has been printed with alterations and large omissions; the third has been altered.

The purpose of this paper is, first, to attempt to correct a still rather widely prevalent error concerning the logical import and the usual emotional temper of eighteenth-century optimism, and, second, to point out that the significance in the history of ideas of the multiplication and the popularity of theodicies in the first half of that century consisted less in the tendency of these arguments to diffuse optimistic views of the nature of reality than in their tendency to procure acceptance for certain new ideas of the nature of the good, which the logical exigencies of the optimistic argument involved—ideas pregnant with important consequences for both ethics and aesthetics, since they were to be among the most distinctive elements in what perhaps best deserves to be named “Romanticism.”

The true nature of the so-called Gothic novel has been misunderstood, and the problem of its origin rendered unnecessarily difficult in consequence of a classification which takes only one of the many features into account. The critics who have hit upon supernaturalism as the most distinctive and significant element, have done this in spite of the fact that a part of the body of the fiction they pretend to describe is plainly controlled by a rationalism that forbids anything more than a mere toying with the appearances of the marvellous. No procedure of the authors of such novels is more usual than the lifting of the mask when the mysterious scene has gone far enough to produce its emotional effect. To insist upon the usual classification is to render oneself incapable of differentiating between the Radcliffian novel on the one hand, and Otranto, the Monk and the German Schauerroman on the other.

In Recalling a story told by Turgenieff at one of Flaubert's Sunday gatherings, Maupassant writes:

Personne plus que le grand romancier russe ne sut faire passer dans l'âme ce frisson de l'inconnu voilé, et, dans la demi-lumière d'un conte étrange, laisser entrevoir tout un monde de choses inquiétantes, incertaines, menaçantes. Avec lui, on la sent bien, la peur de l'Invisible, la peur de l'inconnu qui est derrière le mur, derrière la porte, derrière la vie apparente. . . . . On croit sentir, avec lui, un fil imperceptible qui nous guide d'une façon mystérieuse à travers la vie, comme à travers un rêve nébuleux dont le sens nous échappe sans cesse. Il n'entre point hardiment dans le surnaturel, comme Edgar Poë ou Hoffmann, il raconte des histoires simples où se mêle seulement quelque chose d'un peu troublant.1

The life of William Cowper has been written many times; first by his friend and fellow poet, William Hayley, and most recently by Thomas Wright, Principal of the Cowper School at Olney. The present manuscript, here reprinted in full, was probably prepared for the first of these biographers about two years after the poet's death. It is in the hand of the Rev. John Johnson, Cowper's cousin and constant companion during the last five years of his life. It was doubtless used by Hayley for his brief record of these years, but seems to have been unknown to all succeeding biographers. The dismal circumstances of this part of Cowper's life combined with the unscientific historical attitude of a century ago to make Hayley's account altogether unsatisfactory today. The diary comes to the modern student of Cowper, therefore, as virtually new source material for those years of his life which have always been the least documented.

The purpose of this article is to indicate the character and approximately the scope of Rossetti's reading, and to examine the opinions he expressed on the books he read. Many volumes must, of course, have passed through his hands of which he left no record, but enough allusions remain (and I omit mention of a few relating to unimportant works of the nineteenth century) to enable us to reconstruct the literary interests of Rossetti and define his tendencies as a critic.

Material for the study is drawn in part from Rossetti's works, though he wrote few formal criticisms. Comments on his reading occur also in various biographies of the poet, particularly in that by his brother, William Michael Rossetti. Finally, the greatest source of our knowledge is his own letters. A large number of these have been preserved in volumes edited under different titles by his brother, but there are many others in various memoirs, especially in Hall Caine's Recollections of Rossetti.

Middleton's London comedies of his early period, 1604-1614, have, throughout the course of English dramatic criticism, inspired curiously diverse comments.

The early comedy of Middleton is as light, rancid, and entertaining as anything in Elizabethan drama. It is irresponsible rather than immoral, and does not exactly recommend, or approve of, the trickeries and debaucheries which it represents, in a life-like way, under improbable conditions. . . . . His aim is at effect, and he rarely fails in his aim. . . . .1

Although the present-day popular views of grammar do not, in medieval fashion, find “divine inspiration in the eight parts of speech” and veiled references to the Trinity in “the three persons of verbal conjugation” yet they do look upon the rules of the common school grammars as the infallible measure of correct language, and the one defence against the forces of corruption that continually beset it. “Grammatici unus finis est recté loqui” still expresses the attitude of the ordinary public, of most school teachers, and of many men of letters. Even a hundred years of the historical method in linguistic scholarship has failed to affect in any marked degree the common grammatical ideas and ideals of the general public.

The sonnets of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, despite the intensity of feeling and glow of style which seem to immerse the reader in their spirit, are obscure. Often we find ourselves left with a very vague conception as to the import of the sonnet as a whole. Yet the vagueness does not result, as sometimes with Swinburne, from the haziness of meaning, or from the fine diffusion of thought or feeling through the large fecundity of images and words. Rossetti's obscurity arises often from the use of special symbols bound up with his view of life; more often from the fact that although a sonnet takes its inceptions from some specific and personal experience, the poet generalizes and allegorizes it in such a way as to imply the personal experience and still give us no clew to it. The experience is vividly present to his own imagination so that the sonnet is a commentary upon it; yet the actual object is either not present or only vaguely adumbrated. Thus a study of Rossetti's life as a background for his poetry, recreating the lost implications, should and does illuminate the poetry very vividly. Such a study in this particular case, moreover, affords a revealing instance of the way in which experience transmutes itself into lyric art. I wish, then in this paper, to bring together in concise form all the material for dating and grouping the sonnets of The House of Life and to discuss how far we are justified in giving to these sonnets an autobiographical interpretation.

The first poet to cast a spell upon the impressionable mind of the youthful Keats was Mary Tighe. When Mrs. Tighe's Psyche and Other Poems was published in London, Keats, then in his sixteenth year, was fresh from school, where he had revelled in Lemprière and Spence's Polymetis. In the work of the Irish poetess the young reader found chivalric romance and Greek myth against a background of Celtic landscape and mood. The romantic melancholy and the luxuriant imagery of the Psyche touched the springs of his imagination; rhythm and phrase impressed themselves upon his memory and became a part of the fabric of his verse. The biographers and critics of Keats have done scant justice to Mrs. Tighe. Her influence upon the pseudo-Spenserian pieces of his earlier years has been recognized, but the fact that the Irish poetess was one of the most important sources of his poetic inspiration and vocabulary has been overlooked.

Gifford long ago complained that “the modern editions of Massinger offer a very inadequate representation of his works,” and Dr. Greg recently remarked—and to a considerable extent demonstrated—that this is “unhappily still true.” Having recently read the manuscript facsimile of Massinger's admirable Believe as You List and compared the text with that of Arthur Symons in the “unexpurgated edition” (save the mark!) published in 1889, I am prepared to confirm the opinion of Gifford and Greg and to supply the student of Massinger with a comparatively long list of corrections to errata contained in Mr. Symons' text. They are as follows:

1. In twenty-five instances in which Massinger wrote the aphetic form 'em his modern editor prints the word them. Twenty-three of these follow words ending with a consonantal sound, and only two follow vowel sounds (study, see).

In his recently published Philosophy of Grammar, Professor Otto Jespersen devotes Chapter XIII to the discussion of “Case.” And, as in every former work from his pen, in this latest he is highly interesting and instructive. And yet I find myself unable to agree with several positions taken therein, especially in the chapter on Case.

I use the term lyric in the sense of form rather than of inspiration and should say stances except that the word was not applied to the lyric monologues until 1630. My subject is the origin of the monologues, written in other meters than the alexandrine couplet, that are found in the plays of Corneille and his contemporaries. The most familiar examples are those of the Cid and Polyeucte. They are usually of a contemplative nature, but do not necessarily contain a soul struggle.

The problem offered by Count Leo Tolstoy to the world has not been advanced appreciably nor has a definite soluio been offered during the past years. Large numbers of hitherto unknown articles and stories have been brought to light. Nearly every person connected with the great writer during his last years has published memoirs and reminiscences. Nevertheless the serious question as to the nature of the real greatness of the man is still unanswered and no one has attempted a synthesis of the various views held about him.