In the first of her two volumes to the writing of which Amy Lowell gave her life that John Keats might live afresh, she threw out this suggestion: “If any one would have a grateful task, let him track Keats's indebtedness to Chapman's Homer. There is an ample field and practically unexplored.” In offering this suggestion Miss Lowell evidently was not aware that the expert eye of de Sélincourt had already noted the indebtedness which he had observed in the course of a perusal of the entire series of Chapman's Homeric translations. And I must plead guilty to the same ignorance at the time I began a systematic comparison of the two poets, embracing the whole of Keats's poetry and the entire translation of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns. (I have not included the translations of the Georgics of Hesiod, the Book of Days, or any of Chapman's dramas.)

So far as we know, Wordsworth never bothered himself enough with Keats to write a line about him. The best evidence we have as to his attitude toward his youthful contemporary is in the testimony of Lord Houghton and Benjamin Haydon. Lord Houghton relates that when at Haydon's “the younger poet had been induced to repeat to the elder the fine ‘Hymn to Pan’ out of Endymion …. Wordsworth only remarked, ‘it was a pretty piece of Paganism.‘”

No english deist has been more discussed in connection with Voltaire than Bolingbroke. For Bolingbroke was an important political figure, who had definite personal relations with Voltaire, and whose name appears with great frequency in Voltaire's works. Yet no other English deist was so falsely quoted by Voltaire, and no other important deist, with the possible exception of Thomas Chubb, seems to have had less direct influence on the course of Voltaire's deistic criticism. Critics have spoken so long of Bolingbroke as master and of Voltaire as pupil that a tradition has been established, for which there seems to be no foundation in fact.

Mm. edmond et Jules de Goncourt ont inventé trois choses, ils le disent du moins: le naturalisme, la vogue du XVIIIe siècle, et le japonisme. Pour nous en tenir à la littérature, ils se flattent un peu; cependant Germinie Lacerteux est de 1865, et suivait Renée Mauperin, qui est de 1864.

With these words Professor Lanson began the section of his Histoire de la littérature française devoted to the Goncourt brothers. It would be permissible in a manual intended for the man in the street to halt at this point in order to discuss the Goncourt claims to have founded Naturalism without investigating the vogue of the eighteenth century and of things Japanese in literature. Here, however, it is proposed to go a little farther, to investigate first the Goncourt claims to be the first French artists to appreciate the work of the Japanese, and secondly to call attention to a kind of literary “Japonisme,” concerning which Professor Lanson is silent.

Thomas carlyle's essay entitled German Playwrights appeared in the Foreign Review in 1829. The three playwrights dealt with as representatives of the whole class in Germany are Grillparzer, Klingemann and Milliner. If the space devoted to each of these three could be regarded as a criterion of their relative merit Klingemann would rank slightly above Grillparzer, and Milliner would have to be considered almost doubly as important as either of the other two. In a footnote Carlyle lists the following plays of Grillparzer which had appeared prior to 1829: Die Ahnfrau, König Ottokars Glück und Ende and Sappho. He disposes of Die Ahnfrau in summary fashion in about two pages, devotes about three to Kônig Ottokar, and dismisses Sappho with a few sentences. Of Das Goldene Vliess, which had appeared in 1821, Carlyle merely says (p. 97): “His Goldene Vliess we suspect to be of similar character, [like Sappho] but have not yet found time and patience to study it.”

Seldom do readers of Gerstäcker's Germelshausen, Irrfahrten, Wild-Dieb, etc., know how this author first appealed to, and won, his worldwide clientèle of the last eighty-odd years. I hope soon to present a truly adequate account of his life, letters and works; here I will but most briefly sketch his early life, depict his picturesque attempts to become a real American citizen, and indicate finally the truly dominant influence of this, his first American sojourn, over all his later career.

In discussing the date of the Eddie poems one must carefully distinguish three factors: the date of their written compilation or recording, the date of their actual composition by the poet, and the age of the mythological, legendary and other material which they contain. In speaking of the age of the Eddie poems it is clear that we are referring to the second factor, the creative act of the poet, which, so far as we know, did not contemplate immediate written record either by himself or a scribe. It is by no means superfluous, however, to emphasize the distinction of the first two factors mentioned, as, in the case of the sagas, they have not yet been entirely disentangled. A consideration of the first and third factors is furthermore not without value, as it must be clear that the poems are not younger than the time of their written record and not older than their original content. The recording may be much later, the content much older, than the date of composition. These, however, if they can be established, furnish the most definite termini ad quern and a quo respectively. If the recording was actually centuries later than the time of composition we shall expect to find corruptions of various sorts, such as interpolations and transposition of stanzas and verses, with which we are abundantly familiar in the case of the popular ballads. This allows great leeway for textual criticism, in which, as experience has shown, critics are prone to disagree. Similarly, if the original content is centuries older than the time of composition of the poems, it is reasonable to suppose that the content will have been profoundly affected in its passage through the centuries. If we take as an example the Nibelungenlied, whose date of composition is approximately known, its original content of the time of the Germanic migrations has been in places so affected by the later medieval institutions and ideals of life, which have thereby become an important part of the content, that the terminus a quo would by this very fact be pushed far beyond the time of the migrations. Analogies of this sort may be of value in an effort to date the Eddie poems, but the question is here somewhat confused by the question of possible interpolations.