One of the preliminary problems that confronts the textual investigator of the Canterbury Tales is to determine which if any of the early prints can claim to rank with the manuscripts as independent authorities. It seems to be generally agreed that no account need be taken of any edition later than that which Thynne included in his collection of the Chaucer's works printed by Godfray in 1532, but of the six prints of the Tales of which that was the latest no complete investigation seems yet to have been attempted. My object in this paper is to make a beginning by subjecting to critical analysis the first 116 lines of the Knight's Tale as they stand in these six editions.

“Geoffrey Chaucer,” says Professor Kittredge, “is nearer to us than Alexander Pope.” This is true, not only of the spirit of his times, but also of the man. Chaucer is more like us than Pope is: we feel more mental, moral, and spiritual kinship with the writer of the Nun's Priest's Tale than with the author of the Essay on Man. But, though this is true, we are not to think that therefore we understand him more thoroughly. In reality, we comprehend nearly all of Pope, and some of him we don't like; per contra, we like all of Chaucer that we comprehend: yet there are moods and meanings in him hard to fathom.

It is my intention to demonstrate that Chaucer, far from attacking alchemy in his Chanouns Yemannes Tale, was probably not only in sympathy with it, but possibly knew (and if so, respected) the famous secret. The common opinion, of course, is just the reverse: virtually all the critics follow Tyrwhitt in thinking that Chaucer's satire may have been inspired by personal resentment and that it may in its turn have inspired the statutes against “multiplying” passed in 1403. Both these assumptions are possible; yet there seems to be another side to the story, as Professor Kittredge has already hinted.

The lost morality, the Paternoster Play, has been a subject for speculation among many writers upon early English drama. Although no finding can lay claim to the last word upon the question, each additional bit of evidence helps toward a more accurate definition of the play. It is the purpose of this paper to call attention to the possible relation of this play to sermons upon the Oratio Domini among the treatises of Hugo of Saint Victor. Before embarking upon this discussion, it seems desirable to summarize briefly the facts and theories concerning the play now current. The material is of two sorts: information in regard to the morality to be derived from documents contemporaneous with it, and speculations as to its origin and nature which have been put forward by various scholars.

The Endymion myth, which grew up in the popular traditions of Elis in the Peloponnesus and of the Ionian cities in Caria, received literary treatment in a lyric poem of Sappho which is now lost. It does not exist in full development in extant classical literatures, although allusions to it are found in Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, Apollodorus, Pausanias, Lucian, Ovid, and Cicero. After the Renaissance when the study of classical literature was revived, it became a favorite subject for poetical allusion in the literatures of modern Europe. But the only poet before Keats who treated the myth at length was Michael Drayton; and, therefore, if Keats owed any suggestions for the plot of Endymion to his predecessors, he would most likely have derived them from Drayton.

The troubled tone and unsettled mood of Drayton's The Shepheards Sirena at once calls to the reader's mind Drayton's statement that in his pastoral poems he wrote “of most weightie things.” Rarely ever does this statement seem to be applicable to Drayton's pastorals, for though in many of them there is some veiled allusion to contemporaries, it hardly seems to be “weightie,” even from Drayton's point of view. In The Shepheards Sirena, however, there is the atmosphere of a dark conceit; things of weight, at least to Drayton, seem to be dimly shadowed forth. Dorilus, a shepherd well past his younger days, is cast “in sorrowes deepe” by the necessity of deciding between two courses of action in his relations with a fair shepherdess, the “Bright Sirena”:

Hard the Choise I haue to chuse,
To my selfe if friend I be,
I must my Sirena loose,
If not so, shee looseth me.

When, at the end of 1664, the second list of donations to authors and wits appeared—awarded by Colbert upon the recommendation of Chapelain,—it presented again, like the one of the preceding year, a mixture of feeble and profuse poetasters and of writers of outstanding value. Corneille, Racine and Molière contrasted oddly with Benserade, Cassagne, or Cotin. As in 1663, some of the most quarrelsome watchdogs of contemporary literature—La Serre, Furetière, and the brothers Boileau,—had been forgotten, intentionally or not. Chapelain, always over-anxious to please everybody and the minister, had committed a tactical mistake in excluding these satiric wits. That they would attack him at once was quite consistent with the literary customs of the time and with the habits of the Genus irritabile of all centuries. Moreover, his name was a symbol of a passing generation in literature, against which the New School was arrayed in battle. The first epigrams against Pucelain were coined, no doubt, during the gay after-dinner hours in one of the renowned Cabarets, or during an animated discussion in one of the literary drawing-rooms. When their authors or the listeners took the pains of noting them down, they were circulated in more or less reliable manuscripts and generally attributed to several among the literati. There can be no doubt that the greater number of these ephemeral satires, parodies, vaudevilles, and the like, have perished; others have remained unpublished. The best known among these satires is the celebrated Cid parody, Chapelain décoiffé, which, composed glass in hand at a riotous feast, was soon recited everywhere and handed around in numerous copies—to the lasting dishonor of Chapelain's venerable wig and of the mediocrities he steadfastly protected.

In recent decades the Comic Spirit, after a century of sleeping-sickness, has been struggling with imperfect success to reassert herself in literature. And to her renewed vitality, it seems, is due something of the fresh interest in Byron—her recreant son. His poetry has not yet had its full and clear day. It was mistily worshipped by his contemporaries. The Victorians partly mispraised it and partly reacted from it. The poetic spirit of our own time, rejecting Victorianism and casting back for inspiration to the early writers of the century, has loved the Shelleyan dream and the “colorful” imagery of Keats. But Byron could offer neither. Moreover, though recent writers have re-created a cult and a cant of free individualism that is often reminiscent of Byron, they have patently desired not to be Byronic—so strongly has this poet inoculated his posterity against Byronism! Critics and interpreters of Byron have recently done him some good service. But they have allowed his poetry and his personality to remain too closely intertwined; and sometimes they have continued, in one guise or another, the legend of his Titanism. Matthew Arnold, while professing a balanced and disillusioned view of Byron, did much to strengthen the illusion that he was essentially, or potentially, a Titan. In 1881 Arnold still felt so strongly the pull of his boyhood's hero that, adopting for once a Swinburnian hyperbole, he insisted on Byron's “splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength.” How ironic that word “imperishable” appears when Arnold goes on, in maturer vein, to state that Byron “has no light, cannot lead us from the past to the future”; and that he “shattered himself to pieces” in attacking the bourgeois cant of the earlier nineteenth century! For sincerity and strength are “imperishable” in proportion as they cut through the passing forms to the perennial forces of human cant. Olympus itself is antagonist of the true Titan. He makes no compromise with its minions and, when he falls, falls deep. Byron made the compromise called “Byronism,” and fell—into the arms of fairly congenial Guiccioli, “with her sleek tresses” (as Leigh Hunt pictures her) and “none of her graces entirely free from art.”

It is so much easier to understand a simple character, one that runs true to form, than to comprehend a peculiarly complex one, that I have always had a good deal of sympathy for poor old Timothy Shelley, weeping on the neck of his son's friend, Hogg, at Miller's Hotel in London, just after the Oxford expulsion. For Percy Bysshe Shelley, his poetic talent aside, was no ordinary scion to issue from the sedate portals of an English country home. Bred a Tory, he aligned himself with the Radical Reformers; reared in the Church of England, he published a tract on The Necessity of Atheism before he was twenty. Nor does the paradox end here. As the author of Prometheus Unbound and Epipsychidion he seems to us a “spirit that walked in a flaming robe of verse;” but the always-worldly Byron turned over to this spirit of fire and dew his financial negotiations with the wholly substantial John Murray; and this citizen of worlds of unimaginable beauty could turn in a moment from the composition of Alastor to discuss with the impecunious Godwin the least expensive means of borrowing on collateral.

Among the articles in Fraser's Magazine during its early years are a number which contain parallelisms to the acknowledged work of Carlyle. Many of these treat more or less fully Carlyle's favorite theme of the Vates, the Poet, the Man. Most of them show strong German influence, with a regard both for transcendental philosophy and aesthetic criticism.

In one form or another, the issue of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes is forever recurring in French literature. Whether the various forms of literature, and in particular poetry and the drama, shall follow the models offered by classical antiquity or shall resolutely draw their inspiration from contemporary civilization, is a question that has more than once caused passionate argument and unloosed floods of eloquence. The problem rose again toward the middle of the last century. It has been customary to say that there was at that time a reaction against the romanticists (i. e. the moderns) resulting in the establishment of the Parnassian school whose spirit was largely classical. That, however, is not the whole truth. At the time when Leconte de Lisle, Ménard, and others were struggling for recognition as poets, there existed also a group which, far from condemning the romanticists as too modern, considered them not sufficiently modern, and called for a reform in French poetry through a utilization of modern industry as a source of inspiration. The contrast between this group and the Parnassians is even more striking than that between either of them and the romanticists. The chief object of this article is to show how the suggestion of a rapprochement between poetry and modern industry came to be made, and to relate the controversy which followed. The latter centered in a book little known today: Les Chants Modernes by Maxime Du Camp. The secondary object of this paper is, therefore, to place Les Chants Modernes in their true historical light.

Nearly everyone knows that behind Browning's Childe Roland lies a vast contributory reservoir of chivalric romance. The hero of the poem is obviously engaged in a quest, drawn out through a number of years and attended by continual disappointments, a quest which he shares with a band of other adventurers who have been lost in their attempts to achieve. Roland's coming to the Tower, under these circumstances, while it may not be duplicated in any one romance, is patently a chivalric enterprise of a familiar type. Our recognition of this fact makes the poem much less the mystery that early commentators found it. And yet many puzzling details still remain to be explained.

The existence of dipodic structure in English verse has been recognised by metrists only within a comparatively recent period of time. There have undoubtedly been two principal reasons for this failure of theory to take into account a very old and very deep-seated characteristic of English verse. Dipodic structure was, on the one hand, until the last forty years confined almost entirely to popular verse, while its sporadic occurrences in literary poetry were usually of such half-hearted nature as easily to escape the attention of the formal metrist. On the other hand, the study of dipodic verse has been handicapped by the lack of an objective method which could translate unsupported subjective feeling into scientific metrical proof. An attempt toward the establishment of such a method for the simplest form of dipodic verse is the object of this study.