Anglo-Saxon and Greek epic each provide k. on two occasions a seemingly authentic account of the narration of verse in the heroic age. Hrothgar's court bard sings of the encounters at Finnsburg (lines 1068–1159), and improvises the tale of Beowulf's exploits in a complimentary comparison of the Geatish visitor with Sigemund (lines 871–892); Alcinous' court bard sings of the discovered adultery of Ares and Aphrodite (Odyssey vin.266–366), and takes up a tale of Odysseus while the Ithacan wanderer listens on (Odyssey vin.499–520). Nothing in all this is autobiographical : unlike the poets of Deor and Widsith, the poet of Beowulf is not concerned with his own identity; the poet of the Odyssey, reputed blind, reveals himself not at all in singing of the blind minstrel Demodocus. Since none of these glimpses of poetizing without writing is intended to incorporate a signature into the epic matter, there is prima-facie evidence that Beowulf and the Homeric poems each derive from an oral tradition. That such a tradition lies behind the Iliad and the Odyssey, at least, is hard to deny. Milman Parry rigorously defended the observation that the extant Homeric poems are largely formulaic, and was led to postulate that they could be shown entirely formulaic if the complete corpus of Greek epic survived; he further reasoned that frequent formulas in epic verse indicate oral composition, and assumed the slightly less likely corollary that oral epic is inclined towards the use of formulas. Proceeding from Parry's conclusions and adopting one of his schemata, Francis P. Magoun, Jr., argues that Beowulf likewise was created from a legacy of oral formulas inherited and extended by bards of successive generations, and the thesis is striking and compelling. Yet a fresh inspection will indicate one crucial amendment: Beowulf and the Homeric poems are not at all formulaic to the same extent.

Relationships between verse content and. music in the love songs of the Provençal troubadours are not easily defined. One is tempted to seek in these cansos an expressiveness corresponding to our own acceptance of the term and to consider the melodies, like those of a modern art song, to be largely inspired by meanings and emotions of the texts. But it is not at all certain that the establishment of a close sentimental rapport between words and music was an objective overtly recognized and desired by the troubadours: if there were poet-composers who on occasion projected through melody the spirit of a poem, this was by no means a universal occurrence. Authoritative opinion on the subject is difficult to form because so little troubadour music has been preserved. All the more important then to examine carefully the evidence we do possess. Worthy of particular attention are the poets whose melodies remain in sufficient quantity to permit evaluation of individual attitudes and techniques. Such a poet is Peirol, troubadour from Auvergne, who flourished during the Golden Age of Provençal song, cultivating chiefly the love poem. His works provide material of genuine interest, often neglected where it might prove most illuminating. Despite the comparatively large number of melodies, relationships between verse content and music in his cansos have never been studied. To investigate these relationships will therefore be the aim of this paper.

Special interest in the German word Ehre was aroused forty years ago when Gustav Ehrismann dealt with Middle High German ere as one of the three cardinal virtues of the age of chivalry (“Die Grundlagen des ritterlichen Tugendsystems,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Alter-tum, LVI, 1919, 137–216). Since then this word has been repeatedly discussed by scholars, e.g., by E. R. Curtius (who opposed Ehrismann's views), Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt (in her detailed semantic study of the word in Old High German), Friedrich Maurer (in his investigations of the word in Middle High German), Eduard Neumann, and others. The same topic has also been dealt with in several dissertations, e.g., by Hildegard Emmel and by Frederik Mos-selmann.“ Recently monographs by Hans Reiner and by George Fenwick Jones have dealt with the concept of honor.

Boccaccio's first work of importance is the Filocolo, a long rambling romance in prose, built around the well-known medieval legend of Florio and Biancofiore which it grieved the author to see relegated to the “fabulosi parlari degli ignoranti.” Boccaccio, that is, wished to ennoble the popular legend by giving it a literary and artistic dignity that it lacked in the oral tradition and in the French and Italian sources available to him. The very choice of the story is significant, for in its basic design it represents a theme that Boccaccio was to treat with predilection and consummate art in later works such as the Ninfale Fiesolano and several tales of the Decameron: the natural or instinctive love that attracts two young people of the opposite sex and the persistence of their love against the obstacles erected by an unsympathetic law or by class-conscious relatives concerned with preserving the distinctions created by social and economic position. In the Filocolo, however, this simple outline serves only as the nucleus or skeleton of a story of epic dimensions, for Boccaccio creates such Odyssean adventures for his separated lovers as to make for a seemingly endless and chaotic unfolding in which Virgil, Ovid, and Dante are only the most obvious and persistent influences.

The final episode of the third book of The Faerie Queene has never received adequate interpretation. By analogy to the final episodes of the other books Busyrane should be the great enemy to chastity, and his defeat should be accomplished through the virtue of chastity. Previous interpretations have not defined the allegorical appropriateness of Busyrane and his mask of Cupid as the climactic testing of Spenser's knight of chastity. The problem for the reader is to see how Britomart's experience at the house of Busyrane solves Amoret's problem and at the same time is the final challenge to her own virtue.

The conclusion of Ants Oras as to the chronology of Milton's major poems, based on his important study of the blank vejse, is, I believe, in serious error. Examining strong pauses, both terminal and medial, the distribution of medial pauses over the pentameter line, run-on lines, feminine and masculine pauses, the distribution of polysyllables over the verse line, feminine endings, rhythmical expressions creating shifted stresses, syllabized “-ed” endings, and pyrrhic verse endings, Oras concludes that the traditional chronology for Paradise Lost (from Book I through Book XII), Paradise Regained (from Book I through Book IV), and Samson Agonistes is correct. As a prosodical study, the statistical data presented lead us to a greater understanding of the aforementioned verse techniques as used by Milton than we have heretofore known. Professor Oras' inferences of dated practice are, however, another matter.

L'avare is probably Molière's harshest play. Scheming love suits, openly rebellious children, an unloving father, a sordid theme hardly leave our sympathies any acceptable resting-place. Harpagon, moreover, is a monster who, unlike Tartuffe, is firmly anchored to the center of the stage. No jail, not even an omniscient King can rid the unhappy family of the man who is its head. His power may wither, as it must for the comedy to end on a note of relief, but his presence cannot be so decisively expunged from the lives of those around him. When Tartuffe is dragged to jail in Orgon's stead, justice is restored in the state, as is solidarity to the once bitterly divided family. Harpagon leaving the stage to go see his chère cassette is merely shedding his family without another thought, allowing it to find unhoped for reunion under the wing of a new father, Don Thomas d'Alburcy, as generous and loving as the real father had been mean and hateful.

Modern scholars of the Restoration stage have been content largely to overlook the career of Samuel Sandford, the famous actor of villain parts. What little information is available on Sandford is widely scattered, but the few facts that can be assembled deserve careful attention. Because he was an actor of some eminence in his age his career is interesting per se. More important, from almost the beginning of his career in 1661 to the end around 1700, Sandford was typed in the public consciousness almost exclusively as an actor of villains. And so an analysis of his career not only affords some insight into the process by which a Restoration actor became typed but also permits several interesting speculations concerning the influence exerted by the audience over the Restoration stage. My purpose, therefore, is twofold. First, I shall examine why Sandford became typed; and I shall suggest that this occurred primarily because Sandford's personal appearance and histrionic techniques suited his audience's preconceptions of stage villainy. Secondly, I shall examine the results which ensued from Sandford's being typed. And I shall make two additional suggestions: that after the public image of Sandford as villain had become established, stage managers found it difficult, though not impossible, to cast him for parts which violated that image; and that playwrights, too, not only succumbed to the public stereotype but took advantage of it by writing into new plays villain parts tailored even to Sandford's personal appearance.

It is well-known that in Songs of Experience several of the poems are direct contraries to some of the Songs of Innocence, the precise nature of this opposition being reflected in the subtitle of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience: “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.” And Blake emphasized this essential organic unity of the contraries by giving four of the opposing poems identical titles: “Holy Thursday,” “The Chimney Sweeper,” “Nurse's Song,” and “A Cradle Song.” Occasionally he changed the title almost imperceptibly: “The Little Boy Lost” becomes “A Little Boy Lost,” “The Little Girl Lost” becomes “A Little Girl Lost,” and “The Divine Image” becames “A Divine Image.” The great majority of Songs of Experience, however, have either totally new titles or changes of the Songs of Innocence titles which make more explicit the nature of the opposition between the two states. Thus in the two introductory poems the piper yields to the bard, in others “The Lamb” becomes “The Tyger,” “The Blossom” becomes “The Sick Rose,” “The Ecchoing Green” becomes “The Garden of Love” or “London,” “The School Boy” becomes “The Little Vagabond,” and “The Divine Image” becomes “The Human Abstract.”

Recently there have come into my possession four hitherto unpublished autograph letters which throw further light on Wordsworth's exertions in behalf of the Copyright Act of 1842. Two are by W. E. Gladstone, one is by Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, and one is by Wordsworth. These letters were written during 1838, a critical year for the supporters of the bill.

The general election of 1831, part of the high tide of Reform feeling, swept many new men into the last un-Reformed Parliament, among them Edward Bulwer. Bulwer, later Bulwer-Lytton, for whom the first flush of literary success had become a more or less permanent roseate glow of popularity, had determined to make his mark as an MP as well as a novelist, and he became, in his own mind at least, the spokesman for literature in the House. As a political neophyte, he needed a cause and he found one in the theatre, whose wretched state was generally decried. In espousing its legal reform, Bulwer saw a means of advancing not only the cause of the drama but also his own political fortunes. On 31 May 1832, therefore, he presented a motion for the creation of a select committee to investigate the state of dramatic literature. He was not seeking information, for his speech showed him to be well-informed on theatrical matters. Neither was he impartial; his mind was clearly made up: he was anti-monopoly, anti-censorship, and pro-copyright. The committee was to make an “inquiry” into the decline of the drama, but under Bulwer's direction it was not to be a forum for airing the grievances of the patent theatres, whose “monopoly” was continually violated. Its purpose was to display to Parliament and to the country at large the inadequacies of the legal status quo. Although earlier attempts to form such a committee had been unsuccessful, Bulwer's motion was passed, and the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature was appointed with Bulwer as chairman.

One of the finest of Poe's stories, “Ligeia” is perhaps the one in which Poe managed most successfully to give artistic expression to themes with which he wrestled in all of his major literary works. It therefore has a claim to being called the most typical and also the best. On several occasions Poe himself expressed the conviction that “Ligeia” was the best of his stories. He wrote to Edward Duyckinck, the publisher, that “ ‘Ligeia’ is undoubtedly the best story I have written,” and to Philip Pendleton Cooke, the writer, that “the loftiest kind [of tale] is that of the highest imagination—and for this reason only ‘Ligeia’ may be called my best tale.” Poe's critics, also, have agreed. George E. Woodberry, one of the earliest and most reliable of them, says “Ligeia,” along with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” forms the “richest” of Poe's imaginative work, and marks “the highest reach of the romantic element” in his genius. Arthur H. Quinn classifies it as one of Poe's “masterpieces,” and D. H. Lawrence says it is Poe's “chief” story.

Criticism of Henry James's controversial novel The Sacred Fount has tended rather insistently to take one of two interpretive directions. Since Edmund Wilson's famous essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James” appeared in 1934 and made everyone more aware of the potential complexity of James's handling of the focus of narration, the perhaps more frequently encountered approach to the novel has been one which regards it, like The Turn of the Screw and In the Cage, as principally another Jamesian experiment with a narrator of doubtful omniscience. The other approach, one still found in many treatments of the novel, tends rather to accept completely the narrator's version of events at Newmarch and looks for the meaning and significance of the work in his most obvious preoccupation during the weekend in which those events occur, the vampire theme of fulfillment and depletion in intense human relationships. Both approaches are valid. Indeed, one of the impressive aspects of the serious criticism of The Sacred Fount is that nearly all of the important attempts at analysis have been and remain true to some degree. Leon Edel, following and building on the hints of Wilson, has shown that the novel clearly is about “appearance and reality,” and R. P. Blackmur has pointed out the parabolic nature of the story and called attention to The Sacred Fount as the “nightmare nexus” in the Jamesian struggle “to portray the integrity of the artist and… the integrity of the self.” Even Rebecca West, in her witty dismissal of the book some years ago, was correct—more correct than she knew perhaps since she gives James no credit for a deliberate and skillfully manipulated irony—-in recognizing and mocking the disparity between the passion, pride, and labor expended by the incredibly egocentric, narcissistic narrator and the, if not completely trivial, at least gossamer issues involved. But the irony, like the ambiguity, is both constant and conscious. Unlike the narrator, to whom James has frequently been compared, James presides confidently over his fictional world like, in Lady John's words, “a real providence,” who “knows” (p. 176).

The widening breach between the study of the English language and of the literature written in it appears anew in the December 1959 PMLA. There, two distinguished literary scholars, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, find need to defend the traditional scansion of English poetry against a “linguistic view.” It is not, of course, the fact of their arguing for their beliefs which is disturbing, although even here the breach is evident: “the more extravagant claims of the linguists,” “these extraordinary claims,” “we wish in the main to avoid the cumbersome grammar of the new linguists.”