In my catalogue of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and his school in the Royal Library at Turin, I transcribe the mysterious marginal note on fol. 14 of the Codex on the Flight of Birds as follows:

While Luigi Firpo in his admirable introduction to the catalogue interprets this note as implying an industrial application of the airplane, I now propose to connect it to the well-known series of so-called profetie. Unfortunately, the catalogue was already printed when the solution of this little mystery came to me.

Diogenes Laertius has Plato reading the Phaedo and Lysis aloud to his students, but the only true lecture or series of lectures attributed to him by ancient sources was entitled On the Good, Aristotle's disciple the musical theorist Aristoxenus records that Aristotle attended the Lecture or Lectures (I shall henceforth refer to it in the singular); and Simplicius, writing in the sixth century A.D., notes first that the Lecture was also attended by Speusippus, Xenocrates, and others and later that Hestiaios and Heraclides Ponticus were there too. According to both Aristoxenus and Simplicius, Aristotle maintained the Lecture was delivered relatively late in Plato's career.

One of the big problems in Montaigne studies is that the essayist slips away the minute he is pressed too closely. Careful collation of passages, meticulously chosen with a specific end in mind, can ‘prove’ a given thesis: Montaigne the Stoic, Montaigne the Skeptic, or Montaigne the Epicurean. It can be shown—and has been—that these three aspects were all true, simply superseding each other as Montaigne grew older. It has also been shown, however, that Montaigne the Stoic and Montaigne the Epicurean coexisted; and other combinations likewise. So pressing Montaigne too closely is likely to yield a series of pictures which, viewed individually, are true, but taken as a whole appear contradictory.

Some recent interest in the writings of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) has focused on his use of classical and medieval sources. Another sphere of interest has been the extent to which Grotius knew Hebrew and was able to find and use Jewish source material himself, as distinct from being dependent on Latin translations that were becoming increasingly available at the time that he wrote. This article has a two-fold purpose: the first is to identify exactly the Jewish sources that Grotius cited in On the Law of War and Peace, an identification which has not yet been made with thoroughness and precision.

John Milton's description in Lycidas of the shipwreck that caused the death of Edward King has generally been interpreted along historical and naturalistic lines. In this essay I want to show that the image of the ship as Ecclesia or the Church, coming as it does in almost the exact center of Lycidas, sheds new light on Milton's use of the Christian and humanistic traditions, its single image identifying and being used to unify his twin aims of satire and elegy.

Merritt Y. Hughes, in his edition of Milton's poetry and major prose, refers to the example of ‘disastrous twilight’ in Paradise Lost (1.597) to explain the reference to ‘th’ eclipse’ (1. 101) as the time of the ship's construction.