‘A great age of literature’ remarked Ezra Pound in Make it New 'is perhaps always a great age of translation.’ In this article we will be examining a Latin translation of the twelfth Dialogue of the Dead of Lucian by the Italian humanist Giovanni Aurispa, and the influence that this translation, known generally as the Comparatio, had in Italy and in other countries of Europe, in France, in Germany, in England, in Spain, and in Bohemia. Such a translation was naturally important. Few educated people in Europe at the time we are concerned with, the fifteenth century, could, or would, read Greek. If they knew anything of a recently discovered writer like Lucian, it was precisely through Latin versions of his work produced by scholars like Aurispa.

This year's commemoration of the seven-hundredth anniversary of the death of Aquinas in 1274 continues a tradition of veneration and panegyric which stretches far back into history and reaches considerably beyond the confines of the Dominican order to which the saint belonged. The most famous and provocative panegyric of St. Thomas is certainly that of Lorenzo Valla, delivered in the Dominican church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome, on the saint's feast day, March 7, 1457. The fame, even notoriety, of this particular panegyric derives from the significant place in intellectual history which the panegyrist holds as well as from his curious treatment of his subject. As has frequently been observed, Valla's oration is almost an antipanegyric, an apologia for his own humanistic style of theology against the scholastic style of Thomas. It is a good illustration of the fundamental antagonisms between these two styles and an instance of the polemic which often marked their confrontation.

One of the troublesome problems in King Lear concerns the parting between the kings of England and France in the first scene of the first act. When France espouses the dowerless Cordelia, Lear turns on him angrily:

To the insulting ‘be gone’ he adds a brutal snub, ‘Come, noble Burgundy,' and walks off without giving France the opportunity to reply. Commentators on the play ask us to believe that a few minutes later the two kings meet again for a formal leave-taking.