In a volume of miscellaneous manuscripts at the British Museum, placed at random and inconspicuously among larger folio leaves, is a set of notes headed “Sterne.” The notes were written by Joseph Hunter, the nineteenth-century antiquary and literary historian, and they came to the British Museum with Hunter's other papers shortly after his death in 1861. In view of the abundant information about Sterne's private life which the notes contain, it is surprising that this item has remained unindexed and that it is not mentioned in the catalogue description of the volume. In the absence of such references, very likely only an occasional reader who has happened upon them has seen these notes, and, since the major biographies of Laurence Sterne make no use of distinct details which Hunter provides, it is quite possible that none of Sterne's biographers have encountered Hunter's information during the past century. At present, our familiarity with the early years of Sterne's marriage and his residence at Sutton-on-the-Forest is rather limited, based as it is upon isolated public records, some letters, fugitive anecdotes, and the unflattering and sometimes vicious account written by John Croft. No impartial memoirs with any claim to authenticity or wealth of details have until now seemed available. Thus, the intimate account of Sterne which Hunter has given presents to modern scholars an unexpected and promising opportunity to gain new insight into the life and, perhaps, into the work of one of England's most unusual writers. A transcript of Hunter's notes appears below, followed by a brief evaluation of them according to our present knowledge of Laurence Sterne.

Like Hofmannsthal's youthful works, which were first regarded as typically beautiful but unsubstantial products of Neo-Romanticism, only to be later widely extolled for their depth of significance, Der Schwierige has been the object of an evolving critical evaluation. This comedy, published in 1920 and first performed in 1921, has often been pictured as a basically precious comedy of manners anachronistically glorifying the Austrian aristocracy after its demise in 1918. Such an interpretation seems at least partially supported by Hofmannsthal's own words: “Vielleicht hätte ich die Gesellschaft, die es [Der Schwierige] darstellt, die österreichische aristokratische Gesellschaft, nie mit so viel Liebe in ihrem charme und ihrer Qualität darstellen können als in dem historischen Augenblick wo sie, die bis vor kurzem eine Gegebenheit, ja eine Macht war, sich leise und geisterhaft ins Nichts auflöst, wie ein übriggebliebenes Nebelwölkchen am Morgen.” Yet, at another time, he suggests a more profound aim when he says in a letter to Wildgans: “Sie werden finden, daß ich darin das eigentlich Seelenhafte, das persönlich Metaphysische . . . versteckt habe unter der Ironie der Gestaltung . . . und doch ist dieser individuell-metaphysische Kern sehr stark.” In recent years increased attention has been given to the critical exploration of this serious core, which reveals Der Schwierige in its essence as a universally valid character study in the high-comedy tradition of Minna von Barnhelm and Weh dem, der lügt rather than in any sense either an anachronism or a period piece. The discovery in Hofmannsthal's Nachlaß of a number of early plans and sketches promises to extend still further our understanding of Der Schwierige. This material, previously unpublished for the most part, makes it possible to clarify both the author's basic intentions and his application of them to the finished work.

No foreigner learning French fails to remark the use of jeunes gens as the plural of jeune homme. The French, for whom this plural is a part of their linguistic inheritance, usually accept it unquestioningly, but in the Mélanges Antoine Thomas Professor Oscar Bloch of the Lycée Buffon at Paris notes the abnormality of the expression and seeks to explain its origin. The cause of the disappearance of a plural jeunes hommes is, he thinks, to be found in a hesitation to employ, in a combination of the two words where the separate value of each is still in evidence, the linked s. In other combinations where such a linking to hommes occurs, such as les bonshommes, les gentilshommes, we have, says Mr. Bloch, true compound words in which the separate value of the elements has been lost.

The question as to how many days Chaucer conceived his Canterbury pilgrimage as occupying is of interest for a number of reasons. The consideration of it takes us more familiarly into the time and place where we may behold

Thoreau's color symbols are part of an elaborate system of symbolic imagery he used to express the stage of controllable insight at which the spiritual and moral in nature could be conveyed. But they are especially important because they show the degree of originality and technical refinement he could reach. Emphasizing the sensible properties of natural phenomena allowed him both to present nature directly, as his theory dictated, and artistically to strengthen an appeal designed to be above the level of nature-as-fact. But by making certain of these properties symbolic in themselves, he could increase the range and precision of his expression. Five colors emerged as major symbols because they fitted into his basic system so well. Green, the spring and summer color, he used to stand for organic life activity, for birth and growth. With white he symbolized purity and spirituality, carefully avoiding its associations with winter. Blue, the color of unclouded sky and water, he used to represent the esthetic atmosphere of meditation. With yellow, his sun color, he showed spiritual cause and material effect. And red, his most personally significant color symbol, he used intensively to stand for heroism, strength, and spiritual fruition.

This essay posits that literary studies at the University of Hong Kong during the cold war 1950s exemplify how English as an academic subject is transmuted through the peripheral voices that engage with metropolitan literature. Focusing on the term “imagination's commonwealth,” which the poet and critic Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) invented to denote transnational literary communion, I show how it departs from imperial literary diffusion and how Blunden's poetry and professorial career at Hong Kong University enact the departure. As his interlocutors and partners, Blunden's students played a crucial role in the emergence of a literary commonwealth. In their dialogue with Blunden, they not only query his conception but also push against the boundaries of their own colonial and cold war situation.

A few years ago one bold critic rose in defense of Jaques and protested against “the disturbing intrusion of antiquarian learning” in the interpretation of Shakespeare. Apparently, however, this troublesome academic ghost is still unlaid. Indeed, so much erudite nonsense has been talked about “Elizabethan psychology” in the last quarter of a century that it has come to seem either mortal ignorance or scholarly apostasy to challenge it. We may no longer read the Elizabethans and Jacobeans for their plain poetical meanings: any phrase that speaks however faintly of souls and deeds, or of thoughts and feelings, we must interpret literally in terms of a dutifully mastered sixteenth century jargon. If a plotting villain who sees his intended victim approaching so much as cries “Dive, thoughts, down to my soul!” his words are found heavy with psychological import he little dreamed of: he is using “words which represent the final perversion of the will. In the light of Elizabethan thinking, they probably mean the wilful subjection of intellect to a mode of thought and action guided by the desires of the heart.”

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.‘”

The House of Fame is the most curiously constructed of Chaucer's works. Although the poem has all the trappings of a typical love-vision, it deals with a heterogeneous body of subject matter that often seems only remotely connected with love. Love is the dominant theme of the first book, which retells the story of Dido and Æneas, and the purpose of Chaucer's trip to the house of Fame is presumably to hear love tidings. Yet the second book is taken up with the scientific lessons of the eagle, while the third is concerned with Fame viewed first as the maker of reputations and secondly in her role as the disseminator of rumor. How is one to reconcile these themes and make sense out of the haphazard way in which Chaucer has strung them together? Of course, one can dismiss the problem as a case of poor artistry, and that is precisely what many critics have done. Dorothy Everett, for instance, writes of the poem, “As a whole it is not a success, and was perhaps left unfinished for that reason.” However, the poem is so very successful in part and so very nearly complete (the ending, for that matter, may have been suppressed) that it is at least worth speculating whether the failure to make sense out of the whole is our own instead of Chaucer's.

In four characters, Conrad undermines all possibility of unambiguous moral action. The Professor, whose anarchism begins in existential emptiness and contains a violent totalitarian impulse, dramatizes the potential for death in the human will when its energies are directed toward power, toward political ends; the capacity for destruction, both private and public, of the Professor's devotion to the “idea” is grotesquely symbolized by the bomb he carries, his hand always on the detonator. The Assistant Commissioner has no “idea,” but his apparent efficiency is thoroughly undermined by the way Conrad exposes the ambiguity both of his motives and of the sources of the energy which enables him to succeed in his hunt for Verloc. Like Winnie, the Commissioner has chosen “respectability”—an inauthentic life. Winnie's own destruction begins in her feeling for Stevie and is hastened by Stevie's angry compassion, since even compassion is dangerous as a motive for action. This is a lesson Michaelis' youthful political experience has taught him, and his withdrawal presents the novel's final paradox: that in an anarchic world, self-preoccupied inertia may become the posture of a saint.

Despite its deceptively simple theme—a farmer's son wants to become a knight but comes to a grievous end and is hanged—the Middle High German poem known to us as the Meier Helmbrecht by Wernher the Gardener is not easily integrated as to its literary genre among the literature contemporary with it—probably the sixth or seventh decade of the thirteenth century.

Michel de Certeau thinks about reading as an archaic practice: “Readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else … despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (174). Embedded in Certeau's romanticization of reading is a history of how Egypt has been read: as wealth to be plundered, as endlessly available texts, as the ruin of time. Pose against this lostness Friedrich Nietzsche's contention that all philosophy is just Egyptianism, the nostalgia for and reification of a past tense without a dynamic sense of history, so many “conceptual mummies” (35). Nietzsche reminds us to consider not lost origins but the possibility of endings, not the loss of history but its death—not death in the sense of apocalypse as Percy Bysshe Shelley's “now” and the release of new time in Prometheus Unbound but death as the archaic, the ruin, the mute, as Egypt's lost “now” and the end stop of archaic time. I will pursue the problems of the archaic, poetic ground, and translative readings Romantically through Hegel's Egyptianized account of aesthetic practices, for Nietzsche's post-Romantic Egyptianism mummifies thought. Although Hegel's Egyptianizing also concerns the dead matter of the past, his account renders that matter as dynamic. His revivification of the archaic Romantically accounts for its contaminative potential as a mysterious text whose translation can unearth a curse, and/or a promise, for the new.

St. Mawr has generally been treated as if it were a story about a symbolic horse, as if the other characters in the novel had obviously been intended to be subordinate to him, and as if his disappearance seven-eighths of the way through were an indication of Lawrence's inability to concentrate or of his ineptitude in constructing a novel. More than anything else in the book, St. Mawr's failure to cross the finish line has upset critics and has led even so able a commentator of Lawrence as Father Tiverton to describe the novel as “bi-valvular,” because near the end of the book Lawrence “forgets all about the horse-hero, St. Mawr himself, and becomes absorbed by New Mexico.” It is a matter for regret that Lawrence gave his novel the title he did, since it has been instrumental in leading critics into a new variant of the intentional fallacy: the titular heresy, which has made many besides Father Tiverton regard St. Mawr as a structural failure. In fact, the mystery of St. Mawr is bound up with the entire problem of the novel's organization, since the fuss about the horse is only symptomatic of the more profound frustration with what a recent critic has termed the “essential inchoateness of the book.” Therefore the fundamental problem involved in reading St. Mawr, which is one of the book's formal integrity, requires the exploration of the techniques Lawrence employed to shape his work; this problem solved, it then becomes easy not only to understand why the horse is dropped so casually from all notice, but also to see what vision of life the book as a whole means to communicate.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer has sometimes been called the Lessing of the nineteenth century. In certain aspects of their lives the parallel is striking. They were the sons of clergymen and were expected to follow in their fathers' footsteps, but each turned to other pursuits. Liberal thinking, particularly in theology, though differing fundamentally in texture, brought them into conflict with traditional orthodoxy. They were both critics in the field of aesthetics and both were men of letters in the narrower sense; Lessing alone, however, gained a position of distinction in literature.

Of All the decadents in the Spanish drama as it fell away from the glory of the golden age at the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, there are three who most merit the name of disciples of the great Calderón: Bances Cándamo, Vázquez de Zamora, and Cañizares. Taken together, they form a sort of trinity in their support of the Calderonian theory of the drama. But while all wrote, as well as they might, after the manner of their illustrious predecessor and master, it is to Bances Cándamo that one must turn as to the spokesman of a dramatic theory and technique more or less common to his time, a system whose repercussions are to be found not only in the works of the three writers just mentioned, but as well in those of a number of wholly inferior dramatists who, together with the three, form the background of the Spanish stage as it existed from the death of Calderón until, or perhaps slightly beyond the third decade of the eighteenth century; until, indeed, it found opposition and eventual overthrow at the hands of the afrancesados, led, as is generally thought, by Luzán, whose Poética (1737) was for decades the text-book and vade mecum of the neo- or rather pseudoclassicists.

Blake's attitude toward sexual love changed in significant ways during the late 1790's. Before that time, Blake thought of sex as potentially liberating—as a prime method of achieving the fourfold vision of Eternity. After that time he connected sexual love with pity and compassion, not with liberation. He came to think of sexual love as a force which tied individuals to the endless cycles of the fallen world; a force which at best might lead to the delightful, but limited, threefold vision of Beulah. Details of this important shift of attitude are suggested on the basis of close examination and discussion of three poems: “William Bond,” “My Spectre Around Me…,” and “The Crystal Cabinet.”