Some loose vellum leaves of a manuscript written between 1431 and 1450 (according to Dr. Kenyon of the British Museum) are bound in with a paper ms. of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, in ms. British Museum Sloane 1212. These leaves, written in what may be a different hand from that of the Hoccleve scribe, contain some interesting material, most of which has up to now remained unidentified.

Il y a trois mois s'éteignait Alfred Valette, le directeur du Mercure de France depuis sa fondation, exactement un jour et vingt ans après Remy de Gourmont. Des fondateurs de la vivante revue qui célébrera dans quatre ans ses noces d'or avec la littérature, un seul survit aujourd'hui, M. Ernest Reynaud. On écrira un jour l'histoire de la vie littéraire d'avant-hier; le rôle, joué par le Mercure, revue et maison d'édition, se révélera considérable, non seulement à l'égard des lettres, mais de la pensée. Au centre d'une phalange d'hommes de talent, on verra se détacher deux figures, Valette et Gourmont, l'un le directeur identifié à sa fonction, qui communiqua au Mercure sa propre solidité, l'autre, l'auteur des Promenades littéraires, des Promenades philosophiques, des Epilogues, qui lui passa quelque chose de ses goûts universels; l'un, l'homme de jugement et d'action, l'autre l'homme de réflexion. Valette et Gourmont furent les consuls du Mercure de France des vingt-cinq premières années. Il se trouve que les dernières lignes écrites par Valette furent un témoignage d'amitié, rendu à la mémoire de l'autre consul, à l'occasion du vingtième aniversaire de sa mort. Quand elles sortirent de presse, Valette n'était plus.

The three scholars, J. M. Hart, F. S. Boas, and L. R. Merrill, who have in recent years done most to call the Christus Redivivus to the attention of general readers and scholars have without exception emphasized especially the element of the Miles Gloriosus utilized in the early drama by Grimald with astonishing elaborateness and effectiveness. The four soldiers stationed by Pilate to guard the sepulchre of Christ are used by Grimald in apparently a more original manner than in any other single situation in the religious drama of the sixteenth century in England. Hart merely calls attention to the presence of the Miles Gloriosus elements in the play. Boas makes a great deal of it, emphasizing Grimald's ability to vary his style to suit the changing speakers and occasions. He gives an elaborate description of the most interesting scenes of the play in which the four bragging soldiers appear. “It would be interesting,” he says, “to know whether Grimald confided to Airy that he had later models than Plautus, and that in his tragi-comic treatment of a Biblical theme he had been influenced by at least one of the continental humanist playwrights, Barptholomaeus Lochiensis, whose Christus Xylonicus, first published at Paris in 1529, had been re-issued at Antwerp in 1537, and by Johan Gymnicus at Cologne in 1541. . . . . The action of Christus Xylonicus ends with the burial in the garden tomb, . . . .” Merrill in his very valuable contribution to the Grimald field of scholarship lays considerable emphasis upon the element of the bragging soldiers around the grave of Christ, and points out convincing evidence of the indebtedness of one of Sebastian Wilde's plays to this portion of the Christus Redivivus.

While the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater may be found in innumerable editions, what is usually reprinted is the revised text which De Quincey prepared for a collection of his principal writings in the last years of his life. It is well known that this version of the book differs greatly from the original, and some of the differences have from time to time been pointed out; yet no one has gone to the trouble of comparing the two in any detail. The result has been some inaccurate literary history. It is important to know whether a book was written in the time of Scott and Byron or in that of Dickens and Tennyson. What is more, a comparison of the two forms of the Confessions throws a great deal of light on De Quincey's development. Only by the publication of a two-text edition could all the differences be pointed out; but since an accurate reprint of the 1822 text has recently appeared, while the revised text of 1856 is readily accessible, this hardly seems called for. Instead, I shall here confine myself to indicating the main differences between the two forms of the book—that of 45,000 words and that of 90,000.

Although the pictorial element has long been recognized as an important factor in James Fenimore Cooper's descriptive style, detailed analyses of specific techniques that Cooper shared with contemporary landscape painters can still add much to our understanding of his fundamental artistry. A number of such studies have already appeared. Howard Mumford Jones has shown how Cooper's moral view of the world found a means of expression—the expansive depiction of a panoramic scene—that is strikingly similar to the typical landscape of the Hudson River School of painting, and James Franklin Beard has written of the basic artistic technique that Cooper shared with the painter Thomas Cole—the harmonization of precise details to present an ideal truth. Other studies, moreover, have pointed out a number of specific devices that Cooper and his artistic friends employed to express their related themes. One important painterly technique used by the novelist, however, has yet to be treated in detail: the chiaroscuro, or arrangement of light and shadow, that he, like the painters, included in his delineation of the natural scene. Many readers of Cooper, no doubt, have perceived the effectiveness of Cooper's carefully lighted descriptions, and comment upon them has, indeed, appeared in print. The technique, however, is so important in Cooper's art that it merits a much more extended treatment than it has yet received.

In 1940 Miss Hope Emily Allen called attention to the relationship between The Tretyse of Loue and the Ancrene Riwle.1 The Tretyse of Loue, one of the six books printed at Caxton's press between the time of Caxton's death (c. 1491) and his successor Wynkyn de Worde's first book under his own name (Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection, 1494),2 is a compilation of ten devotional tracts, from the first and longest of which it takes its name. This first piece, (1) The Tretyse of Loue proper, is an expansion and adaptation of Part vil of the Riwle,3 dealing with the nature and virtue of spiritual love. The (2) Meditation on the Hours of the Cross and (3) Remedies Against the Seven Deadly Sins belong with the Tretyse by virtue of their similar dedication to a very wealthy lady4 and by the borrowings from the Riwle found in the latter. After an intermediate conclusion which may mark the end of the original compilation, there follow seven shorter tracts on various subjects. They are (4) The Three Signs of True Love and Friendship, three pages of meditations on Christ's love; (5) The Branches of the Appletree, a mystical treatise which, because of its significance in connection with the origin and provenance of the compilation, is the particular subject of this discussion; (6) The Seven Signs of Jesus' Love; (7) An Exhortation by Faith, five pages of moral exhortation; (8) Nine Articles of Master Albert of Cologne; (9) Diverse Sayings of Saint Paul and Others; and (10) The Six Masters on Tribulation.

“War always interested me,” wrote the twenty-three-year-old Leo Tolstoy in “the raid” (1853), an early story inspired by his personal experience of a brutal border skirmish in the Caucasus. “Not war in the sense of maneuvers devised by great generals … but the reality of war, the actual killing” (1). The focus of Tolstoy's interest here remained absolute throughout his long and brilliantly inconsistent life. As a second lieutenant during the Crimean War in 1854–55, he wrote three “Sevastopol Stories” about that city under siege, which were so cannily constructed and voiced that the new tsar, Alexander II, deeply touched, decreed that they be translated into French so that Russian courage would reach a European audience—whereas other readers took these tales as critical of the imperial war effort, even as subversive. Tolstoy revealed his own chauvinist side in the mid-1860s while writing the final books of War and Peace. Napoléon was a caricature from the start, of course, but, in a rising arc of patriotic disdain, Tolstoy proceeded to ridicule almost every alien nation's soldiers, generals, and tacticians; only simple Russian peasants, partisans, Field Marshal Kutuzov, and the occasional clear-seeing field commander were exempt from the author's scorn. By the end of his life, Tolstoy professed radical Christian anarchism and pacifism, preaching nonviolent resistance to evil and urging young men to oppose the military draft. But he never lost his fascination with close-up “actual killing.” The greatest literary achievement of Tolstoy's final decade, the Caucasus novel Hadji Murad, ends with such graphic slaughter, so many grotesque hackings and mutilations, and even the beheading of the hero described at such epic leisure that it is difficult to believe Tolstoy ever doubted the veracity of languages of violence.

Gerhart Hauptmann hat in seinem Florian Geyer den groβzügigen Versuch gemacht, eine um vier Jahrhunderte zurückliegende Zeit mit den Mitteln naturalistischer Technik auf der Bühne lebendig zu machen. Dem Drama in seiner Eigenschaft als Wortkunstwerk gegenüber stellte sich der Dichter die Forderung, einen Dialog zu schaffen, der im Leser und Hörer die Illusion erwecken müsse, er vernehme unmittelbar die Sprache von Menschen der deutschen Reformationszeit, genau so, als wäre der Dialog vor vier Jahrhunderten auf Schallplatten aufgenommen und für unsre Zeit aufbewahrt worden. Es galt mithin, den Satzbau, die Wortformen, den Wortschatz und die ganze Fülle jener bildlichen Wendungen, die den charakteristischen Stil einer Epoche ausmachen, mit möglichster Treue nachzubilden. Um dieses Ziel auch nur annähernd zu erreichen, war—von der höheren, eigentlich schöpferischen Befähigung ganz abgesehen—zweierlei vonnöten: erstens eine auβerordentliche Gabe der Einfühlung in das Leben einer vergangenen Zeit und sodann ein gewissenhaftes Studium des aus jener Zeit überlieferten Schrifttums.

Der letzte Spross einer alten Familie wird nach schmerzlichen Erfahrungen in seiner Jugend sich seines Dichtertums bewusst. Seine frühe Lyrik wächst aus der preziösen Formkultur der Neuromantik hervor, sie gewinnt unter nordischem Einfluss Farbe und Kraft, um dann in der Berührung mit Russland und der deutschen Mystik ihre tieferen religiösen Quellen zu entdecken. Durch die persönliche Bekanntschaft mit einem hervorragenden Geist seiner Zeit wird aus dem mystischen Gottsucher und Gotterahner schliesslich ein Gottfinder, der in Werken von ganz seltener Zartheit und Tiefe und in virtuoser Beherrschung der Form uns zukunftweisend die letzten Fragen der Menschheit erfühlen lässt.

There are four volumes of Balzac's letters: two volumes of miscellaneous letters known as the Correspondance and two very substantial octave volumes containing the master's messages to Madame Hanska during the seventeen years they were engaged. The latter collection has been poetically entitled Lettres à l'Etrangère. All four volumes have always been considered a rich store of biographical information. The Correspondance has been twice edited: in the two-volume edition published by Calmann-Lévy in 1877, and in an octave volume which forms part of what is known as the édition définitive of the Œuvres Complètes (Calmann-Lévy, 1876). The Lettres à l'Etrangère were published by Calmann-Lévy in 1906. None of these volumes contains information as to its editors or their method of procedure.

In the few poems that Clough wrote during his student days at Oxford one can see signs of a growing perplexity and anxiety with regard to certain problems of life and religion. This perplexity came to a head during the years that he taught at Oriel, and finally led him to resign his fellowship at that College. This resignation may be said to be the most dramatic and significant action of his life, and the story, told many times by his biographers, can now be told more fully in the light of the unpublished correspondence between him and Dr. Hawkins, the then Provost of Oriel College. Nor has sufficient attention been so far given to the circumstances that led to Clough's subsequent appointment as Principal of University Hall, London, and the manner in which his connection with that institution came to an end. It is proposed in the following pages to throw some light also on this important period of the poet's life.

Another paper on Keats may be pardoned if by a readjustment of the familiar materials, it makes possible a new interpretation of the poet's mind and work. The present essay ventures to suggest that the literary problem admitted and analyzed by Keats in Sleep and Poetry contains a clue for the study of his verse, which, although recognized in some of its implications by Keats's critics, has not hitherto been understood in its full significance. The following argument attempts to prove that by April, 1819, the poet, having settled, at least for a period, a very difficult question dating back to the autumn of 1816, was so released from his mental bondage that his creative genius, long restrained, broke forth into that glorious series of poems which included the great Odes and Lamia.

The national epic poems of France offer a vast body of literature in which we may study the development of French ideals from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. During so long a period at a critical epoch in European civilization influences of all kinds are of course reflected in this poetry. These influences may be described as literary, political, social and religious.

It is with but one of the literary forces which came to bear upon the chansons de geste that we are concerned just now. This external force is that exerted by the matièdre de Bretagne, popularized in France about the middle of the twelfth century. The admirably brief statement of Mr. Alfred N utt (in Celtic and Mediaeval Romance, pp. 15-18) leaves little to be desired as regards the influence of the Breton matter upon the matièdre de France. Mr. Nutt's account of the change in literary ideals during the twelfth century recommends itself to anyone who is conversant with the period.

In Notes and Queries for February 10, 1917, John H. Sandham Griffith, Esq., of Llwynduris, Llechryd, Cardiganshire, announced that he had in his possession Shelley's set of the Hon. Robert Clifford's translation (4 vols., 1797-8) of the Abbé Barruel's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Jacobinisme. The set, Mr. Griffith believes, was left by Shelley at Horsham after his expulsion from Oxford;1 and he further explains that “there was such a considerable degree of intimacy existing between the poet's family and my ancestor William Sandham of Horsham, a tenant and near neighbor of Sir Timothy Shelley of Field Place, that the poet was probably a frequent visitor, and obtained a loan of £100 in January, 1811, before being sent down from Oxford, which he never repaid. The unredeemed promissory note is in my possession, and also a holograph letter, requesting a further loan on the plea of ‘now being reduced to the very last extremity,‘ written from Keswick shortly after his marriage to Harriet West-brooke [sic].” Volume II of the set, Mr. Griffith says, “bears the poet's autograph in full, and the date 1810.”

A little studied aspect of the prolific linguistic controversies in eighteenth-century England is the development of synonymy. Not only were books of synonyms late to appear and uncertain as to their function and methods, but synonymy was one of the last departments to be introduced into the English dictionary. This slow development is not surprising, since just discrimination between words of almost identical meaning requires not only an authoritative dictionary and grammar as tools but a relatively settled state of the language and a body of recognized opinion on questions of usage. The evolution of English synonymy not only stems immediately from the French, but the steps leading toward this goal may be paralleled in France from fifty to one hundred years earlier.

Gewöhnlich charakterisieren literarhistorische Betrachtungen den Sturm-und-Drang als eine dichterisch-weltanschauliche Revolution, die in wuchtiger Auflehung gegen die Aufklärung für die Freiheit des Gefühls, der Individualität und der literarischen Form kämpfte. Dabei wird Goethe, dem Dichter des Götz, Urfaust, Werther und anderer artverwandter Dichtungen eine führende Rolle zugeschrieben. In seinem klassischen Werke Geist der Goethezeit hat Korff eingehend den philosophischen Hintergrund für diese Bewegung gezeichnet und nachgewiesen, wie sie sich in der Dichtung im Sinne politischer, sozialer, metaphysischer und formaler Freiheit ausgewirkt hat.

Debates about how to stage, film, narrate (or record in any available media) real-life catastrophe, such as mass human-rights violations or war, tend to center on the simultaneous necessity and inadequacy of any representational form to capture the real event: evidence is needed for political, legal, cultural, and historical purposes, but its framing is always conditioned by whatever a given regime of visibility leaves in or leaves out. All too familiar ethical, political, and representational challenges lurk behind the deployment of media to make visible the experience of real-life survivors—in the case I treat here, women survivors of imprisonment and torture during Uruguay's 1973-85 dictatorship. Consider the risks of revictimizing the protagonists, overwhelming or numbing spectators with images of extreme vulnerability, or, even worse, of inciting voyeuristic or sadistic pleasures in an audience passively “regarding the pain of others”—to recall Susan Sontag's famous last title (2003). Some have argued that testimonial or documentary accounts cannot represent the effects of destruction without courting these perils.