The first series of Essays in Criticism was one of four works growing directly out of the lectures which Matthew Arnold delivered at Oxford between 1857 and 1867. The so-called “inaugural series,” on the “modern element” in literature, survives only in fragments—one whole lecture and part of another. A second series, on the translation of Homer, was begun even before the first was completed, and the lectures on Celtic literature wound up Arnold's professorship, except for the valedictory “Culture and Its Enemies.” Crowded into the interstices of this ambitious program were the pieces which were to make up the bulk of the Essays in Criticism of 1865.

Mm. edmond et Jules de Goncourt ont inventé trois choses, ils le disent du moins: le naturalisme, la vogue du XVIIIe siècle, et le japonisme. Pour nous en tenir à la littérature, ils se flattent un peu; cependant Germinie Lacerteux est de 1865, et suivait Renée Mauperin, qui est de 1864.

With these words Professor Lanson began the section of his Histoire de la littérature française devoted to the Goncourt brothers. It would be permissible in a manual intended for the man in the street to halt at this point in order to discuss the Goncourt claims to have founded Naturalism without investigating the vogue of the eighteenth century and of things Japanese in literature. Here, however, it is proposed to go a little farther, to investigate first the Goncourt claims to be the first French artists to appreciate the work of the Japanese, and secondly to call attention to a kind of literary “Japonisme,” concerning which Professor Lanson is silent.

When Keats in a letter calls this world “The vale of Soul-making,” he comes close to Wordsworth's way of thinking. For Keats says that we come into the world as pure potentiality or “Intelligence” and that we acquire a “Soul” or “sense of Identity” through “Circumstances.” And it is the main purport of Wordsworth's poetry to show the spiritual significance of this world, to show that we evolve a soul or identity through experience and that the very process of evolution is what we mean by soul.

The purpose of this study is to trace the history of the word goz and to attempt to solve the mooted problem concerning the authorship of Philomena. It will be recalled that Gaston Paris discovered the poem buried in the Ovide moralisé, which is dedicated to Jeanne de Bourgogne, who died in 1329. G. Paris considered Philomena one of the works enumerated by Chrétien de Troyes in the introductory lines of Cligès, all of which, with the exception of Erec, had been thought lost. The author's name is given in verse 734 of Philomena, riming with bois:

Through an annotator's error, this name was long interpreted as Chrétien Legouais de Sainte-More vers Troyes. This identification was accepted in the 14th century by Eustache Deschamps and as recently as 1893 by L. Sudre. But in the same year, Professor A. Thomas revealed the paleographical error involved. By doing so, he precipitated a battle royal, the smoke of which has not yet cleared away. Many theories have been advanced to determine whether Crestiiens li Gois and Chrétien de Troyes were one and the same person. C. de Boer boldly entitled his edition: Philomena, Conte raconté d'après Ovide, par Chrétien de Troyes (P., 1909). However, as K. Voretzsch has pointed out, while there are similarities in the literary conception and style of Chrétien de Troyes and Crestiiens li Gois, nevertheless the linguistic differences in their works point to two distinct authors.

Although Spenser, speaking in the character of Irenæus in the View of the State of Ireland, declares himself as not “professed” in religion, he shows in general such profound interest in religion that his ecclesiastical and theological views have provoked abundant discussion. In examining the question of his religious predilections one might expect to gain further evidence from a careful study of his use of the Scriptures.

Le 10 Avril 1853, dans une lettre à Louise Colet récemment publiée, Flaubert écrivait:

La seule chance que j'aie de me faire reconnaître, ce sera quand Bovary sera publiée; et mes compatriotes rugiront, car la couleur normande du livre sera si vraie qu'elle les scandalisera.

George Walker, a London bookseller and publisher, author of several Gothic tales, printed in 1799 a satirical novel, The Vagabond, directed against the Jacobins and their philosophic forerunners. The author's purpose was a serious one, to refute and counteract the works that had poured from the Jacobin presses. As a result the novel, though amusing and fanciful in the manner of the Anti-Jacobin, represents a consistent view-point and an earnest desire to show the beauties of society as then organized. In its way, it is a summary of the reactionary position, and, by giving the opinions of the opponents of Rousseau, Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Holcroft, Paine, William Godwin, and others, illustrates a large section of late eighteenth-century thought.

To the average reader, even in Italy, the name Anton-francesco Doni suggests nothing. There is no collected edition of his works, nor, aside from the 1863 edition of the Marmi and the sporadic and limited publication of occasional pieces, are there even reprints of single works. To the average student he is but one of many writers of novelle that, altho by comparison with some of the others are only mildly filthy, are not distinguished by either sweetness or light. Of his other works, the Libreria is the earliest Italian bibliographical work; the Marmi, a series of conversations between Cinquecento Florentines sitting on the steps of the Duomo, is photographic in its realism; the Mondi, a socialistic fantasy, shows the influence of More's Utopia; the Zucca is a collection of proverbs, etc., yet nothing very significant. Nor are the facts of his life (1513–1569) more interesting. Altho associated somewhat mysteriously with the Accademia Ortolana of Piacenza and with the still more mysterious I Pelegrini at Venice, his roving life is tarred with the same brush as that of the “infame” Aretino. And to the English reader his direct claim is even more slender, as it consists only of a translation, made by Sir Thomas North in 1570, of his translation of the fables of Bidpai. In life he was of “vivissimo ingegno;” to-day the “ghiribizzoso” Doni is remembered as an erotic author.

“Comme tout le monde avait lu le même conte dans Boccace, … les éloges des critiques anglais étaient inépuisables en l'honneur de Chaucer, qui, dans son imitation, avait su ajouter, disait-on, d'heureuses circonstances au récit de Boccace. Nous savons aujourd'hui que tout ce mérite d'inventeur qu'on lui attribuait consiste à avoir fort bien copié notre fabliau.”

One of the points always brought out in a study of the prosody of Milton's later poems is the manner in which he breaks away from the end-stopped lines, and moulds his verse into long majestic periods, like the paragraphs of prose. But while this aspect of his poetry has often been admired, the prosodical devices by which it is made noticeable and effective have never been studied. Accurate knowledge of these devices depends: first, on an analysis of Milton's punctuation, as the number and position of the full stops determine the extent and effect of the verse paragraphs; and second, on an analysis of the rhythms immediately following the full stops, that is, at the opening of the succeeding sentences.

Notice of King John has been concentrated on questions of date; revision; polemic purpose; treatment of history; influence of the Image of Hypocrisy, Kirchmayer's Pammachius, Lindsay's Satire of the Three Estates, and Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man; and relation to the morality play and the chronicle play, between which it seems transitional, with its effect upon the latter, especially upon the Troublesome Reign and Shakespeare's King John. Herbert Barke notices here and there the historical basis of its use of the Roman rite. Otherwise there has been almost no notice of a substance and technique that, beyond this basis, articulate structure, unite allegory and history, and must have made the propaganda emotional for a mid-sixteenth-century audience.

Let me tell an old British tale in my own plain way; for I am unversed in ornaments of style. This is all that the Franklin's prologue means on its surface. The connotation beneath is inviting. Are “aventures,” “layes,” “rymeyed,” “instruments” intended precisely? How much grasp they suggest of early medieval poetic is perhaps beyond our determination. But the term “colours of rethoryk” occurs also in the Hous of Fame. The interlude before the Clerk's Tale has a sarcasm of the Host against these same “colours” in the same connection. The Squire's disclaimer has the same significant terms as the Franklin's, and the same point as the Clerk's reply to the Host. The satire in the Tale of the Nun's Priest on Geoffrey of Vinsauf confirms the suspicion that in all these passages Chaucer implies specific criticism of a certain later medieval poetic, the poetic current in the Latin manuals entitled poetria. For the language of the Franklin's prologue, in spite of his disclaimer, is literary. Chaucer knew as well as Shakspere that he who announces “a plain, unvarnished tale” may command a better art than the rhetoric that he disclaims. It is worth while to explore, therefore, the mention of rhetoric in connection with story-telling, the conjunction of Cicero and Parnassus. As Sir Thopas parodies not only the conventional motives of romance, but also particular faults in its conventional technic, so Chaucer's references to “colours of rethoryk,” instead of being taken as general disparagement of grandiloquence, may well be sounded for their particular significance. In any age, indeed, the man of letters contemplating the rules of his art laid down by the pedagogues is moved to sarcasm; but Chaucer's sarcasms may suggest specifically wherein the pedagogues that he knew went wide of the narrative art that he came to comprehend as artist and as critic. His reference in the House of Fame merely glances at “prolixitee.” The passages in the four Canterbury tales, ampler and more specific, together suggest that the application of “colours of rethoryk” to narrative is a perversion, that Cicero is out of place on Parnassus.

The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate on the basis of internal evidence that the anonymous play, The Drinking Academy, or Ike Cheaters' Holiday, which was recently printed for the first time, is in all probability the work of Thomas Randolph. As has long been known, much genuine material was omitted by Randolph's literary executors in the first and subsequent editions of his collected works. At least one lost play is known to us by title, and modern scholars—Hazlitt, Parry, and more recently Professor Moore Smith—have had notable success in recovering authentic poems and fragments from Randolph's pen. Under these circumstances there is nothing essentially unreasonable in proposing, even at this late date, to claim for Randolph a play whose authorship has hitherto been wholly unknown.

A letter from O'Neill to John Rogers, an actor in Tyler's production of “Chris,” refers to the play as “a frank experiment in dramatic construction.” Jordan Y. Miller alleges that elements of “The Ole Davil” were subsequently “combined with ‘Chris’ to become the final 'Anna Christie.' ” However, an examination of the manuscripts discloses that there was really nothing “experimental” in “Chris” and that “The Ole Davil” is virtually an alternate title for Anna Christie, with at least ninety-five percent of the text of “Davil” being identical with the published text of Anna. O'Neill complained of Tyler's cutting “Chris” during the productions in Atlantic City and Philadelphia, but this was apparently greatly exaggerated. When the playwright himself reworked “Chris” into “The Ole Davil” and finally Anna Christie, he deleted nine of the seventeen original characters and reduced his manuscript by ten thousand words. But Paul Anderson of “Chris” is a much closer antecedent of Mat Burke than most critics have indicated. There are many verbal parallels between the first Christopherson play and the last. A comparison of the manuscripts is an enlightening study of O'Neill's maturation.

Thomas Deloney's four novels are generally praised for their vigor of style and their realism. Indeed, his modern editor, Mr. F. O. Mann, in singling out for commendation “his faithful and sympathetic rendering of commonplace human life,” insists that in Deloney is to be found “the highest achievement of the Elizabethan novel.” Not infrequently, however, Deloney's “commonplace human life” yields to high-flown and altogether improbable romances of earls and ladies, princes and princesses, kings and queens, just as his ordinary familiar prose style at times is embellished with all the euphuistic tricks he was capable of imitating. In particular his apparently casual references to strange birds, queer beasts, and other wonders of nature and to historical and mythological characters give a surprising air of learning; and the notes of his various editors suggest that he was acquainted with such authors as Boccaccio, Belieforest, Pliny, Sextus Empiricus, and Cornelius Nepos.

The Middle English poem Patience, it will be remembered, is in the main a paraphrase of the book of Jonah. In the main also, the medieval writer has followed the biblical narrative, as he has in Clannesse when narrating the fall of the angels, the flood, the destruction of Sodom, and the capture of Babylon. But just as in these latter stories the English poet has taken considerable freedom with the biblical account, both in vividness at the expense of a literal rendering and in the use of medieval scripture interpretation, so in recounting the life of Jonah there are passages which have no close connection with the book of the prophet. The most remarkable of these is the extension of two sentences in the book of Jonah into some thirty-nine lines, describing vividly and picturesquely the storm at sea which overtook Jonah and his companions. Of this striking extension, and of certain additions which also occur in it, no source has ever been pointed out so far as I am aware. Nor has attention been called to a close parallelism between this portion of Patience, and a similar extension of the same story in the poem De Jona et Nineve, formerly attributed to Tertullian.

Four leaves of the Skeireins (I, II, V, VII) are preserved in the Bibli-oteca Ambrosiana, Milan, under Sig. E 147 parte superiore. VI, which also belongs to this group, has been missing since 1943. In August of that year Milan underwent heavy bombing, in which thirteen halls of the Ambrosiana were wrecked, ten others hit, and some 80,000 volumes reduced to ashes. Though the Gothic palimpsests of the Ambrosian collection were moved to insure their safety, the sixth leaf of the Skeireins disappeared unaccountably, and all attempts to find it have been unavailing.

Tyrwhitt's dating of the A-text of Piers Ploughman in the year 1362 from the allusions in the Second Vision (Passus v, 10–20) to the “pestilences” and “this south-Westerne wynt on a Saterday at even,” which seem to refer to the plague of 1361 and to the terrific gale which swept southern England on January 15, 1362, has long gone unchallenged. Skeat accepted it without question when he edited the poem for the Early English Text Society in 1877. Tyrwhitt found records of the storm in the chronicles of Thorn, Walsingham, and Murimuth; Skeat added Fabyan, Hardyng, John of Bridlington, the Eulogium Historiarum, and others to the list. That these two scholars have established the reference in the early lines of Passus v is clear enough, but it does not follow from this that the poem was written in 1362. It must have been written some time after 1362. I shall endeavor to show in this paper that the Prologue and First Vision (Passus i-iv) were written as late as May, 1376.