Assonance—the repetition of a vowel sound in stressed syllables near enough to affect the ear—has been as important as alliteration. Such vowel echoes have been employed in three chief ways. They have been simply harmonious, as in Swift's “So rotting Celia stroles the street / When sober folks are all in bed,” where the echo of [i] and [o] may be more pleasing to the ear than the two alliterations. Assonance has been used for structural effects and for emphasis: it has bound adjective to noun, from Beowulf's “ēōwralēōde”—a popular formula—to Thomas' title “The White Giant's Thigh”; it has bound the lines of a couplet, as in Spenser's “All in a vele of silke and silver thin / That hid no whit her alablaster skin”; it can emphasize rhythmical stresses, as in Shakespeare's “Do I delight to die, or life desire”; it can emphasize rhetorically balancing words, the names in Butler's “Didst inspire Witers, Prin, and Vickears,” or the verbs in Dr. Johnson's zeugma “No dangers fright him and no labors tire.” Assonance can also be onomatopoeic when it repeats the vowel of a key word, as in Pope's “Now pleasing sleep had seal'deach mortal eye; / Stretch'din their tents the Grecian leaders lie.”

Mateo Alemán's Ortografía castellana ‘Castilian Orthography’ (Mexico City, 1609) is one of many little-studied Renaissance treatises on correct spelling. It offers a modest scheme for reforming the representation of spoken Spanish sounds in writing, argued with elaborate artifice and based especially on the claim that written letters communicate thanks to inherent Pythagorean harmonies. The treatise includes a full illustration of these reforms in an appendix called the “Problem,” which tells how two courtiers inconclusively debate whether speech or writing possesses “greater excellence.” By offering arguments composed entirely of topoi, establishing a rhetorical paradox, and employing devices of admiratio, the “Problem” achieves a fusion of “intersubjectivity” and “intertextuality” that identifies as a single reading experience the wonder of the paradox posed with the success of the improved spelling.

The suggestion which this paper has to make will remain only a suggestion when the argument is complete. Perhaps I should disarm criticism in advance by admitting that the plausibility of my final and boldest point consists partly in its seductiveness. I should, in short, like to persuade the reader that the character of Belphoebe in The Faerie Queene owes something not only to the Venus of the Æneid but also to the allegorical interpretations of the Virgilian Venus which Spenser inherited from Italy.

It has been stated repeatedly by Professor James L. Barker of the University of Utah that in French the breath stream is interrupted in certain cases after the production of a sound and that the position for the following sound is taken in silence during the interruption. The cases mentioned specifically in which such interruptions occur are the transitions from consonant to vowel, from vowel to consonant, and from consonant to consonant.

“Com neer, thou preest, come hyder, thou sir John!
Telle us swich thyng as may oure hertes glade.
Be blithe, though thou ryde upon a jade.
What thogh thyn hors be bothe foul and lene?
If he wol serve thee, rekke nat a bene.
Looke that thyn herte be murie everemo.”
“Yis, sir”, quod he, “yis, Hoost, so moot I go,
But I be myrie, ywis I wol be blamed.”
—Prologue, Nun's Priest's Tale
“But by my trouthe, if thou were seculer,
Thou woldest ben a trede‐foul aright.
For if thou have corage as thou hast myght,
Thee were nede of hennes, as I wene,
Ya, moo than seven tymes seventene.
See, whiche braunes hath this gentil preest,
So gret a nekke, and swich a large breest!
He loketh as a sperhauk with his yen;
Him nedeth nat his colour for to dyen
With brasile, ne with greyn of Portyngale.
Now, sire, faire falle yow for youre tale!”
—Epilogue, Nun's Priest's Tale
The literary pastime of finding real-life models for characters in literature is a fascinating one. In proportion as the vital statistics of the object of the literary manhunt recede in time, the fascination grows. Something akin to the possession of occult powers is felt by the literary detective who can, from a foothold in the twentieth century, reach back three, four, or five hundred years and “get his man.” Admittedly there is a real value in this kind of scholarly effort, but there is also a very real danger. The danger arises from the pleasurable self-hypnosis that often accompanies these ventures. In this state of quasi-suspended judgment, we are not always responsible for our conclusions. It is my desire to examine the results of one of these ostensibly successful manhunts in an effort to suggest that the “culprit” was not actually apprehended after all.

In the early twentieth century, a period of mass immigration, Jewish assimilation into mainstream American society was largely a theatrical venture. The musical theater, a predominantly Jewish field that portrayed a variety of American experiences, offers powerful illustrations of theatrical strategies of Jewish assimilation. The groundbreaking Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1943), created during one of the most anti-Semitic periods in United States history, exemplifies how ethnic outsiders demonized a racial other in an effort to be considered white and thus to be included in the utopian (theatrical) community of America.

In a previous paper, “The Origin of the Ancren Riwle,” I showed that a remarkable series of coincidences would seem to prove that the Ancren Riwle was written for the three “puellae” (Emma, Christina, and Gunhilda), to whom the hermitage of Kilburn, together with land and three corrodies, was granted by the abbot and convent of Westminster c. 1134. Their house was described in the foundation charter as “heremitorium de Cuneburna, quod aedificavit Godwynus,” and it was given to the three young women “concessu tamen, atque precatu illius Godwyni heremitae, quatinus eundem locum qui ad ilium pertinet in elemosina pro redemptione animarum totius praedicti conventus fratrum possideant.” The gift was made, not only to the three maidens in question, but “omnibus illis quae inibi eadem sanctitatis vitae norma fruendi causa futurae sunt.” Godwin, who had evidently instigated the establishment, was to oversee it: “Sit ille praescriptus heremita Godwynus, magister loci, illarumque puellarum quamdiu vixerit custos. Et post ejus obitum eligat conventus puellarum seniorem ydoneum, qui earum ecclesiae praesit, abbatis tamen concilio.” Some further information as to the nucleus of Kilburn Priory is given us by Prior Flete of Westminster in the fifteenth century. He writes of Abbot Herebert: “Iste fundavit cellam canonissarum de Kilborn, ubi prius quidam nomine Godwinus heremiticam multo tempore ducebat vitam. . . . statuit tres virgines Deo sacratas, domicellas videlicet camerae Matildis bonae reginae, consortis regis Henrici primi.”

To the girl who wanted a “man of fashion” Stephen Crane proclaimed himself “a savage,” “docile … only under great social pressure,” “by inclination a wild shaggy barbarian.” At the same time, however, this rebel against middle class conventionality strove to remain a gentleman, gallant if only to streetwalkers, chivalric to the déclassé, ministerial to reckless youth, and grandly hospitable at Brede Place to friend and stranger alike. While his friends might grumble that he “had no sense of propriety,” Crane, self-conscious and self-deprecatory, tried to be both the isolated Bohemian and “Baron Brede.” Able to breathe only “in the slums or among aristocrats,” as a contemporary remembered him, he seems to have struggled all his life between the appeal of the “wild free son of nature” and the need to find a place in society and tradition. Like his Henry Fleming, he struggled to gain the respect of his fraternity without surrendering his life or his individuality to the “moving box” of tradition; he tried, like his Swede, to make a place for himself as a gentleman without impaling himself on his purchase. This apparent temperamental need for a role both docile and savage was transmuted into the impersonalities of his fiction, in which the fate of the hero—soldier, honey-mooner, outcast, or outlander—is the measure of his ability to establish the grounds for proper conduct. In that transmutation Crane defined himself as an artist; and to pursue a metaphor of decorum through his best stories is to discover anew his view of life and the courage of his response to it.

Those who consider punctuation ‘largely a matter of taste’ and look upon the so-called ‘sentence-sense’ as a kind of sixth sense that comes only from generations of gentle breeding, will regard with small favor the attempt to formulate any very definite principles governing the structure of the sentence; but those who have little faith in the subjective conclusions of capricious taste will welcome any systematic presentation of facts that may enable them to settle points of disputed usage for themselves. It is with this conviction that I offer the following contribution to the study of the sentence, not without hope that it may incite others to a more thoro investigation of related problems of English usage.

Macaulay's essay on The Life and Writings of Addison has been signalized by his most recent biographer as probably “his soundest piece of literary criticism.” Published in July, 1843, when he was at the height of his critical and stylistic powers, the work reveals both the strength and weaknesses of its author. It takes its point of departure as a review of Miss Lucy Aikin's Life of Joseph Addison, published in 1843 by Macaulay's own publishers, Longman and associates. After paying his respects to the lady author, he brushes aside the contributions in her work with severe strictures on its errors. In the prospect that the charm of Addison's letters, many of them printed in the biography for the first time, might brings a demand for a second edition of the Life, he concludes his remarks by saying: “If so, we hope that every paragraph will be revised, and that every date and fact about which there can be the smallest doubt will be carefully verified.” While making numerous corrections in Miss Aikin's work, Macaulay failed to produce a study any less in need of such checking of facts. As will be shown, this need is most notable in his spirited account of one of the salient episodes in Addison's career—the writing and publishing of the Campaign (1704).

Practically every play of the period 1587–92 that cannot be definitely credited to somebody else has at one time or another been attributed to Robert Greene.1 The canon of Greene's dramatic work has now been fairly well established, however, by conservative modern critics and it includes only those dramas for which there is reasonably sound evidence, external or internal or both, of his authorship. The attribution of yet another play to the formerly all-too-convenient Greene would not ordinarily arouse interest. But the recovery in recent years of John of Bordeaux, a sequel to his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (ca. 1589), the appearance in 1936 of an edition of this sequel in the Malone Society Reprints, and the tentative assignment of it to Greene by two such careful scholars as W. L. Renwick and W. W. Greg, its editors—these are developments which deserve more attention than they have yet received.2 There is no contemporary evidence concerning a second part of Friar Bacon,3 and now that a sequel is known to exist, there is no external evidence as to who wrote it. My purpose here is to analyze John of Bordeaux in relation to Greene and his work. This analysis, it may be said at once, supports at every point the assignment of the play to Greene.

The theory of Heinzel. Style and Metre: connected. The Metre. Four accents versus Eight accents. The Alliteration.

Dickens' Our Mutual Friend is an existential novel dealing with the struggles of the central characters to place, in Sartrean terms, existence before essence. This theme of self-definition involves characters singularly preoccupied with analyzing the deadness of past history and with rejecting the impositions of the past upon the present and the future. Boffin's historical reading and Lizzie Hexam's visions in the symbolic fire both reveal the necessity of change if there is to be an existential future. The main protagonist, Eugene Wrayburn, faced with the Shakespearean-Sartrean decision of whether or not to be in his sexual relationship with Lizzie, chooses to reject the pornographic cliches of Victorian sexuality and establish an existence for himself outside of the atrophied “Society” of the novel. Because of these decisions by the central characters to reject the dead history of the past, Our Mutual Friend is an optimistic statement of Dickens' belief in the power of the individual to regenerate a dead world.

In the twenty-fifth stanza of the first book of the Troilus occurs a passage which is puzzling in more respects than one. The stanza is as follows:

Among thise othere folk was Criseyda,
In widewes habite blak; but nathelees,
Right as our firste lettre is now an A,
In beautee first so stood she, malcelees;
Hir godly looking gladede al the prees.
Nas never seyn thing to ben preysed derre,
Nor under cloude blak so bright a sterre.

A great deal has been said about the failure of Hart Crane's The Bridge. I should like here to add a note upon an aspect of The Bridge which, as far as I know, has not been more than mentioned, probably because the finality of the usual criticism of the poem tends to obscure it. Perhaps the shortest way to what I propose is through Ezra Pound's definition of the Image: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” As symbol providing a logical meaning for the poem, the Bridge has been examined and judgment delivered; but the pattern of language through which Crane hoped to make his symbol effective as intellectual and emotional complex, or, to use his terminology, a “new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate”, has been left almost untouched.

In the following pages are presented hitherto unprinted texts of the Miracles of Our Lady in Middle English Verse, together with some discussion of the groups in which they appear, with particular regard to their relationship to the principal Latin collections of Miracles of the B. V. In considering the antecedents and the existing relationships of the Middle English versions, one must take as a starting point the results achieved by Mussafia and Ward in their monumental studies of the Legends of the Virgin, which deal especially with the Latin collections, from which presumably the English texts derive, either directly or indirectly. Though the researches of these scholars have been constantly drawn upon in discussing the materials here assembled, it has not seemed necessary in every case to trouble the reader by citing page references to their works, since the material contained in them is so systematically arranged that it is easily accessible. In citing MSS. containing English texts of the Miracles, I have availed myself of the MS descriptions contained in Carleton Brown's Register of Middle English Religious and Didactic Verse.

In that section of his “tale” which treats the deadly sin of Ire, Chaucer's Parson observes that from this sin come various “stynkynge engendrures,” including manslaughter, or homicide.

Wordsworth's relation to Italy has been a subject rather neglected in the annals of English poets who have known and loved “the land of lands,” and have left us memorial records of the beauty of Italy's blue sky, the golden clarity of her air, the soft greenness of her trees, and the fame of her poets and artists. Biographers of Wordsworth have so emphasized his relation to France that the general reader is hardly aware that the poet had crossed the Alps, both in body and in spirit. He belongs with Chaucer, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Milton, Gray, Goldsmith, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Landor, Clough, and the Brownings, all of whom will ever be associated with memories of Italy. An attempt to trace the history of his acquaintance with Italy, may, it is hoped, show that he had for things Italian a really life-long sympathy. Moreover, the study may help to dispel some lingering superstitions about Wordsworth's insularity. Wordsworth was one of the most assiduous travellers of all the English poets except Byron. The difficulty of travel in the early nineteenth century should be remembered in considering the distances he traversed. He knew France, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and various regions of England, including every inch of the Lake Country.

A number of noted scholars from Jacob Grimm to Streitberg have treated this topic. The latter in his Gotisches Elementarbuch (1920) summarizes, under the corresponding heads of the syntactical part of his grammar, the results of the various investigators. I intend in this paper to make an annotation here and there to their statements. And since I have noticed that some critics waver as to where to draw the exact demarcation line, I shall start with a definition of the matter under present consideration, following in part Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik.