Despite its sovereign status among English elegies and within English poetry in general, two strictures upon Lycidas continue in some degree to shadow the poem: the one would hold with Dr. Johnson that its pastoral apparatus is a flaw in terms both of art and of personal expression; the other would agree with G. Wilson Knight that the work lacks order or unity. Both strictures have become increasingly untenable in the light of one type of study which has helped to make reavailable the form and power of the pastoral elegy in itself, and of another type which has marked the structural and affective unity of Milton's poem. Yet some readers still may feel that Milton sets cool pastoral against impassioned personal outcry, and will consider the two modes of expression to be in direct conflict. Milton editors and critics therefore will continue to face the question of unity in Lycidas. Recently Douglas Bush and Merritt Y. Hughes, for example, delivered defenses of the poem in the course of registering adverse charges made against it.

The comedias of the Golden Age in Spain present a field of investigation that seems to be inexhaustible. The dramatic productions of that unbelievably exuberant period are so numerous that no one can hope to read them all. Even to try to keep up with the research based upon them is a task of the first magnitude. These plays have been studied from the point of view of sources, dramatic technique, versification, style, dates of the plays, authorship, and much, much else.

From Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, through the medieval commentators, the Elizabethans inherited a body of complex psychological principles. An examination of these principles and their bearing on The Faerie Queene has so far been only casual and incidental. Since in Book ii, Canto ix, the poet combines one of the most widely used of medieval motifs—the conception of the body as a world, city, or castle—with certain current doctrines of psychology, such an inquiry is especially apposite. Spenser's use of the abundant contemporaneous literature of psychology affords material for an extended treatment such as that which Miss Anderson has made of Shakespeare's plays. The present study purposes to set forth one aspect of his system of psychology—his psychology of memory in the allegory of the Castle of Alma, to make clear the relationship of his system to the current Elizabethan doctrines, and to establish the purpose of certain departures from those doctrines.

An analysis of the multiple versions of many of the novel's events contained in E. M. Forster's manuscript of A Passage to India increases our understanding of the published work. Examining his changes in the “Caves” and “Temple” material supports the notion that the novel is a philosophic one, whose themes were in Forster's mind from the beginning–largely as a result of his Indian experiences–but whose dramatic structure was developed slowly as he sought to create characters who would animate his ideas. Thus, the nihilistic message of the Marabar Caves–that “everything exists, nothing has value”–is substantially the same in even the earliest version, only there it is the schoolmaster Fielding, rather than Mrs. Moore, who encounters this bleak pronouncement. Since such a vision could never alter Fielding's admirable yet limited humanism in any significant respect, Forster decided to have Mrs. Moore enter the cave instead. In the published work, Mrs. Moore emerges in a dominant role as a disillusioned mystic after her earlier MS beginnings as a conventional, God-fearing Christian lady.

One of the most puzzling of literary problems is the fact that John Milton, though unquestionably one of the world's great poets, spent the prime of his life in writing chiefly prose. By 1640 he had written some poems which the world has not willingly let die. But with the exception of a few sonnets (many of which are occasional poetry or mere society verse) he wrote hardly any poetry from 1640 to 1658—that is, roughly, between the ages of thirty and fifty. A careful reading of his History of Britain, however, sheds some light on this situation and reveals an important trait of Milton's which is seldom fully recognized. Coming to the History of Britain with no preconceived notion of Milton's character or purpose, one is increasingly impressed with the idea that for Milton the writing of poetry was unusually difficult, and that his mind tended more naturally to prose criticism. (I hope soon to publish a study of Milton's satire which will support this view.) To say that Milton was no poet or that poetry can be defined only as the product of un trammeled fancy is ridiculous; it is a bent, a matter of degree rather than of kind. But there is some justification for thinking of Milton as a reluctant poet.

Athelston is one of the most vigorous and independent of Middle English romances, yet it is one about which least is known. Various writers have commented on this “strange neglect,” but in the years since 1829 when Hartshorne first published the text in his Ancient Metrical Tales, it has only twice been made the subject of serious study. Zupitza's edition in Englische Studien XIII-XIV (1889–1890) was primarily textual in character and devoted less than two pages to questions of origin. In Englische Studien XXXVI (1906), Prof. Gerould discussed “Social and Historical Reminiscences in Athelston.” Frankly accepting Zupitza's brief conjectures as to the original personages and events of the story, he concerned himself with the study of sworn brotherhood, a custom prominently referred to in the romance, and with the interesting possibility that the characterization of king and bishop in the romance had been influenced by the vivid personalities of Henry II and Thomas Becket. Certainly their memory was as living for the fourteenth century as it had been for the twelfth since it was continually renewed by the pilgrim hosts at Becket's shrine. A story which had to tell of the quarrel between a king and a churchman might well borrow something from the traditional violence of King Henry and the fearless courage of Becket, but such influence in Athelston, if it existed at all, must have affected simply the characterization of the two dominant personalities; in other respects, in motive, detail and incident, there is no real correspondence between history and the romance. In a story so closely knit as Athelston it is unprofitable to believe that it had absorbed unrelated incidents or that it had varied very much from whatever was its basic type. From the false accusation brought by the king's friend against his sworn brother, through the king's quarrel with the archbishop who hurries to the defense of the king's sister and her husband, to the great climax when the accused pass through the ordeal by fire, the story pursues an almost inevitable course which allows for hardly one of the haphazard accretions usual in mediaeval romance.

In a review-article dealing with four recent monographs, all of which were to some extent devoted to problems connected with the genesis of Zola's novels, M. Jean Onimus points out that it is hard to think of another author in whom such problems can be more satisfactorily studied. The survival of the dossiers of each of the novels in the three great cycles makes it possible to elucidate almost the entire process of composition in respect of each component work and hence to generalize about this process with considerably more assurance than is permissible to the student of any other major French novelist. “Ce que nous cherchons avec tant de difficulté chez Balzac, ce que Stendhal nous livre au hasard de ses ‘pilotis’ et des commentaires en marge de ses manuscrits, ce que Gide nous a donné dans le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, Zola nous le révèle pour toutes ses œuvres et jusque dans le dernier détail.”

The following list is meant to be a useful tool in locating authors and copies of books; it is not a complete bibliography of all editions. In most cases only the earliest ones available have been noted. Modern editions of separate plays have been listed when found, but modern editions of the works of the various authors have not been included. For Latin plays written by Englishmen, including those printed on the Continent, see Alfred Harbage's “Census of Anglo-Latin Plays,” PMLA, liii, 624–629.

Many scholars have found in Hamlet's soliloquy beginning “To be, or not to be” the crux of the drama. Those who, like the Romantic critics, have interpreted the play as a struggle between Hamlet's determination to avenge his father and his inhibiting propensity to over-subtle philosophizing have felt that here, more clearly than anywhere else, he is exposing his malady: over-delicate sensibility and a love of intellectual hair-splitting which absorb energy that should have gone into decisive action. Such critics point for further confirmation to the soliloquy at the end of Act ii, in which Hamlet contrasts his own lethargy (in language far from lethargic) with the deep histrionic passion of the player who has just recited for him, and to the later soliloquy (iv. iv), in which he certainly does quite roundly chide himself for procrastination, while he confesses to have had “cause, and will, and strength, and means, / To do't.”

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.”

Pablo Neruda’s first noteworthy lyric was written in 1925, at a time of unrest not only in himself but in Chilean society as well. “Galope muerto” strains the mimetic capacity of poetry. Similes without a referent and present participles without a limiting verb leave the reader reaching for some hidden source, some inner principle of experience. A new verse translation can instigate and inform the close reading of “Galope muerto,” showing what Neruda was after: an image of dynamic form, to catch things consumed yet brimming with energy, contained yet astir with life. He moves from the “dead gallop” of his title toward indigenous American calabashes resting on the earth and yet swelling with life. Twenty years later, in his major poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Neruda reanimated the Andean site, drawing on the image of suspended energy that he first explored in writing “Galope muerto.”

The possibility of bettering the present curriculum in English literature will depend in great measure upon the proportion of time allowed to it. So long as the classics and mathematics retain for themselves the lion's share of time and interest, the hopes of our professors of literature will never become unduly exalted. If I may express myself with thorough frankness, the customary quota of English literature, say less than two hours per week for less than two years, is so insufficient that I cannot look upon it as capable of improvement. The study will remain perforce hurried and superficial. Now the course that I have in mind is one of two full hours (better three) throughout three entire years. It is the course which has been required since 1880 for the B. L. degree in the University of Cincinnati, viz., three years, three hours a week. The classical students are now (beginning with 1884) compelled to take two of the three years, and the Scientifics one year. Perhaps this last requirement will be hereafter raised to two years.

The Accompanying table gives the most recent data obtainable on the extent to which foreign languages are offered and studied in public secondary schools in the United States. The last national survey was made by the U. S. Office of Education in 1948–49, and comparisons are made with the results of this survey to show the subsequent gain or loss in each state for which more recent figures could be obtained. For some states the data are incomplete because the state department of education does not know, and apparently does not care to find out, what the pupils in the high schools are currently studying. In seventeen states, the information existed only on reports filed by each high school, and it was assembled through the help of foreign language teachers who went to the state department of education and spent days tabulating the reports.

It has long been recognized that the American formalists' rehabilitation of Alexander Pope depended on a renewed interest in rhetoric. In fact, there is a remarkable structural congruence between the formalists image of Pope's poetry and their conception of rhetoric, for both are item-centered, combinatory, and ultimately unifying. A single model of unified diversity, then, governs not only the formalist image of Pope's couplet rhetoric and theodicean scheme but formalist conceptions of rhetoric and “organic form” as well. An alternative (and complementary) model of rhetoric, however, insisting on creation as an act of structuring through differentiation rather than through unification, can help us to a fuller understanding of The Dunciad, and especially of the place of Dulness in that poem. Such a model can also generate a poetics capable of granting to satire and mock forms an appropriately primary status. (FVB)

In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (VIII, ix-xii) occurs the oldest and almost the only known legend about the most famous megalithic monument in Britain. The story accounts for Stonehenge as the funeral monument erected for hundreds of noble Britons slain by the treacherous Hengist and his Saxons, and it was for centuries accepted as the historical explanation of that great structure. Chroniclers repeated the tale and successive generations believed, to borrow Spenser's wording, that they could

“Th'eternall marks of treason . . . at Stonheng vew.” (F. Q., II, x, 66).

The first Italian grammar published in England, in 1550, written by William Thomas, clerk of the Council to King Edward VI. and one of the first Protestant victims of the succeeding reign, contains “a Dictionarie for the better understanding of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante.” The title indicates that the great Italian poets of the trecento were first studied by English readers, and Boccaccio and Petrarch are here named before Dante. Indeed, after a most careful search, I cannot find any Elizabethan translation of any work of Dante. The first English translation of Dante in the British Museum Catalogue is that of Henry Boyd, L'Inferno, in 1785, La Divina Commedia, in 1802.

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).

During the summer of 1849, while Melville was in New York writing White Jacket, the New York Herald carried a running story of the arrest and trial of a petty criminal known as the “Confidence Man.” There are several parallels between the Herald's “Confidence Man” and the character that Melville created in his later novel The Confidence-Man. Both the New York “Confidence Man” and Melville's Confidence-Man use the same approach and the same line of reasoning, leading to the same question: “Could you put any confidence in me?” Both men work under several aliases; both men use the former-acquaintance routine to relax their victims. In both the reality and the fiction there is a matter of bail to get out of the Tombs. And in both the novel and a Herald editorial a strong parallel is drawn between petty confidence men and the confidence men of Wall Street. From this correlation there is little doubt that this “Confidence Man” of 1849 was, in fact, the prototype for a major part of Melville's character in 1857.