During the past fifty or sixty years in the history of Romance linguistics, the erratic development of vowels in hiatus has constituted an ever recurring problem. Scholars have been little preotcupied with the subject except in so far as it touches the history of the number words (CL dŭo) and the possessive adjectives and pronouns (CL měus, tŭus, sŭus). A study of the latter led d'Ovidio to give the first account of any extent of the development of vowels in hiatus in a Romance tongue; he limited his study to Italian. At about the same time, Karl Brugmann was investigating the mode of development of vowels in hiatus in Latin and Greek. Although he was able to establish a fairly clear system of development for the forms in the ancient languages, further studies in Romance linguistics failed to clarify the issue for the modern languages. In 1893, Menger attempted to answer, at least tentatively, some of the outstanding questions incidental to the problem and cleared the atmosphere somewhat; his treatment was, however, primarily a development of the possessive pronoun and was limited to Italian. The work of scholars such as Meyer-Lubke led to mere tabulation of forms; other treatments have considered at most a set group of words, like the possessive pronouns, in the various languages or have dealt only with the multitude of dialectal forms in an area geographically restricted. In short, the development of vowels in hiatus in the whole of the Romance territory has never been the object of a comprehensive study.

There existed in Scandinavia a well-defined legendary tradition that, when Hamðir and Sǫrli seemed about to achieve their vengeance upon the Gothic king Jǫrmunrekkr for slaying their sister Svanhildr, the Goths were instructed (or advised) to stone them to death. The two have been sent, against their will and with considerable misgivings, by their mother Guðrún to avenge their sister. On the way they have met Erpr, a third brother, and, after an exchange of sneers and insults, have slain him. Upon arriving at the Gothic hall they have cut down large numbers of Goths and have lopped off the hands and feet of Jǫrmunrekkr. Now they stand, themselves unscathed, Gothic weapons useless against them. Nothing seems to stand in the way of complete execution of their vengeance. Then, at the moment of their apparent triumph, come the instructions (or advice) to stone them. Upon this the ninth-century Eddic Hamðismál, the thirteenth-century Vǫlsungasaga, and the Edda of Snorri Sturluson all agree. Bragi the skald, in his Ragnarsdrápa, recounts only the attack in the Gothic hall, but he too represents Hamðir and Sǫrli as stoned.

In his book entitled Malory Professor Vinaver propounds a plausible hypothesis that certain features of the romance of Gareth in the seventh book of the Morte d'Arthur were inventions of the author.

The hero—Beaumains—is Malory's own hero, and his name, impossible in any French romance, strangely resembles that of Malory's patron [Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick]. His successive battles with the Black, Green, and Red Knights, and particularly his behaviour at the tournament at the castle of Lady Lioness, at once call to mind the romantic adventure of Richard Beauchamp. At that tournament the King of Ireland wondered who Beaumains might be, “that one tyme semed grene, and another tyme at his ageyne comyng he semed blewe. And thus at every cours that he rode to and fro he chaunged his colour so that ther myght neyther kynge nor knyghte have redy congnyssaunce of hym.” The parallel is so close as to lead me to believe that some parts of the book of Beaumains were written in remembrance of Beauchamp's gallant deeds.

This essay follows closely a long tradition of poets writing about war as winter, emphasizing its most dangerous characteristics: an impersonal force that can bring indiscriminate annihilation, freezing numbness or insensibility, and blank illegibility. These poems tell of modern total war avant la lettre and its capacity to destroy what we can feel or know of its work. Focusing primarily on eighteenth-century British poets (Pope, Thomson, Cowper, and Wordsworth) but turning as well to Homer and our contemporary poets, the essay considers the particular threats of war to poetic creation and the difficult, often desperate means by which poets resist those threats. Perhaps most ominous in these figurations are representations of war as still, inactive, and somehow outside the logic of historical eventfulness. Thus the poets meditate as well on the very possibility of historical narrative amid the violence of war.

A small manuscript of only five leaves in Paris, Bibl. Nat. N. A. franç. 10176, which receives a brief notice in the catalogue, contains an early, and so far as known a unique, medieval translation into French of the article from Suidas's Lexicon and of a part of the Testamenta XII Patriarcharum. Both of these works were translated from Greek into Latin by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235–1253. A description of the manuscript follows.

It is well known that two kinds of ne are present in Chaucer, which are written alike in the manuscripts. These two particles, however, must not be confounded. One of them is ne (neque) and the other is ne (non). Compare Old French ne and né (=ni).

Ubrich Knoche in seinem schönen Artikel “Betrachtungen über Horazens Kunst der satirischen Gesprächsführung” (Philologus, xc [1936], S.373 ff.) zeigt, von demhorazischen Präzept ausgehend:

Perhaps no portion of the chapters of Moryson's Itinerary, published in 1903 under the somewhat unexpected title of “Shakespeare's Europe,” has aroused more interest than his brief passage about the so-called English comedians, whom he saw at the Frankfort fair in September, 1592. Of the few contemporary accounts known to us his is the only one from an English source and probably the only one written by a man whose previous acquaintance with the theater fitted him in any way to judge of the merits of such performances.

It would be deceptively easy for a critic defining the central conflict of The Back Room, Carmen Martín Gaite's first post-Franco novel, to sort out a series of polar forces—chaos and order, memory and memoir, fantasy and reality, “loose” woman and Falangist supporter. While the narrator recognizes the impossibility of emancipation from these necessary structures of thought, she nevertheless insists on her freedom to question such dualisms and to collapse apparent polarities in a radically ambiguous manner, rendering undecidable many issues of limits and transgression. The resulting story is both untellable and never-ending, and its most significant allegorical representation in the text is a sewing basket full of miscellaneous items tangled in colored thread.

Is Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance chiefly the story of Hollingsworth and his unsuccessful philanthropic scheme, or the story of Zenobia and her tangled relations with Hollingsworth, Priscilla, Westervelt, and Old Moodie, or the story of Coverdale, the cold observer, or the story of the Blithedale experiment? Any of these candidates could be defended. Hollingsworth has the strongest effect upon the plot, and Hawthorne originally intended to name the novel after him; Zenobia is the most vivid character, and her story receives even more space than Hollingsworth's; Coverdale is the character whom we know most intimately; and although Hawthorne prefatorially states that his description of the communal farm “is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the romance,” his remarks about Blithedale's purpose, operation, and failure constitute an evaluation of the Brook Farm experiment. Yet none of these sub-plots clearly dominates the rest. Unless some principle of unity holds them together, Blithedale is at best a noble failure; until we are aware of this principle of unity, we cannot read the novel with satisfaction.

Though mentioned by every compendious grammar, the stylistic figure of litotes has been the subject of few specialized treatments for the individual languages. Of these, two are outstanding longo intervallo: Carl Weyman's learned and apparently exhaustive treatise entitled Studien über die Figur der Litotes, which deals with the phenomenon in Latin literature; and Alfred Hübner's Die mhd. Ironie oder die Litotes im Altdeutschen abounding in subtle and thought-provoking suggestions based on a vast material, but not well organized.

Although most critics have registered disappointment with Book v of Wordsworth's Prelude, a reading of that part of the epic in the light of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century educational theory reveals that in it Wordsworth made a supremely unified and significant poetic statement. Such a reading of Book v demonstrates that Wordsworth feared that the overly manipulative systems of contemporary educational theorists would sever children from the sources of their imaginative growth. The Book shows that Wordsworth believed, in contrast with most contemporary educational theorists, that freedom and spontaneity were the sources of the imagination. If the childhood of humanity were deprived of the freedom necessary for imaginative growth, human culture, so important to man's earthly existence, would wither and die. In Book VWordsworth took a stand against what he thought was an overwhelming contemporary evil. If we read Book v in its proper intellectual context, the structural and conceptual integrity that previous critics have missed becomes apparent.

Publication continues to be one of the more important activities of the scholar-teacher. Through the years, the scholar gains experience as to what is publishable, where it should be placed, and how it can be presented to achieve maximum effect. The Executive Council of the Modern Language Association felt, however, that the advice of some senior scholars and experienced publishers might be of use to younger writers. The following document has passed through several revisions and incorporates the observations of thirty-three able consultants. It is hoped that it will save both scholars and their publishers from unnecessary disappointments.

When Addison in his essay on the imagination made novelty a source of aesthetic pleasure, along with beauty and grandeur, he was not announcing a discovery. Previous critics had repeatedly noted the efficacy of the varied and strange, the wonderful, and the surprising in achieving desired poetic effects. Addison's idea of novelty includes these elements. The new or uncommon diverts our minds with “the Strangeness of its appearance”; the novel “fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise”; variety, in the essay on the Imagination and in the criticism of Paradise Lost alike, is a virtual synonym for novelty; and the wonderful, or the marvelous, almost invariably applies to that which possesses both grandeur and novelty—to anything that excites “admiration.”

Students of Elizabethan literature are well acquainted with the fact that Sir William Cornwallis had part of Montaigne's essays available in translation before the composition of the first volume of his own essays, which was published in 1600, and probably written soon after he returned from Ireland where he had been knighted by Essex on August 5, 1599. Unfortunately, no one has been able to determine whether or not the translation which Cornwallis saw was Florio's. While Florio's Montaigne was not published until 1603, a large part of it may have been completed much earlier, and Cornwallis may have seen all or part of Florio's work; but it is just as possible that he saw a translation which is not now extant. Florio, himself, says, “Seven or eight of great wit and worth have assayed, but found these Essayes no attempt for French apprentises or Littletonians.” Cornwallis does not help us to decide the question. Although he is frequently indebted to Montaigne, I can find no passage which approaches a quotation closely enough to make comparison with Florio's version illuminating. Neither is Cornwallis's tribute to Montaigne's translator very helpful.

Mr. Bateson's numerous notes on the Middle English Clannesse (Mod. Lang. Rev., xiii, pp. 377–86) renew interest in that curious, though often tantalizing poem. Worthy of acceptance, it seems to me, are those on lines 3, 30, 54, 222, 341, 379, 411, 449, 553, 630, 1048, 1261, 1483, 1566, 1735, a considerable list. About as many others are equally good, but have been proposed before. For example, the New Eng. Dict. has anticipated Mr. Bateson in his suggestions for lines 148, 214, 887, 1038, 1469, while the Cent. Dict. had preceded the NED in the note on line 1514. Besides, the NED seems to be misquoted on (1153) and penitotes (1472). The former is certainly given under tight, v. 2, with this passage among others. Nor have I found where the NED reads ryther for ryth of 1543.

This paper explores the strange fascination with smallness that runs through Vergil's Aeneid, focusing on the bee simile in book 1, the poem's inaugural miniaturizing moment. Deviating from the standard paradigms of Vergilian criticism, I suggest we can learn a great deal about smallness in this poem by studying it through the lens of the sublime. My analysis bypasses the proliferation of Romantic sublimes to draw primarily on a model of sublimity derived from Neil Hertz's influential reading of Longinus. Read through the Hertzian sublime, miniaturization in the Aeneid is revealed as a subtle articulation of the poem's running concern with power. The bee simile, I argue, enacts a threefold drama in which hero, author, and reader confront what I call their sublime condition, coming to terms with their implication in immensities beyond their comprehension and control.

Although Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) is a well-known document in the history of English criticism, there is, curiously enough, only one modern edition of this work, and there exists as yet no study of Hurd's total accomplishment as a critic. Miss Morley's Introduction to her edition of the Letters has been described as “valuable,” but she has done little more than summarize the contents of the book and reprint Hurd's own notes uncritically.

The romantic career of that unhappy favorite of Queen Elizabeth, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, like the histories of Mary Stuart and of the Maréchal de Biron, has been often used as a subject for tragedy in Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English. Several of these plays have been studied more or less carefully at different times, so that I shall not do more than summarize those versions briefly before passing on to my main subject, the relation between Niccolo Biancolelli's Regina Statista d'Inghilterra and its commedia dell'Arte variants, of which the one presented here is hitherto unpublished.