The following pages are a discussion of the origin of the second half of Chrétien's Ivain; the part of the story, namely, in which the hero wins the title Chevalier au Lion. They are a continuation of a study published in 1903, which dealt chiefly with the first half of the romance. That study, to which frequent reference must necessarily be made, endeavored to show that the Ivain is a partly rationalized fairy mistress story. The kernel of the evidence there presented was a detailed comparison of the Ivain with stories in the Lebor na h-Uidre (LU) and the Book of Leinster (LL), two Irish manuscripts that were actually written before the time of Chrétien de Troyes. The first part of the Ivain was shown to be founded, almost incident for incident, on the well-known Celtic tale, of which the Serglige Conculaind is an ancient example, about a mortal who is invited to fairyland, journeys thither successfully and weds a fairy queen, but disobeys her injunctions, loses her, becomes insane and has to be cured by a magic remedy.

The title of this work, Object-Pronouns in Dependent Clauses: A Study in Old Spanish Word-Order, is perhaps too inclusive. The investigation concerns itself only with the phenomenon which I shall call interpolation. Throughout this study, interpolation will be used to mean the interpolation, between an unstressed object-pronoun and its following governing verb, of another word or other words, not unstressed object-pronouns in similar construction. In Old Spanish this phenomenon is almost without exception confined to dependent clauses, i. e., clauses that begin with a subordinating conjunction, a relative pronoun, or a relative adverb with conjunctional force.

The Spanish scholar, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who has of late been engaged in the work of resurrecting Spanish epic matter of the Middle Ages, has several times called attention to a curious form of lay communion recorded in certain traditions examined by him. Thus, in the tragic account of the seven Infantes of Lara which we find in the chronicle called the Estoria de los Godos, it is stated that the seven brothers, before beginning their last sad battle, “gave communion and confessed all their sins, one to another” (comulgaron e confesaron todos sus pecados unos á otros). On this passage Menéndez Pidal comments as follows (Leyenda de los Infantes de Lara, Madrid, 1896, p. 36): “This sort of priestly function, which, in default of clergy, relatives exercised one for another, was a very orthodox doctrine for the minstrels (juglares), and it even existed as a real custom during the Middle Ages.” He cites the noted instance in the chanson de geste Aliscans, according to which Count William not only heard the confession of his dying nephew, Vivian, but also gave him by way of communion some “pain benoït,” which the Count is said to have brought with him in his scrip (vv. 826 ff.). For other Old French examples of this lay administration of the most august of sacraments, Menéndez Pidal refers to Leon Gautier, La chevalerie (Paris, 1890, pp. 44 ff.), where, in fact, no few are mentioned, in all of which, however, the species of the communion is symbolical, being either grass or leaves.

The chief prose works of the fifteenth century in France, by common consent, are the long pseudo-chivalric romance entitled Le Petit Jehan de Saintré, the satire on women called Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage and the collection of tales known as Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. The author of the first work alone names himself: it is Antoine de la Sale, a native of Provence, known also as the author of several didactic works, La Salade, La Salle, Le Réconfort, etc. The author of the Quinze Joyes has hidden his identity in a riddle which has not yet been satisfactorily deciphered. Not even a hint as to the author or editor of the Cent Nouvelles is contained in the manuscript. Led astray by an erroneous interpretation of the riddle, Pottier in 1830 ascribed the Quinze Joyes to La Sale. Le Roux de Lincy did the same for the Cent Nouvelles, in 1841. The first scientific attempt to prove these ascriptions was made by L. Stern in 1870. Stern sought to establish La Sale's authorship of the Cent Nouvelles by a comparison of certain details of style and by the fact, noticed more in detail later, that a “conte” addressed to La Sale appears as one of the hundred tales. This was followed immediately by the paper of E. Gossart, which gave special attention to the Quinze Joyes. Gossart showed that La Sale, in La Salle and in Saintré, had made use of St. Jerome's paraphrase of Theophrastus, also cited in the prologue of the Quinze Joyes. However, as M. Raynaud has pointed out, this epistle of Jerome, with that of Valerius, also cited in the Quinze Joyes, was the chief source of most of the diatribes against marriage in the Middle Ages.

In the Arthurian romances the term Round Table is employed in three significations. Most commonly it denotes a brotherhood of knights; very rarely—though of course this is the primary meaning—it is used actually for the table itself; and finally it designates a courtly festival celebrated by Arthur on some great feast day, usually Pentecost. This last meaning of the expression is the one with which the present paper is especially concerned.

In 1887 Mr. Charles Plummer in his Elizabethan Oxford reprinted from various sources several records of Queen Elizabeth's visit to Oxford in 1566. This visit was a great event for town and university, especially since Oxford wished to outdo the welcome which Cambridge had given the Queen on a similar occasion two years before. Consequently the various ceremonies, stage-plays, and disputations of her five days' stay at Oxford were carefully chronicled. The most enthusiastic of the chroniclers was a certain John Bereblock, whose Latin Commentarii is a most detailed and valuable record. In the course of this commentary Bereblock makes large and interesting additions to our knowledge of three lost plays, Marcus Geminus, the Palæmon and Arcyte of Richard Edwards, and the Progne of Dr. James Calfhill, all of which were acted during the Queen's visit. He also gives an important description of the manner in which plays were staged at the universities.

Listening to an orator delivering a speech or to a reader reciting good prose, we may notice, running through the speaker's utterances, a characteristic and persistent tune. The voice rises and falls, increases and diminishes, moves now slowly, now rapidly, throws emphasis upon one phrase and takes it away from another, not waywardly and erratically but in accordance with some underlying pattern or scheme of movement. It is this tune or pattern, in some of its simpler and more obvious features, that I mean to consider in this paper. The pattern is the rhythm of prose, and to chart it and discover its law is to effect for prose what metrical scansion does for verse.

Attention has often been called to the extraordinary parallelism which exists between Sir Gowther, a fifteenth century English version of Robert the Devil, and the so-called Breton Lay of Tydorel. The latter is one of five anonymous romances published by Gaston Paris according to the manuscript in the National Library, which includes also the lays of Marie de France.

For some reason, the dramatist Kyd almost entirely dropped out of public notice during the 17th and 18th centuries. This is the more remarkable when we remember the popular favor which greeted certainly the Spanish Tragedy and perhaps other of his productions during the last decade of the 16th and the first quarter of the 17th century. It was one of the achievements of 19th century scholarship to restore Kyd to his place among the great Elizabethan dramatists. In this restoration, a single paragraph from Nash's prefatory Epistle to Greene's Menaphon has played a conspicuous role. It has now come to be all but universally accepted by scholars that this paragraph refers to Kyd, and in it are found not a few otherwise unknown facts of his literary history. This paragraph also has the distinction of containing the first reference in the English language to Hamlet; and a study of the context has led students to the opinion that, according to Nash, Kyd was the author of the Ur-Hamlet.

In the progress of Oriental stories westward, a movement which has been, to say the least, far from uncommon, the means and methods of transportation are usually extraordinarily difficult to ascertain. When analogues of tales well-known in the folk and formal literatures of Europe are found in the East, it is easy enough to assume that the parent form of the type was Asiatic in origin; but it is no light task to show the successive stages by which the material passed from the one continent to the other. In cases where the story was adopted by the Christian church at an early date for the moral or religious instruction of its adherents, there is perhaps less difficulty than elsewhere in believing that it was actually transplanted from the East, since the lives of the hermits of the desert, those reservoirs of Christian example, were strongly tinged by Oriental thought.

Within the last decade students of German in America have been brought to a fuller consciousness of the great debt which American culture owes to the German Fatherland. On this side of the water the Americana Germanica and its successor, the German American Annals, edited by Prof. Learned, have not only thrown much light on the linguistic, literary and cultural relations of the two countries in the past, but have also served as a stimulus in calling the attention of scholars to many points of contact hitherto overlooked. On the other side of the ocean, Ludwig Viereck, in his book Zwei Jahrhunderte deutschen Unterrichts in den Vereinigten Staaten, has given German scholars a clear historical account of the part which German instruction has played and is still playing in American education.

Joly's edition of the Roman de Troie represents substantially the text of the poem as it was written by the author and followed by Guido delle Colonne in his Historia Trojana. But a number of other translations were not made from the original text, inasmuch as the work offered great opportunities for interpolations, added by scribes who did not confine their activities to the duties of a mere copier. In 1888, E. T. Granz, in a Leipzig dissertation, Über die Quellengemeinschaft des mittelenglischen Gedichtes Seege oder Batayle of Troye und des mittelhochdeutschen Gedichtes vom trojanischen Kriege des Konrad von Würzburg, from a careful comparison of Konrad von Würzburg's Trojanerkrieg and the Middle English Seege of Troye, postulated, as the common source of the English and German poems, a redaction of the French work, containing episodes common to them, but differing in details from the text of the published work of Benoit. This thesis was further developed by C. H. Wager, who in the introduction to his edition of the Seege of Troye, contributed further to the problem by an examination of the relations of the three manuscripts to each other, and to their original.

Joost van den Vondel is one of the few Dutch poets who have attained to anything approaching international fame. To him is attributed a rather noteworthy influence on Milton. As long ago as 1854 A. Fischel demonstrated in his Life and writings of Joost van den Vondel that Milton knew and made use of Vondel's works. Gosse, in his Studies in the Literatures of Northern Europe, pointed out that this influence came only from Vondel's Lucifer and was restricted to the sixth book of Paradise Lost. Edmunson, however, in his Milton and Vondel: A Curiosity of Literature (London, 1885), showed that not only in Books 1, 2, 4, and 9 of Paradise Lost, but also in Paradise Regained and in Samson Agonistes fragments are imitated from Joannes den Boetgezant (John the Messenger of Repentance), Adam in Ballingschap (Adam in Exile), Samson of the Heilige Wraak (Samson or the Sacred Vengeance), and from Bespiegelingen van God en Godsdienst (Reflections about God and Religion). Among the other discussions the most important are that of Masson in his Life of Milton, that of Professor Moltzer in Noord en Zuid (vol. 9), and that of Van Noppen in the introduction to his translation of Vondel's Lucifer.

The following discussion of the actual dates of the composition and revision of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women takes up the question at the point where it was left in a previous article on the Prologue as related to its French and Italian sources and models. The attempt was there made to show, on the basis of such relations, that B. was the original version and A. the revision. Assuming the soundness of such a conclusion, is it possible to fix at all definitely the date of each? The present paper essays an answer to that question and includes as a corollary a discussion of the chronology of certain of Chaucer's other works specifically named in one or both forms of the Prologue itself.

Most literary productions are definitely accepted as the work of certain men, whose personality is associated with, and in a measure fixed by, their writings. Cases are not uncommon, however, in which the originality of a book is dubious, or its authorship uncertain; and students of literature are then called upon to decide whether a work, or a passage in a work, is the product of one man's brain, or of another's. In other words, they must determine the personality back of the written words.