Dass die Metapher recht eigentlich das Wesen der Poesie, deren Urzelle, die kleinste Einheit des dichterischen Schaffens darstelle, ist eine Verallgemeinerung und Hyperbel, die man oft wiederholt findet in der Literatur über Stilistik und Metaphorik. So sagt etwa Gottschall: das Bild ist nur die Abbreviatur dessen, was die Dichtung im Ganzen und Grossen ist (nämlich: Versinnlichung des Geistigen und Vergeistigung des Sinnlichen). So meint auch Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Die Handlungen, die Gestalten sind nichts anderes, wofern man das Wort nur recht versteht, als Gleichnisse aus vielen Gleichnissen zusammengesetzt. Und so nennt denn auch Hermann Pongs, der in seinem tiefgründigen Werke die Metaphernkunde auf eine neue Grundlage stellt, das dichterische Bild die originäre dichterische Einheit, das Urphänomen des .

“A little less than certain,” is the summing up by Eugène Vinaver of the evidence in regard to the identity of Sir Thomas Malory. The new material recently brought to light by Mr. Edward Hicks has practically established the theory presented by Professor Kittredge in the nineties. Of course, since other contemporaries of the same name have been pointed out, it is still possible that an extraordinary group of coincidences may have led to an erroneous conclusion, but the probabilities of this seem slight. One argument supporting this identification has not as yet been fully presented. This is the fact that the Morte Darthur gives an unmistakable reflection of the impressions which would have stamped themselves on the consciousness of a man living through the events which this Malory of Warwickshire must have experienced. As one of the retinue of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, he would have had his youthful enthusiasm enlisted in the efforts of Henry IV to establish his royal title and quell rebellions against it; he would have had a share in the continental victories of Henry V and have gained a vivid impression of the terrible conditions in France resulting from the savage feuds of the Burgundians and Armagnacs; he would have witnessed the crowning of Henry VI in Paris and probably have been on duty in Rouen at the burning of Jeanne d'Arc.

Recently the old question of the quarto-folio relationship of the York and Lancaster plays has come to the fore again—this time in exhaustive studies made by Mr. Alexander and Miss Doran in favor of the theory that the Quartos, the Contention and the True Tragedy, are pirated or reported versions of the Folio plays—2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI respectively—following rather than preceding 2 and 3 Henry VI. They hold that the Contention and the True Tragedy were written by actors who had played in 2 and 3 Henry VI and written from memory with the possible aid of a few scattered, isolated manuscript or printed parts. Rather am I in accord with the position taken by Professor Tucker Brooke in 1912, namely, that there is a lost text from which the Contention and the True Tragedy, the Whole Contention, and the Folio all came separately or independently. I am not sure that Professor Brooke now holds exactly this position, since his review of Alexander's study contains some qualifications, but I believe it is right, and submit here my evidence for so believing.

The information gained from a detailed study of the MSS of the Canterbury Tales throws light not merely on the operations of the scribes but also in some cases enables us to perceive successive stages in Chaucer's arrangement of the Tales. One of the clearest illustrations of this is presented by the conclusion of the Clerk's Tale. The variations of the MSS at this point seem to afford unmistakable evidence of revision by the poet himself, and they carry with them, I think, some larger implications.

In October, 1805, in his twentieth year, John Wilson, gentleman commoner of Oxford, purchased some ground on Lake Windermere. Here it was that, after his brilliant graduation in March, 1807, the winner of the first Newdigate prize settled in his cottage of Elleray. Through diffidence he had been unwilling to intrude upon Wordsworth during his early visits to the Lake District; but by 1808 he had made the acquaintance of the poet and his family, and for the next few years he was on most intimate terms with them, as the letters of Dorothy Wordsworth show. Naturally, too, he became acquainted with the other members of the “Lake School.” De Quincey first saw “Wilson of Elleray” at the dances held at Low Brathay, home of Charles Lloyd, and was introduced to his lifelong friend by Wordsworth at Allan Bank, “at the latter end of 1808,” at a time when both De Quincey and Coleridge were on a visit to Wordsworth, the introduction taking place in a room used as a study by Coleridge. Southey likewise dined in Wilson's company at Lloyd's, and breakfasted with him at Keswick shortly after, but whereas Wilson always felt warm regard for the laureate, the latter could not recover from his abhorrence when he learned of the younger man's passion for cockfighting. “I could not tolerate his manner of life enough to accept the advances which he made towards an intimacy,” writes Southey, with entirely unnecessary indignation, in 1819. Precisely when Coleridge met his fellow-laker is uncertain. We know that Coleridge invited Eliza Nevins, Wilson, and Mrs. Wilson to Grasmere in September, 1808, and that, together with the Wordsworths and De Quincey, he paid Wilson a visit at Christmas, 1809, during which, Dorothy Wordsworth informs us, “we enjoyed ourselves very much, in a pleasant mixture of merriment and thoughtful discourse.” We know that in the seventeenth number of Coleridge's The Friend, on December 14, 1809, appeared that splendid tribute to Wordsworth, the letter of Mathetes, joint production of Wilson and his friend, Alexander Blair.

The orator in petticoats often launched her plays with such audacity that she eclipsed the glory of the Prologue-monsieur and established the vogue of a particular kind of stage-oration which the poets called “She-Prologues” or “Female Prologues and Epilogues.” For her, Lyly, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Suckling, Dryden, Congreve, and many lesser playwrights wrote feminine orations; and as she pleaded her customary theme, “for my sake,” she made herself mistress of an art that won applause for As You Like It, Love for Love, The Way of the World, Cato, and more than two hundred other plays before 1714. A tall woman of her tongue was the She-Prologue; yet no one, I believe, has told the history of her addresses, the history of a particular type of playhouse-discourse with a vogue that touches upon the great change in the theatre resulting from the employment of actresses. Witty, saucy, beautiful, she and her playhouse-sisters with a gift for oratory harangued the pit and gallery for more than half a century: Nell 'neath a big hat, like a bug under a leaf; Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Bracegirdle, true friends to Betterton; yes, more than twenty other women—prattling sometimes, sometimes discoursing—circumscribed the matter and manner of the female prologue or epilogue, an address by a female orator of the stage.

Critics have generally agreed that of all of Shakespeare's sonnets cvii offers the most hope for dating by internal evidence. It runs:

Not mine own fears, nor the propehtic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,

Can yet the lease of my true love control,

Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,

And the sad augurs mock their own presage;

Incertainties now crown themselves assured,

And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Now with the drops of this most balmy time

My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since spite of him I'll live in this poor rhyme,

While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes;

And thou in this shall find thy monument,

When tyrants crests and tombs of brass are spent.

Three works attributed to Robert Greene, all published posthumously, have served as the basis for almost all that has been written about the life of that interesting Elizabethan author; portions of these works have been accepted as pure autobiography, and the information contained in such passages has been used to confirm similar details, apparently also autobiographical, in the earlier works. The hazard involved in the use, for purposes of biography, of material contained in the novels of Greene, or of any other writer of fiction, should be obvious to any modern critic; but the earlier scholars were evidently unaware of the danger.

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.

When Wuthering Heights first appeared the immediate and quite predictable reaction of Victorian readers and reviewers was to view with dismay, if not with disgust, the wildness and brutality of the characters and emotions described in it. Charlotte Brontë herself, while professing great admiration for her sister's work, doubted whether it was right to create men like Heathcliff. Today the wonder of critics is turned upon another aspect of the book; namely, how could a girl in Emily's situation, with her limited experience and living her secluded life, write such a book at all? The researches of biographers have thrown little light on this problem, largely because of the very meager sources to which they may turn. Emily was a fiercely reticent person. She seems to have had no friends and hardly any acquaintances outside her family circle. As to people beyond that circle, Charlotte tells us that “she had scarcely more knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates.” Her letters and manuscripts were with very few exceptions—two brief letters and some manuscripts of her poems—destroyed either by Charlotte or herself.

The present study purposes to establish a direct relationship between the comic underplot in Twelfth Night and the Jonsonian comic method as first developed in Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour. Shakespeare's name appears first in the list of actors for the former play in the Jonson Folio (1616). This is almost the only indubitable instance of Shakespeare's acting, attested by written evidence on the authority of Jonson rather than based on tradition or hearsay. His thorough familiarity with this play is, consequently, a certainty, and the production of Every Man out of His Humour by his company in the following year is sufficient evidence that his knowledge of both plays was intimate and detailed.

For a number of years Francis Meres, the glorifier of Shakespeare, has been puffed as a classical scholar. The translated quotations from innumerable classical authors in his Palladis Tamia as well as his references to many recondite poets of antiquity in the celebrated section on poetry have misled many scholars. One of the chief sinners in this respect is the late Sir Sidney Lee, who on at least two occasions called attention to Meres's powers as a classical scholar. Even the able American scholar, Professor C. F. Tucker Brooke, has on one occasion lumped Meres and Gosson together as puritans and classicists. Others who have attributed various epithets to Meres as “careful,” “learned,” “scholar,” “classical critic,” “Professor at Oxford,” and “Professor at Cambridge” are myriad; and one can locate these phrases through the index rerum of many works on Elizabethan literature. There are, indeed, some scholars who have had reasonable doubts; but as yet there has been no definite effort to investigate the matter for the truth. In the course of this paper, I shall point out the sources of Mere's classical allusions, and I trust that the shallowness of his knowledge in this respect will stand as a caveat regarding his evidence in general.

William Drummond of Hawthornden is as much a translator as an original poet. This Mr. Kastner has shown in detail in the copious notes to his edition of the poet and in several special articles. He translated and adapted from a large number of Italian and French poets, as well as some Spanish and some neo-Latin writers. Yet his work, read as a whole, has a very individual note and charm of personality that unify it and give it distinction. This was not due to similarity in his sources. The poets whom he translated were widely varied in tempers and styles—so much so that some of them have made their idiosyncrasies felt in the work of other English poets and have started particular streams of influence. It is of interest to draw together all the translations and adaptations from each of the French and Italian poets, Drummond's principal sources, and make a detailed comparison of style, to see what particular contribution each made to Drummond's style, and how far we find in him Petrarchism, Marinism, and so forth. By this series of contrasts we shall be able first to define these influences more exactly. And this definition is of interest, incidentally, not only for Drummond, but for other poets such as Donne and Crashaw. Second, we shall see the particular style of Drummond emerging from among the various source poets and taking on its integral character.

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.”

In the midst of the stormiest days of his career at the Collège de France, we find Edgar Quinet plunged in the Essays of Emerson. The striking example of a great French teacher and reformer taking refuge in the writings of the Concord philosopher, then practically unknown, during so violent and eventful an academic year as was 1844–45, is clearly shown in Quinet's lectures and commonplace book of that same period. Doubtless he found in the pages of the American essayist at this trying period both inspiration and solace. Little wonder, then, that he proclaimed enthusiastically to his auditors at the Collège de France that America had given birth to an original philosophy; and furthermore, that Emerson “was the most idealistic writer of our time.”

It was Coleridge who so definitively characterized Sir Thomas Browne as “a hunter of oddities and strangenesses.” There is no key which fits his temper so perfectly. He was, his life long, an indefatigable searcher after what was unusual, in his reading, in his friends' experience, and in his own. Clearly it is this penchant for the exceptional, this probing for the bizarre, the exotic, which accounts for his lively interest in foreign countries, notably those which were least like his own—an interest attested by the fact that so generous a portion of his reading concerned other lands.