The history of the early eighteenth-century stage, although recently favored by the attention of numerous scholars, still suffers from lack of contemporary data of a reliable nature. The period is a difficult one; for it is a period where uncertainty and intricacy abound. Everything seems in an uncrystallized condition; and drama, court, and society present varied and varying modes. In many ways it is a pioneer age; in many ways it mirrors the brilliance of future achievement. No attempt is made here, however, either to explain, criticize, or defend the early years of the century, but merely to offer certain facts taken from indisputable sources. As the newspaper is the medium of this information, a brief account of contemporary journalism is prefaced.

The Day of Judgement“ was in 1775 added to the Swift canon without question, by inclusion in a supplement to the Dean's works, and its authorship has apparently never been doubted. In the following paragraphs it will be shown that the poem was accepted on insufficient grounds, but that it is authentic. The poem is generally supposed to have been first printed in the Earl of Chesterfield's Letters to his Son (7 April, 1774), its authenticity guaranteed by an accompanying letter in which the earl wrote that he had the original in Swift's own handwriting. As a matter of fact, the poem was first published in the St. James's Chronicle (12 April, 1774) in a letter from an anonymous contributor, and apparently from this source transferred through the Monthly Review (July, 1774) to the fourth edition of Chesterfield's Letters (29 October, 1774). From the Letters, apparently, it was incorporated into the collection of Swift (1775), and thus into the Swift canon. The anonymity of the original source raises doubts concerning the poem's authenticity. From these doubts two references to the poem (both by Lord Chesterfield), one of which could not have been available to a literary forger, clear ”The Day of Judgement.“

To be perfectly accurate, this title should be considerably longer; for the late eighteenth century will be represented by only its last decade and its hero-worshippers by those remarkably misguided bards who gained an immortality of sorts by publishing their verses in the poets' corners of contemporary magazines. Apparently the desire to write poetry had then become quite uncontrollable in the breasts of most literate Englishmen, and practically everything so written could be sent off to certain acceptance by obliging periodicals. Yet some poets were still timorous enough to feel the need of authority and wise enough to find it by writing either tributary stanzas to generally admired authors or acknowledged imitations of their more familiar compositions. Others, more generous, did the same thing to express their unbounded enthusiasm; and a few even wrote in reproach and bitterness of spirit when certain contemporary authors failed to satisfy them. Whatever their motive, their poetry remains valuable as evidence of the taste of the time. And, because the process of making over the gods in one's own image, or rather in the image of what one would like to be, is always instructive, and because at this particular time the image was so distinctly that of the average man, become more or less articulate, the opportunity for research and generalization becomes irresistibly alluring.

The Middle English Dictionary inherited from the Oxford Dictionary about 450,000 slips containing Middle English quotations, generously donated to us by the Delegates of the Clarendon Press. We have also about 175,000 slips collected at Cornell under the editorship of Professor C. S. Northup. Before beginning to collect material on our own account it seemed wise to study the material we already had in order to discover just what material was needed to supplement it. For testing the Oxford Dictionary material we prepared what we called a “cross section.” We first selected 150 words which should be fairly representative of the whole Middle English vocabulary. All of the slips for these 150 words were removed from the files and were rearranged according to the texts from which they were taken, so that for every important text read for the Oxford Dictionary we have a sample body of slips running in number from 10 or 20 to 2200.

Some years ago Mr. T. J. Wise said that “Many of Conrad's books may, in fact, be studied profitably in three published states: (1) the serial state (England and America), (2) the partly-revised state from the serial (America), and (3) the finally-revised state (England).” He suggested that a collation of the texts of the magazines with those of the books “would yield very remarkable results.” I have attempted a collation of six of Conrad's short stories: (a) “An Outpost of Progress,” “The Lagoon,” and “Karain,” published with two other stories in Tales of Unrest (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898); and (b) “Youth,” “Heart of Darkness,” and “The End of the Tether,” published in Youth (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902). This collation does not include the American serial and book texts. I have found only “Hearts of Darkness” published serially in America. Moreover Conrad paid little attention to his American editions. For example, of the first American edition of Tales of Unrest Conrad wrote: “Uncorrected by me. Probably differences of text from 1st English edon.” Of the first American edition of Youth Conrad wrote: “1st U.S. edition printed from unrevised proofs. Probably much nearer the Maga text than the 1st Eng. edition.” Mr. Richard Curie declares:

Conrad always regarded his English book-text as the one that mattered. He was not much concerned about perfecting his text for serial publication and not greatly concerned, even, if the American book-text was not his finally revised one.

It does not often happen that a language form created by conscious deliberation and planning wins the warm support and widespread acceptance which has fallen to the lot of New Norse, the creation of Ivar Aasen (1813–1896). A large body of serious literature has grown up in this artificial common denominator of Norwegian dialects; possibly a fourth of the school-children of Norway receive their chief instruction in it. Although New Norse is far from its goal of supremacy, it is a factor of the utmost significance in Norwegian history, and a phenomenon of great interest to students of language and literature.

The earliest detailed study of Aasen's linguistic practice is found in Johan Storm's polemic pamphlet Det nynorske Landsmaal. That brilliant scholar here applied his wit and ingenuity to proving that New Norse (Landsmaal) as written, was not and could not be a language, because of its inevitable tendency to crumble up into the dialects of which it was created. To this end he analyzed in some detail the language of the various New Norse writers, among them Aasen. His purpose did not, however, involve an exhaustive study of Aasen's works, many of which were then unknown or scattered. Hence his classification was inadequate and at times definitely incorrect. He divided Aasen's New Norse into an older form, represented by Prøver af Landsmaalet (1853) and Fridtjofs Saga (1858), and an intermediary form used in Ervingen (2d ed., 1874), Heimsyn (1875) and Symra (3d ed., 1875). But this rough division (based chiefly on the change in 1858 from dan, dat to den, det) gives us no conception whatever of the gradual steps by which Aasen passed from form to form and the experimentation out of which his completed New Norse norm was shaped.

In voller konkreter Wirklichkeit, jedem ungefähr in gleicher Weise vor Augen tretend, stehen im Gegensatz zu Tiecks Runenbergfrau und Hoffmanns Serpentina, Fouqués Elementargeister im Verkehr mit den Menschen. Allerdings macht auch Fouqué einen sehr wesentlichen Unterschied in der metaphorischen Behandlung der beiden Gestalten, der Undine und des Kühleborn. Kühleborn, in jeder seiner Erscheinungen an das Wasser gemahnend und an das Wasser gebunden, ewig beweglich und sich verwandelnd, halb Wasser, halb Geist, steht der Natur näher und erinnert durch falschen Schein und Irrtum an die illusorischen Gestalten Tiecks und Hoffmanns. Dagegen steht Undine selbst in ihrer engen Verwandtschaft mit Melusine der Stufe der Volksmärchengestalt näher und erinnert mehr an Musäus' Schwanenjungfern und Nymphe des Brunnens. Sie ist fast vollständig vermenschlicht und verwandelt sich nur am Anfang und am Ende der Erzählung. Aus dem Wasser geht sie hervor, ins Wasser kehrt sie zurück, dazwischen aber liegt ein Menschenleben, welches nur in der Macht, die sie auf Kühleborn ausübt, und durch einen zarten metaphorischen Schleier den Zusammenhang mit dem Element erkennen lässt.

Richardson, writer and printer of the eighteenth century, the center of a circle of admiring ladies, began his career (as is well known) in an inconspicuous manner by preparing love-letters for enamoured young women. Finding himself successful in this delicate mission, he responded to a demand for a volume called Familiar Letters, models for all occasions. But, being innoculated by the moral virus of the eighteenth century, he sensed the shallowness of these epistles and decided that they should contain moral as well as literary examples. His first book, Pamela, was a group of letters instructing a maidservant in manners and morals. But neither Richardson nor the women who were his constant critics were satisfied until he had prepared a volume of letters instructing a “lady.” This lady, called Clarissa, was created as an “examplar to her sex.” These two books were so popular, and the demand for an example of conduct for the perfect gentleman was so great that Richardson next wrote Charles Grandison. Since fiction without a moral purpose was disapproved by the eighteenth century, Richardson makes it clear that one should not look “upon the story as the sole end but as a vehicle to the instruction.” It is obvious that Richardson's first aim was to instruct in manners and morals; his secondary aim, begun as a writer of Familiar Letters, was to make model letters for all who needed instruction. There is no evidence that he abandoned this latter purpose; he simply subordinated it to a loftier one.

A study of the writings of Mme de Staël shows an interrelation between their strength and weakness. The source of both the good and the bad is largely to be found in the influence of conversation, although the author's inborn characteristics and considerable knowledge derived from books should be sufficiently emphasized. There was a feeling on the part of both the enemies and the friends of Mme de Staël that she was the epitome of the age. This belief indicates that her writings were close to the large circle from which she drew inspiration and the ideas which influenced her own and succeeding periods.

Various attempts have been made to express the difference which is felt between French and English accent; for example, French accent has frequently been described as a caress, while English accent has been compared to a blow. Such rather impressionistic terminology has been found suggestive and helpful in teaching, but it represents an attempt to treat the complex phenomenon of accentuation as if it were more simple than it is. In order to make a quantitative study of accent, it is necessary to measure the various elements which constitute it. The object of the present paper is to describe the method used in making a comparative study of the nature of accent in French and English and to present a summary of the results of this investigation.

Few lines written by Coleridge are more familiar than those near the end of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things, both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

The most significant aspect of the intellectual attitude of the twentieth century appears to be the fulfillment of Nietzsche's prophecy that the last achievement of the Occidental intellect will be to question all its achievements and, in the end, to doubt its own existence. Philosophers and logicians, as well as physicists, seem to have arrived at a state of extreme resignation, while those psychologists who can be called scientists have at least their moments of scepticism. It is hardly necessary to refer to Spenglerian pessimism, to what H. Leisegang writes about the crisis and catastrophe of logic, or to Einstein's views, as expressed, for example, in his speech given in honor of Planck in 1918, in which he pointed out the current tendency to seek a simplified synoptic view of the world—a picture comfortable to human nature—and to overcome the world by replacing it with this picture. How little psychology has as yet revealed, or can ever hope to reveal, can be gleaned from C. K. Ogden's enlightening account in The Meaning of Psychology.

Zwischen der Verschmelzung einer körperlich engeren und fassbaren, konkreten Naturgestalt mit menschlicher Form oder menschlichem Geist in Goethes Irrlichtern und Schlange und der einer mehr abstrakten physikalischen Eigenschaft in Freyas Galvanismus steht die Gestalt des Naturdämons, der ein grösseres landschaftliches Phänomen in menschliche Form verdichtet, in Tiecks Frau vom Runenberg. In der Bestimmtheit ihrer Gestaltung, in der Furchtbarkeit ihrer Dämonie nimmt sie wiederum eine Mittelstellung ein etwa zwischen dem Strom in Goethes Märchen und den Naturdämonen des naiveren Volksmärchens.