At the present time, when the world is too much with us, many reasons might be urged for a wider and deeper attention to the study of Wordsworth. We must content ourselves here with a single, obvious reason, easily grasped. The two accredited leaders of English criticism in the nineteenth century, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, ranked Wordsworth among the five greatest English poets, his compeers being, in their opinion, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. A third critic, no mean one, namely Wordsworth himself, held substantially the same belief, viewing the grounds of his belief as objectively as he could. It is well for everybody, now and then, to regard some matters in a broad perspective.

The morality of Mundus et Infans exists in a print dated 1522, from Wynkyn de Worde's press, and is styled by him a ‘new production.‘ The word must be taken for what it is worth, but it should be remembered that Wynkyn was not afraid to print old works, and call them such. In his print of Ragmannes Rolle, Wynkyn adds an envoy attributing the faults of the poem to “Kynge Ragman holly, whiche dyde the make many yeres ago.” The printer is therefore entitled to some confidence, especially since certain internal evidence points to the same fact.

Some loose vellum leaves of a manuscript written between 1431 and 1450 (according to Dr. Kenyon of the British Museum) are bound in with a paper ms. of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, in ms. British Museum Sloane 1212. These leaves, written in what may be a different hand from that of the Hoccleve scribe, contain some interesting material, most of which has up to now remained unidentified.

It is a well known fact that long before the day of the modern nature-fakir, animal story played an important part in the history of fiction. In medieval literature there were three sets of works that dealt with animals. There were the bestiaries, in which the medieval symbolists attempted to give a moral interpretation to the habits of beasts; there were the fables, in which beast tales were told for the sake of the lesson they taught; and third, there was the distinctively medieval set of stories, told because of their own intrinsic power of affording amusement, to which is generally given the name ‘beast epic.‘

In the twenty-fifth stanza of the first book of the Troilus occurs a passage which is puzzling in more respects than one. The stanza is as follows:

Among thise othere folk was Criseyda,
In widewes habite blak; but nathelees,
Right as our firste lettre is now an A,
In beautee first so stood she, malcelees;
Hir godly looking gladede al the prees.
Nas never seyn thing to ben preysed derre,
Nor under cloude blak so bright a sterre.

The need for critical research in at least one field of modern literature is exemplified by the lack of exact information regarding the establishment on the French stage of the three dramatic unities that characterized so markedly many pieces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although our knowledge of the history of these unities has been increased by several works that have recently appeared, a number of facts concerning them remain to be determined, as Dannheisser, the chief authority on the subject, has clearly shown. Thus, while demonstrating that these unities of action, time, and place were not imposed at one time, but, developing separately, came only after a half century into general acceptance and a rigorously narrow form, he has left unfixed the date at which they were first singled out in seventeenth century France as the distinguishing marks of the classic drama.

It is so unusual a circumstance at this late day for an entirely new English ballad to come to light that we are justified in hailing its appearance as an event of general interest to the world of English scholarship. From the completion of Professor Child's magnificent work up to the present no ballad has been discovered, which would merit insertion under a new title in that corpus. Variants of ballads already known continue to be unearthed with gratifying frequency, but so well did the great collector glean the field that it can seldom fall to the lot of any follower to bring to light a new specimen. The honor due for such a discovery belongs, however, to Mr. Frank Sidgwick, who printed in 1905 a ballad called The Withies, or The Bitter Withy in Notes and Queries.

Nearly forty years ago Robert Browning issued The Ring and the Book, his longest and most important poem. It has suffered varied fortunes at the hands of the critics. Brooke, Dowden, Chesterton, and Herford, however, devote long and important chapters to its discussion, and acknowledge the poet's mastery in his subject. Amid critics friendly and hostile alike, the lawyers' monologues have perhaps suffered more than any other portion of the poem. They have been skipped by the ordinary reader as unmeaning and dull. Few open and intelligent words of defense have been uttered in their behalf. Chesterton puts the matter well (p. 160), “One of the ablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr. Augustine Birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two advocates in The Ring and the Booh will scarcely be very interesting to the ordinary reader. There can be little doubt that the great number of readers of Browning think them beside the mark and adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say that anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. … The introduction of them is one of the finest strokes in The Ring and the Book.”

In the history of the development of good literary taste in Germany, Christian Wernicke has long held an honorable position. The praise of Johann Ulrich König, of Bodmer, of Hagedorn, and Ramier; the commendation, the more impressive for being qualified with criticisms, of Lessing and Herder; and the tendency of historians of literature to maintain groups and relationships once established, have all contributed to secure to Wernicke the title of a redoubtable opponent of the so-called second Silesian school of poets. Until recently, however, little more has been known about his personal character and career than what he himself incidentally disclosed in his verses and in his unusually frank and circumstantial foot-notes. Koberstein, with accustomed succinctness, summarized Wernicke's critical opinions; Gervinus, in one of his famous parallels, contrasted Wernicke unfavorably as a man and as a poet with Logau; Scherer barely mentioned him; Francke did not mention him at all; Ludwig Fulda, without adding much to our knowledge, set forth in an excellent brief essay the proper bearing of the facts that were then known, and corrected thereby the somewhat distorted presentation of Gervinus; but not until the investigations and fortunate discoveries of Julius Elias and Leonhard Neubaur had brought a host of new facts to light was an adequate estimate of either the personal or the literary character of Wernicke possible. We now have such an estimate by Erich Schmidt. Looking eagerly forward to the reprint of Wernicke's epigrams promised by Elias, E. Schmidt says of the epigrammatist, “philosophisch reichgebildet, in alter und moderner Literatur ungemein belesen, huldigt er, mit Boileau vom Dichter vollständige Kenntnis der Welt, zumai des Hofes fordernd, einer vornehmen Poetik; ” and adds, “wir kennen vor Liscow, ja vor Lessing keinen klareren, gescheiteren Kopf.” The question, therefore, how far Wernicke is to be regarded as a predecessor of Lessing in the development of a critical theory of poetry appears to deserve serious attention.

Those who consider punctuation ‘largely a matter of taste’ and look upon the so-called ‘sentence-sense’ as a kind of sixth sense that comes only from generations of gentle breeding, will regard with small favor the attempt to formulate any very definite principles governing the structure of the sentence; but those who have little faith in the subjective conclusions of capricious taste will welcome any systematic presentation of facts that may enable them to settle points of disputed usage for themselves. It is with this conviction that I offer the following contribution to the study of the sentence, not without hope that it may incite others to a more thoro investigation of related problems of English usage.

The sole edition of the chanson de geste “Ogier le Danois,” generally attributed to Raimbert de Paris, is that of J. Barrois, Paris, 1842, and bears the title: “La Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche.” This edition makes no pretence to critical accuracy.