I purpose in the following paper to proffer an explanation of such constructions as “My old bones aches “ (Tempest, III, 3), “All his successors (gone before him) hath done't” (Merry Wives, I, 1), “Ill deeds is doubled with an evil word” (Errors, III, 2), “As the events stamps them” (Much Ado, I, 2), “Their drenched natures lies as in a death” (Macbeth, I, 7),” Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus” (Hamlet, III, 1), “And great affections wrestling in thy bosom Doth make an earthquake of nobility” (King John, v, 2).

Es giebt kaum eine Dichtungsart, deren Werth so lebhaft bestritten worden ist und die dennoch eine so grosse Rolle in der Literatur aller westeuropäischen Völker gespielt hat, als das Sonett. Schon hieraus kann man schliessen, dass die Vorzüge dieser poetischen Form doch nicht so gering sein können, wie dies öfters behauptet worden ist. Es könnte ferner aber auch daraus gefolgert werden, dass bald nach dem Bekanntwerden des Sonetts in Frankreich die Franzosen den Italienern das Verdienst, es in die Literatur eingeführt zu haben, streitig zu machen suchten. Seit jedoch Friedrich Diez, der Begründer der romanischen Philologie, Italien als die Heimat des Sonetts nachgewiesen hat, wird der italienische Ursprung desselben wohl ziemlich allgemein als feststehend anerkannt. Aus Italien gelangte es im XVI. Jahrhundert, wie nach den übrigen romanischen Ländern, so auch nach Frankreich und gleichfalls nach England, wo es sich am eigenartigsten, aber ohne auf die anderen Literaturen einen Einfluss auszuüben, entwickelt hat. Überall war Petrarca das Vorbild, von dem man ausgieng, oder das Ideal, dem sich die Sonettendichtung, wenn sie auf Abwege gerathen war, in ihren edleren Bestrebungen wieder so viel wie möglich zu nähern suchte. Durch ihn war ja bekanntlich diese Dichtungsform zur grössten Vollendung und Popularität gebracht worden.

It is ever a source of regret to anyone interested in the glorious Argentine, lying under the Southern Cross, that its name cannot be mentioned, even casually, without its suggesting revolutions, uprisings, financial distress and ruin. It is an association accepted without question. To speak of that land and not touch upon revolutions, would be like airing one's impressions of Hamlet without mentioning the noble Dane himself. This comparison is somewhat venerable, to be sure, when one considers its three hundred winters and as many summers, but it is singularly suggestive with regard to La Plata, since it points to something being decidedly “rotten in the State.” The latter thought, however, is not apt to disturb the equanimity of the average Argentine mind. To the native of that favored country a revolution is no more out of the normal order of things than is a cyclone to our own Western people.

No observant person can, I think, have failed to note of late years a certain increasing hesitation and perplexity in regard to the true function of literature in studies. Indeed, there are reasons not a few for thinking that we are preparing for one of those revisions and restatements of the general conception of what we should try to get from literature, of which we have several examples in the past. I do not mean merely that our literary taste is changing, or that we are passing from one set of literary admirations to another. Such lesser variation is incessantly going on. Classicism yields to romanticism, romanticism to realism, and this to something else, in an unbroken round of change. But these minor modifications of feeling and opinion about literature may easily take place without any material disturbance of the general estimate of the nature of literatnre or of the attitude of men's minds towards it. My neighbor may think that bad in books which I think good, and yet we may both seek in our reading to satisfy essentially the same needs, intellectual or aesthetic.

The change, however, to which I have reference, is of a far profounder kind. It affects the very substance of men's thought about books, substitutes for one form of promise and enticement to the reading of them another and quite different appeal, and necessarily carries with it new aims and methods in the study of them. I shall, perhaps, make my meaning clearer on this point by some brief illustration.

Among the many interesting phenomena of speech-life are the disappearance and the development of a p, b, t, d, k, or g between two consonants. The suppression of the stop seems to be usually due to a general tendency to simplify consonant groups, whenever such reduction facilitates utterance and does not interfere with intelligibility; thus Vulgar Latin compto becomes comto and then conto. The growth of a consonant between two others appears to be occasioned either by a lack of simultaneousness in the action of different organs, as in English Hampton from Hamton, or by an unconscious effort to bridge over a difficult transition, as in Old French estre from esre; sometimes, perhaps, as in Greek àνδρóς, it is brought about by a combination of these causes.

It has been among the results of Dr. Lounsbury's noble work on Chaucer to make the mind of the poet for us, as never for any generation before us, discoverable in his poetry. Since that work appeared, each of Chaucer's poems, read now through the light of that illumination, seems to kindle into fresh meaning in its revealed association with the mind and purpose of the writer. And from the union of all the poems into one image, there seems to come a somewhat clear revelation of the poet's range of human vision and of his method of poetry. This revelation reaches, I think, its highest point of truth in that eighth chapter which forms the crown of Dr. Lounsbury's book, the chapter on Chaucer as Literary Artist. “About Chaucer's method of work,” he says, “there is nothing of that blind creative inspiration, which, acting without reflection, characterizes, or is supposed to characterize, the poets of the earliest periods. He has all the self-consciousness of the creative genius that has mastered his art” (Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, III, 324). “He knows precisely what he is aiming to accomplish.” Here is, I think, the true word spoken about Chaucer's mental character, about his poetical method, and, by inference, about his rank and special place among the classical poets. For the essence of classical poetry is self-knowledge and self-restraint, the artistic calculation of proportions, and the aesthetic calculation of effects. It is my purpose, therefore, to show in the Troilus and Criseyde, which I take to be Chaucer's most perfect poem, the evidence of Dr. Lounsbury's summary of Chaucer's poetical character, the evidence of deliberate and careful calculation, of cool, self-conscious, almost infallible skill.

The first Italian grammar published in England, in 1550, written by William Thomas, clerk of the Council to King Edward VI. and one of the first Protestant victims of the succeeding reign, contains “a Dictionarie for the better understanding of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante.” The title indicates that the great Italian poets of the trecento were first studied by English readers, and Boccaccio and Petrarch are here named before Dante. Indeed, after a most careful search, I cannot find any Elizabethan translation of any work of Dante. The first English translation of Dante in the British Museum Catalogue is that of Henry Boyd, L'Inferno, in 1785, La Divina Commedia, in 1802.

A good deal has been said, in recent years, about the importance of prose fiction. The vogue which the modern novel undoubtedly enjoys, its immediate and unquestionable influence over multitudes of readers, has contributed much to the prevalent impression as to the value of fiction, yet a more significant factor has been the increasing self-consciousness of fiction writers. They seem to feel a distinct assurance that at last they are going to get seats nearer the head of the table. Compared with the solemnity with which they discuss in public the responsibilities laid upon practitioners of their art, Harry Fielding's prefaces about his stern duty as a historian of human nature seem frivolous indeed. If this conviction of the greatness of the art were producing, or tending to produce, greater artists, one could scarcely quarrel with it, but among the day's distinguished names the great artists are unfortunately as few as ever. Wide-spread as is the present interest in fiction, it is at least debatable whether the English novel is much more intrinsically important, when compared with other types of literature, or even when tested by the proportion of fiction to the entire literary output, than it has been at a half dozen other periods in the last two hundred years.

As Holtzmann has shown the Hildebrandslied as we now have it is a copy from an older manuscript. That it was not written in its present form from memory is seen in the fact that the mistakes are those of sight. For example, Hiltibraht occurs six times for Hiltibrant, man for inan, unti for miti, etc. The errors show that the writer or writers did not fully understand what they were writing, and that their copying was mechanical. It follows that the manuscript from which they wrote did not differ materially from their copy, or in other words, that the linguistic confusion was already present. This confusion, however, cannot be entirely explained unless with Kögel we assume that at an earlier time there was a copy from memory.

Strangely enough the word “weird “has come into modern English entirely from its use in Macbeth. The word occurs six times in this play as usually printed: five times in the expression “weird sisters” (I, III, 32, and V, 8; II, I, 20; III, IV, 133; IV, I, 136), and once in the phrase “the weird women “(III, I, 2). Stranger still, “weird “does not appear at all in the only authoritative text of the tragedy, that of the first folio. In that edition the word is “weyward” in the first three passages in the play, and “weyard” in the last three. It was Theobald, the “dearest foe” of Pope, who saw that Shakespeare must have written “weird,” and that this rare word had been changed because of “the ignorance of the copyists.” Modern editors accept the suggestion of Theobald; but I believe that the full force of the word “weird “is often unapprehended. even by special students of the play.

The rule forbidding hiatus in French verse which has been followed in all literary poetry since Malherbe's day may be thus formulated:—

A word ending in a vowel other than an e muet cannot be followed within the same line by a word beginning with a vowel or h muette.

Where a word ends in an e muet and the following word begins with a vowel or an h muette, the e muet is elided and the hiatus thus avoided.

For the purposes of this rule the t of et is supposed not to exist.

Oui is sometimes treated as though it began with a consonant.

Hiatus is allowed before or after a few interjections; also in certain set expressions such as peu à peu, cà et là, and the like.

In an article, entitled Nibelungensage und Nibelungendichtungen, which appeared in the Preussische Jahrbücher a little over a year ago (October, 1894), Dr. A. Schmidt, after a summary of the entire Nibelungensage and a comparison of this Sage with the form it assumes in the Nibelungenlied, makes the following statement: “Though it would be madness after Homer to reconstruct anew the Iliad and Odyssey in poetic form, after the mediaeval author it is really a religious duty of German poets who have the interests of their nation at heart to recast into higher forms the imperfectly coined Nibelungen treasure.” In these words the essayist expresses not merely a personal opinion, but echoes the sentiments of many other German critics, and above all of over forty authors who, with over fifty different productions in drama and epic poetry, have tried to recast into ‘higher forms’ the Nibelungensage as a whole or in part. This large number of attempts includes three or four dramatic sketches, but does not include the ‘lower forms’ of lyric and ballad poetry, or of prose narrative. After the clear and thorough discussion of Nibelungen dramas by Professor Carl Weitbrecht, it might seem unnecessary to discuss this part of the general subject any further, but there are certain aspects of this question which he has not touched upon which it is the purpose of this paper to consider; and, while there is complete agreement with the views advanced by Prof. Weitbrecht, yet the attempt will be made to show that his conclusions do not warrant the same approval.

The material for the present study was collected during a residence of several months in Mexico City, and the facts stated are the result of personal observation of the idiom spoken by the lower classes. In some cases use is made of words and expressions found in printed material, but all such forms have been subjected to a careful comparison with the spoken language, before being accepted as trustworthy.