The struldbrugg incident in Gulliver's Travels has been relatively neglected. Scholars either allude to the Struldbruggs only in passing or omit the incident entirely from their comments on Book iii. The last sustained treatment is that in the notes of Emil Pons's edition of twenty-seven years ago. Pons's comments, however, attempting as they do to connect the hideous Struldbruggs with Swift's possible fear of old age, reflect a manner of approaching Swift which has become rather out of date. The purpose of this article is to consider three aspects of the Struldbrugg episode: (1) old age and the fear of death as conventional subjects for moral reflection and satire; (2) a desire for immortality in the light of the homiletic tradition; (3) the significance of Gulliver's conversations with his host. Such a study will attempt to show that Swift's treatment of the Struldbruggs conforms to a traditional background as regards both his literary method and his intellectual milieu.

In 1920, the Revue mondiale published an unedited dialogue of Diderot with the Abbé de Barthélemy from a manuscript which had been found, it was said, among the papers of Sainte-Beuve by his secretary, Jules Troubat. Albert Cim (Cimochowski), an occasional contributor to the review, wrote a brief note on the history of the dialogue and said that Troubat had very much wanted to see the text published. Troubat died, however, in 1914 before he could arrange for its publication. Cim, having made a copy of the manuscript, determined to carry out Troubat's intentions and, after the First World War, he enlisted the sympathies of Jean Finot, managing editor of the Revue mondiale. One year later, the publisher, Albert Messein, who had just published a collection of anecdotes on the life of Diderot (Historiettes, collected by Suzy Leparc), agreed with Cim that the dialogue deserved a more lasting format than the pages of a semimonthly review and brought out the thin volume of the dialogue's text.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell assaults what Blake termed a “cloven fiction” between empirical and a priori procedure in argument. In content, the Marriage compounds ethical and theological “contraries”; in form it mocks the categorical techniques that seek to make the contraries appear as “negations.” The unity of the Marriage is in itself dialectical, and cannot be grasped except by the mind in motion, moving between the Blakean contraries of discursive irony and mythical visualization.

Aliterary analysis of the Eldorado episode in Candide should undertake to answer three interlocking questions: (1) What is its philosophic meaning in relation to the whole? (2) By what artistic devices is that meaning conveyed? (3) How successfully has Voltaire fused form and substance? To date no such analysis exists. Questions 2 and 3 have been handled either scantly or not at all. Question 1, while much more frequently and for the most part satisfactorily treated, has in a few instances produced divergent interpretations springing from divergencies of critical approach. It is the purpose of this essay to elaborate an analysis of the episode which will, among other things, provide a standard for evaluating the partial answers thus far offered.

Seventeen years ago, in a highly provocative article in this journal, E. C. Mossner rose to the defense of David Hume's historical writings, which had been treated with considerable severity by scholars such as J. B. Black, who, in his Art of History, had compared them unfavorably with those of his contemporaries, in particular Voltaire. Mossner, however, in trying to bring out the qualities of Hume's History of England, confronted it almost exclusively with Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV, and in this instance it must be admitted that Hume labored under a grave disadvantage, since his far more comprehensive subject was harder to master from the artistic as well as the scientific point of view than Voltaire's. In the present article we shall transfer the comparison from the Siècle to Voltaire's longest and most mature historical effort, the Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, and this considerably changes our perspective, for here Voltaire is dealing with a similar and, if anything, more difficult theme. In this way a parallel may prove highly instructive in bringing out the excellences and weaknesses of the two historians respectively in their approach to comparable subjects and in the formulation of their philosophy of history. What makes comparisons particularly inviting is the circumstance that Voltaire's topic also includes Hume's, so that in numerous instances it is possible to examine the reaction of both writers to the same events and personalities. While our investigation of the resemblances and differences in the thought of these two outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment will stress some of the traits shared by most historians of their age, we shall also attempt to underline the more individual elements that emerge from their works.

Except for several lengthy essays by certain of Arnold's worried contemporaries and scattered comments in out-of-the-way essays by later critics, no careful examination has ever been made of Arnold's religious views. It was not until 1930, when T. S. Eliot turned his attention to Arnold in an essay significantly treating Arnold's religious and aesthetic ideas together, that the long-neglected theological bearings of modern criticism were brought out into the open. Subsequently, Lionel Trilling made a more exhaustive criticism of Arnold's religious experience, but without clearly establishing its relation to Arnold's literary experience. In an effort to treat in detail what Eliot briefly touched on in his essay, I have tried elsewhere to show that Arnold's religious ideas changed in important ways during his life and that these changes affected his literary theory and practice. Religious and poetic ideas, which to later and more logical minds seemed hardly consistent with one another hung together in suspension in Arnold's mind, and as a result his work, taken as a whole, contains both Christian and non-Christian, romantic and nonromantic notions that have since his death been set against one another in the divided tradition which underlies modern English criticism.

Shelley's curious admiration for Francis Bacon has attracted enough attention to make references to Bacon fairly common in studies of Shelley, but a full study of the poet's interest in the philosopher has not yet appeared. In 1933 David Lee Clark published information on Shelley's marked copy of Bacon to supplement the list of marginalia in W. E. Peck's biography, but Clark disclaimed any attempt at a final study. Perhaps the best approach is not through source study as such, but through an attempt to reconstruct the effect his reading of Bacon had on Shelley's mind, with special attention to his changing attitude toward Bacon and his ultimate assessment of him. If, as Clark says, Shelley's debt to Bacon was mainly indirect, what we need is a study of Bacon's whole impact rather than a list of supposed parallel passages.

The clarification of Goethe's concept of mathematics is important not only for an exact delineation of the extent and limits of his thought, but also in defining the relation between the humanities and the sciences. Again and again his spirit is invoked by humanists and scientists alike to define their relative positions. When the peculiar characteristics of the humanities and the sciences are brought into sharp focus, mathematics is usually the separating ingredient, and frequent reference is made to Goethe's supposedly negative attitude toward this science with a resulting unjust classification of his science as unscientific. Such arguments usually terminate upon application of two ancient remedies for deadlocked thought, the sets of supposedly logical alternatives-quality versus quantity, intuition (Anschauung) versus logic. Based on these criteria, Goethe's thought is securely if unilaterally embedded in the realms of quality and intuition, but at all costs immunized against the sinister demons of quantity and logic, which to some humanists are irritating symbols of aridity and vacuity, or even eternal foes of poetry, art, and life.

Even before he had brought to completion the great thirty-five-volume Encyclopédie—by the publication in 1776-77 of its Supplément in five volumes, and in 1780 of Pastor Mouchon's Table analytique et raisonnée in two volumes—a now relatively forgotten Parisian bookseller, publisher, author, and translator, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, had already begun preparations to put out a new Encyclopédie, to be called the Encyclopédie méthodique, ou par ordre de matières. Unlike Diderot's original, this Encyclopédie was to be composed of a collection of individual “dictionaries,” each one dealing with a different subject. Although the entrepreneur was aware from the start of the magnitude of the task, he could not foresee the many difficulties and delays which were to beset the undertaking before it was to be finally completed by his daughter, fifty years later, as “la collection la plus vaste qu'ait jamais produite la librairie française.”

It has been generally recognized in critical works which treat Die Elixiere des Teufels that the central event in the story is the revelation of the facts contained in the cryptic document written by Francesko, “der alte Maler.”In this episode, all but a few of the innumerable mysteries which have existed previously in the story are dispelled by this highly concentrated history of Medardus' ancestry. Thus a focal point appears here on which much of the whole novel converges. Hoffmann himself (p. 274) uses this image to describe the role that the manuscript plays in the novel.

In the experimental period following the “Divinity School Address” Emerson worked out a dialectic in terms of myth as a way of combating skepticism with faith, and throughout his subsequent career, notably in “Song of Nature” and in the prose “Fate” and English Traits, he gave increasing scope to the mythic vision of man's cosmic and historical experience. In the verse of “The Skeptic,” written in 1842, he settled the question of sectarian religion in favor of disillusion and skepticism. But in a series of Journal entries from 1843 to 1845, in the dialectic confrontation of opposites—science and religion, skepticism and faith, evolution and emanation—he accepted skeptical science together with the religious impulse, but lifted both to a new level of occult insight and symbolically clairvoyant fable.