Tels que des flots dans un grand fleuve, nous avons chacun un petit mouvement et nous faisons un peu de bruit dans le large courant qui nous emporte; mais nous allons avec les autres et nous n'avançons que poussés par eux … Si inventeur que soit un esprit, il n'invente guère; ses idées sont celles de son temps, et ce que son génie original y change ou ajoute est peu de chose. (H. Taine, Essai sur Tite Live)

One of the most striking features of the style of Old English poetry is the frequent use of rhetorical understatement. A. H. Tolman was apparently the first to point out this stylistic trait, and more recently passing references to it have been frequent. The following article attempts an investigation of its origin, occurrence, and uses.

The Lashing Gale.—The description of the gale that torments the carnal sinners, Inf., v, 33, as “whirling and smiting” them suggests that in using gastiga in vs. 51 Dante may have had in mind the figure of a whipping-top. As the wailing and wretched shades approach he asks: “Master, who are those folk that the black air so chastises?” Whipping-tops were a common toy in mediaeval Italy; and in Par., xviii, 42, Dante refers to them specifically, saying of the swift rotation with which the light of Judas Maccabæus responded to his name, in the Cross of Mars: “joy was the whip of the top.”

In an article on “Perceptual Sense in Gothic,” JEGPxxxiii, [1934], 205, ff. Professor Allen W. Porterfield propounds a number of theses, the most important of which, when stripped of their sometimes elegant, sometimes confusing phrasing, may be restated as follows: To render the idea of observing an optic phenomenon, Wulfila, irrespective of Greek usage, employs some form of saian or some compound of it with amazing regularity (p. 205). Possibly Wulfila followed the Latin, with its rather consistent use of videre, more closely than the Greek (p. 206). The Gothic prefixes add no semantic increment to the verb, but represent mere verbal nuances (pp. 209, 218). There must have been, in folk-Gothic, an appreciable number of verbs expressing the same general idea (pp. 214 f., 217). It was in all likelihood Wulfila's Arianism that influenced him in the use of saian, as “confining himself to a realistic, ocular verb, one that admits of nothing supernatural, would be in keeping with Arian doctrine.” It is my unenviable task to enter into these propositions at some length, in order to reexamine the use of gasaian and other ga-compounds.

The purpose of this paper is to indicate that the clear and definite tendency of popular Latin speech of all periods to force out unaccented vocalic phonemes, particularly in the interior of words, had a continued existence from earliest times up to the separate development of the Romance languages, and that the divarication of Eastern and Western Romance rests on obstructions interposed in greater part after Latin had ceased to be a living language. While some Latin and Romance scholars have observed elements that call into question the exactness of the orthodox statement of conditions, we nevertheless have been confronted with no clear, unequivocal exposition of the actual situation and no accumulation of evidence that would challenge the correctness of the accepted account.

Many efforts have been made to identify the Rosalind of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender. The following conjecture approaches the problem from a study of Mr. Douglas Hamer's article in the Review of English Studies for July, 1931, entitled Spenser's Marriage, which reaches the conclusion that in April, 1580, Spenser was newly married.

Gadow was the first commentator to notice a connection between certain terms in The Owl and the Nightingale and the language of the law courts, and Atkins was the first to make a detailed study of this phase of the poem. The present commentator has added elsewhere a number of significant details. Both Atkins and the present writer have sought an explanation of the use of the diction and procedure of the courts of the twelfth century in the fact that the arbiter of the debate, Nicholas of Guildford, was connected with the judiciary, either secular or ecclesiastical. Since the evidence presented was somewhat fragmentary and inconclusive, the writer has pursued the present study to establish a connection between the judicial usage of the age, including the penalties inflicted upon the guilty and some passages in the poem, which apparently have not hitherto been noted in this connection.

When Manuel Cañete, in the introduction to the academic edition of Lucas Fernández, first spoke of a certain Alonso de Salaya “tan diestro en bosquejar delicadamente amorosos coloquios,” there was some reason to wonder whether he could have actually read these amorosos coloquios instead of merely quoting the first two lines of a “Farsa en coplas” from the notes which Gallardo, examining the catalogues of Ferdinand Columbus, had taken in the Biblioteca Colombina. When, three years later, in the preface to his edition of Carvajal's Tragedia Josephina, Cañete quoted the first twenty-five lines of the same “linda farsa” by Alonso de Salaya, it became even more tantalizing.

In 1923, in an article in Modern Philology on Spenser's handwriting, Mr. H. R. Plomer verified previous identifications of Spenser's secretary hand. He published several photographs and listed sixteen documents, four of which are signed by Spenser. He also noted the distinctive features of Spenser's secretary hand: the sloped writing, the long-drawn-out f and s, the p which looks like an overgrown x, and the individual way of writing the capitals B, I, and E.

The four prophecies studied in this article are known as aljamiado texts because they are in the Spanish language transcribed in Arabic characters. They foretell the dire calamities that are to be visited on the “isla de España” for her neglect of the Koran and of other teachings of Islam. Written by Moriscoes, they were intended to arouse religious fervor, and hence political strength, in Moslem Spain, and they show a marked contrast to the Christian Spanish feeling of the familiar Merlin prophecies.

The only known source of Romeo and Juliet is Arthur Brooke's poem on Romeus and Iuliet. It is the general opinion that Shakespeare's few deviations from his original concern almost exclusively the minor characters. My purpose is to call attention to four changes in the rôles of important characters, and to compare these changes with the original version of Luigi da Porto.

In 1933, while rummaging about in the mediaeval records of Lincoln, I found a whole series of new entries concerning the Church plays of Lincoln Cathedral for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Previously one could survey the few known items concerning them in the appendix to E. K. Chambers' Mediaeval Stage. One could add to these a few more details by going to Chambers' sources, Mr. A. F. Leach and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, whose Notes on Mediaeval Services in England contains a section devoted to Lincoln customs. The extant records, however, contain a consecutive series of entries which outline with remarkable fullness the drama within the Cathedral Church from 1318 to the accession of Elizabeth.

The value of John Donne's poetry has ever been acknowledged to the extent that, together with Spenser and Jonson, he has been conceded leadership in the English Renaissance. Until recently, however, the Dean of St. Paul's has only casually been touched upon as a prose writer of pronounced merit. This neglect Coleridge hinted at when, in his Table Talk, June 4, 1830, he wrote: “Why is not Donne's volume of sermons reprinted at Oxford?” Of all Donne's prose, the sermons seem to me to be most important. Meritorious as they are for content (which does not interest us here), Donne's sermons best display his mature ability as a man of letters, wherefore as a master of English homiletic style Donne deserves his place among the leading writers of his day.

William Cliff Martin in his paper “The Date and Purpose of Spenser's Veue” interprets Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland as intended to be a subtle and timely compliment to that newest and most powerful of Elizabeth's favorites, the Earl of Essex.

In Milton's attempt to justify the ways of God to men, perhaps no passage in Paradise Lost is more important than Book III, 173–202, for in these lines Milton expounds his doctrine of predestination and its concordance with the mercy, grace, and wisdom of God. To the average reader, however, the passage offers considerable difficulty; and it is indeed surprising, in view of the importance and the obscurity of this portion of the epic, that editors and scholars have done so little to clarify the doctrine of these thirty lines. Newton contented himself with asserting that the views there expounded were Calvinistic, and Todd followed Newton. Sumner, without comment, showed a parallelism between portions of the passage and Milton's De doctrina, a document which is uncompromisingly Arminian. Brydges, however, repeated Newton's observation; and Barber argued at some length for a Calvinistic interpretation. Verity, on the other hand, seemed to agree with Sumner, but dismissed the matter with a single sentence: “The doctrine of predestination here alluded to is discussed at some length in the Christian Doctrine, I, 4.” Masson, Browne, and Moody, in turn, ignored the matter. Such disagreement, therefore, would seem to justify an attempt to throw more light on the passage by determining the precise doctrine that Milton there advances and the relation of that doctrine to the view on predestination advanced in the De doctrina.

Il était impossible pour la philologie anglaise de répondre avec exactitude à la question de savoir si Chaucer, pour sa traduction de la Consolation de Boèce, s'était servi de celle de Jean de Meun: on s'y était pris trop tôt—avant d'avoir les matériaux nécessaires. Lorsque Morris, dans son édition de 1868 du Boèce de Chaucer, s'est posé pour la première fois cette question, rien n'avait encore été fait dans ce domaine par la philologie française. Les manuscrits n'étaient pas classés et, par conséquent, étaient inutilisables. Morris fut obligé, faute de mieux, d'avoir recours, pour comparer les deux textes, à une version anonyne de 1477 (réimprimée en 1494) et conclut logiquement, mais à tort, que Chaucer ne s'était pas servi de la traduction de Jean de Meun. Nous disons “à tort,” car nous savons aujourd'hui que, malgré son épître dédicatoire, le texte de l'édition de 1494 n'est pas la traduction de Jean de Meun. L'opinion de Morris fut suivie en 1870 par B. ten Brink.