Francesco Cieco da Ferrara, author of the Mambriano, has been an enigmatic figure in Italian literature. It is strange that so little is known of this important intermediary between Boiardo and Ariosto. Long after his death, it is true, some definite but extravagant things were written about him by literary men who probably felt the need of dressing up the poor poet: he was an eminent jurist, a theologian and philosopher. But we know only Cieco the minstrel, and common sense would question the truth of these assertions. Again, almost a hundred years after his death, the family name of Bello was bestowed upon Cieco by Francesco Buonamici, a philosopher and astronomer whose information about Italian literary matters was scant and inaccurate. Although scholars like Rua have followed the Bello clue without success, this cognomen has come down into our library catalogues and even into Rua's own edition of the Mambriano, Would it not be good sense to dismiss the Bello christening as the tardy and offhand mistake of an astrologer?

The only adequate and trustworthy account of Fielding's théâtre is that given by W. L. Cross in his three-volume biography, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven, 1918). Yet, in my opinion, three of Fielding's plays, The Letter-Writers (1731), The Modern Husband (1732), and Eurydice Hiss'd (1737), have received inadequate treatment from Professor Cross, for he has failed to indicate their sources properly.

For the past thirty years the ingenuity of Shakespeare scholars has been challenged by a series of libellous publications, the principal contribution to which is a book called Willobie his Avisa, or the true picture of a modest Maid and of a chaste and constant wife. It was published in 1594 and contains the first mention of Shakespeare:

For the past two hundred years critics have been observing and commenting upon the resemblance of Racine's Andromaque to Corneille's Pertharite. It was in 1764 that the first vigorous assertion of this similarity was made:

Il me paraît prouvé que Racine a puisé toute l'ordonnance de sa tragédie d‘Andromaque dans ce second acte de Pertharite. Dès la première scène vous voyez Edüige qui est avec son Garibalde précisément dans la même situation qu’ Hermione avec Oreste. Elle est abandonnée par un Grimoald comme Hermione par Pyrrhus; et si Grimoald aime sa prisonnière Rodelinde, Pyrrhus aime Andromaque, sa captive.

In 1709 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, days not already taken for the publication of The Tatler, its pugnacious rival, The Female Tatler, by Mrs. Crackenthorpe, a Lady that knows every thing, appeared regularly for fifty issues with Mrs. Delariviere Manley as its editor and chief contributor. Mrs. Crackenthorpe's journalism reads like so much copy for the printer, turned out hastily against the time of going to press. It has the freshness and crudity of gossip. Nourished on “intelligence” and dealing in personalities, local color, and realistic detail, it treats the everyday life and occupations of Queen Anne's England with coarse pungency and colloquial vigor. It presupposes in author and in readers a competent knowledge of the compact eighteenth-century English world both of London and the more important country towns.

Wenn O. Schade (Weimarisches Jb., v, 242) im Vorwort zum Weimarer Puppenspiel vom Dr. Faust den Stoff “im allgemeinen deutsches, im besonderen protestantisches Eigentum” nennt und betont, dass “kein Tropfen katholisches Blut” in seinen Adern ist, so trifft er damit den Kern des Faustproblems. Aber Faust wäre nicht das Problem des deutschen Menschen, wäre er nur aus einem Ast unserer Entwicklung erwachsen, wäre er nicht zugleich ein Spiel aus den Spannungen protestantischer und katholischer Atmosphäre. Und gerade das Puppenspiel rollt die Entwicklung des Stoffes auf, die dem ganzen Volk gehört, an der die lebendige Theatertradition vieler Jahrhunderte mitgearbeitet hat. Und in diesem Spielkreis stellt uns die komische Figur vor Fragen, die auf dem Boden der rein protestantischen Faustproblematik nicht gelöst werden können.

In her excellent John Florio, Miss Yates writes (p. 189): “Florio's Worlde of Wordes is an important landmark in the history of Italian scholarship in England.” And, a little further on (p. 190), she continues: “To modern students of the sixteenth century, both Italian and English, it is invaluable…. The number, variety, and picturesqueness of the English equivalents which Florio manages to collect for each Italian word are remarkable.” This is by no means exaggerated praise. A few hours' study of the Italian-English dictionary should indeed convince one of the essential correctness of Miss Yates's evaluation.

On mentionne avec raison l'épicurisme de Voltaire mais il ne faut pas toutefois oublier qu'au point de vue de la morale seule, il est assez difficile de tracer les différences qui devraient exister entre le sage épicurien et le sage stoïcien. Ces deux doctrines, aussi bien que le péripatétisme représenté par Aristote, le pyrrhonisme transformé plus tard en scepticisme, l'éclectisme de la Nouvelle-Académie expliqué par Cicéron, font partie du bagage philosophique légué à l'Europe par la pensée grecque et romaine. Voltaire a été influencé par ces doctrines à différents degrés et l'étude présente sur “Zadig” va montrer combien Voltaire a su lire, comprendre et même pratiquer quelque peu la pensée stoïcienne en la mélangeant naturellement avec d'autres.

In 1758, after thirty years of hack writing, James Ralph published The Case of Authors by Profession, a short pamphlet which vigorously defended professional writers and severely arraigned their principal employers, the booksellers, theatre managers, and politicians. The essay received favorable comment in the Monthly Review and the Critical Review as a just appraisal of the difficulties of authorship. It has additional interest because Oliver Goldsmith may very well have received from it certain ideas which appeared in his Essay on the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, and because from it Isaac D'Israeli quoted, without acknowledgement, extensive passages which appeared in his Calamities of Authors.

The poets of the early nineteenth century are thought of primarily as lyrists; and yet, in the case of all the leading figures, especially the two most popular, Scott and Byron, the bulk of their work is narrative, and for the most part metrical tales. These narratives vary widely in subject-matter and atmosphere: sometimes, as in Crabbe, the purpose is simply to tell a realistic story; sometimes as in Wordsworth, to point a moral or adorn a bit of autobiography; sometimes, as in Coleridge and Byron, to give the reader a new and exotic shudder; or, as in Scott and Keats, to delight with the mysterious and forgotton past; or, as in Shelley, to inculcate a social doctrine. At first sight, this prevalence of narrative seems to be an utter departure from the preceding hundred years, in which satire and didacticism are supposed to have extinguished the versified tale; but a closer examination, especially of minor writers, shows that the eighteenth century had an unbroken tradition of such writings. The existence of this tradition has generally escaped attention, partly because the works of such minor poets are hard to find, and partly because the genre was of rather dubious repute, being akin to the “ballad” of the time, and was hardly included in the literary “kinds” generally accepted by critics and theorists.

Basta Callar es una de las comedias de Calderón que no ha sido objeto de estudio especial a pesar de la existencia de un manuscrito que se cree autógrafo en su mayor parte. La comedia no se imprimió autorizadamente durante la vida del poeta y la edición mas antigua que de ella conocemos es la de Vera Tassis de 1682. El objeto de este estudio es dar a conocer unos quinientos noventa versos que se hallan en el manuscrito considerado autógrafo, pero que faltan tanto en la edición príncipe como en las de Apontes, Keil, y Hartzen busch.

The publication of fourteen epigrams by Sir John Harington in Henry Parrot's Springes for Woodcocks (1613) is gaining recognition as a leading case in the study of Elizabethan literary ethics. Doubtless encouraged by the opportunity to pun on Parrot's name, two contemporaries, John Davies of Hereford and Richard Brathwaite, attacked him for this minor outrage. Their blunt charge that Parrot “stole” epigrams contrasts with the usual mild accusation of “borrowing,” and indicates an increasing appreciation of literary rights. Considerable importance is attached to the case in Professor Harold Ogden White's recent study of literary ethics, but he does not examine the underlying facts, and he only briefly cites the documents.

The problem of ascertaining whether Diderot or Rousseau was responsible for the original inspiration of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts has been a vexing one to biographers and students of both men. Though the famous paradox belongs to Jean-Jacques by reason of his exploitation of it, the question is none the less one of exceeding interest. Rousseau's work, as Lemaître remarks, is but a reflection of his life, the incidents of which “sont à peu près toutes des oeuvres de circonstances. Et la grandeur de conséquence fait qu'il devient émouvant de les voir sortir de si petites causes et si accidentelles.” And it is to the accident of Diderot's intervention that the initial impulse, which was to have such momentous consequences, is frequently attributed. “Il y a tout lieu de croire que c'est lui qui suggère à Rousseau la fameuse réponse à la question posée par l'Académie de Dijon,” affirms the author of a recently published work.

Among the Percy MSS (Folder 273) in the Harvard College Library is a collection of eighteen leaves of manuscript, of octavo size, loosely laid into board covers with a title on the outside printed in ink, presumably by Percy: “Shenstone's Billets.” This material is all in the handwriting of Shenstone, and consists of lists of songs and ballads from various published collections which he had examined, classified according to merit, with brief comments on individual poems in a few cases, and with longer connected remarks in the manner of letters in which he discussed the general principles that should govern Percy and himself in selecting and arranging the material for the Reliques.

Emanations are the stock in trade of mediums, table-rappers, spiritists, and ghosts; they aid the reasoning of romantic poets and all those whose sensations outstrip their science and philosophy, providing a plausible, if undefined bridge between things apparently unconnected and making at least half-acceptable the inexplicable and the occult. Emanations are a metaphor—an old one. They have progressed through the whole biography of a metaphor from plain work-a-day description to science, to definition in philosophy, to the occult, and to poetry; indeed, they have lived that long biography at least twice in the memory of men. For the use of poetry, religion, and the mystical sciences emanations were discovered in the ancient world, lost, won again in renaissance times, and lost or temporarily abandoned by us.

Scholars have sometimes assumed that the version of Comus in the Trinity Manuscript is Milton's original draft of the poem. Miss Lockwood, for example, in her study of the corrections in the manuscript, comments upon its extreme neatness—upon the neatness of the lines and upon the even margins; but in spite of this comment, and in spite of her disagreement with Masson's statement that the manuscript is very much revised, it does not occur to her that the manuscript may not be composition at all but transcription.