In his Seconde Lettre à Monsieur de Voltaire sur ses Jugemens Littéraires Clément de Dijon makes the following statements:

J'aime dans Montaigne sa Philosophie douce et riante, sans morgue et sans pédanterie, qui répand l'enjouement sur les choses les plus sérieuses. Cette Philosophie est celle de La Fontaine qui a beaucoup imité Montaigne … Voyez que le ton de Montaigne vous découvre un homme gaiement préparé a faire bonne contenance contre la mort.

The last of The Waverley Novels was finished in 1831. If, therefore, anyone be offended by the inaccuracy of my subtitle, I rest my defense upon the precedent set by Sir Walter himself. I cannot claim for this paper that it presents any new facts, but the low esteem in which The Waverley Novels are held a hundred years after their appearance seems to warrant some reflections upon their nature and our tastes.

Wordsworth's intellectual and spiritual development terminates with the philosophy expressed in The Excursion. Here he accepts a Christian stoicism, colored strongly by ideas drawn from Kant. He even emphasizes the extreme dualism of Kant's ethics and tends to interpret morality as solely a matter of rational duty, sharply to be distinguished from a life of inclination. Indeed, he has grown very suspicious of human inclination and insists that man must transcend his natural disposition if he is to acquire any genuine dignity.

Johnson's reference to oats in England and Scotland has aroused more, or broader, smiles than are warranted, at least among persons who have not consulted his book, and who may have heard it misquoted. Many know little more of the great Dictionary than what they suppose Johnson said of this grain on the spur of the moment (in a reference that is not a definition) along with his definition of network, which they commonly take at second hand. He does not say that oats never furnish human beings with food in England; like Boswell, he had himself eaten dry oatmeal when a boy; and his statement about oats and people and horses is strictly true. “Very true,” Lord Elibank declared.

When Addison in his essay on the imagination made novelty a source of aesthetic pleasure, along with beauty and grandeur, he was not announcing a discovery. Previous critics had repeatedly noted the efficacy of the varied and strange, the wonderful, and the surprising in achieving desired poetic effects. Addison's idea of novelty includes these elements. The new or uncommon diverts our minds with “the Strangeness of its appearance”; the novel “fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise”; variety, in the essay on the Imagination and in the criticism of Paradise Lost alike, is a virtual synonym for novelty; and the wonderful, or the marvelous, almost invariably applies to that which possesses both grandeur and novelty—to anything that excites “admiration.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau's famous sentimental novel, the Nouvelle Héloïse (1760), had a wide and immediate diffusion in England. Although the date usually ascribed to the first edition is 1761, it was in circulation in England during the later part of 1760. Translation was accomplished as speedily as possible; after three months of preliminary announcements by Becket and DeHondt, booksellers, the first two volumes were placed on sale April 7, 1761.

Although the influence of such philosophers as Holbach, Condorcet, and Godwin on Shelley's theory of the perfectibility of man has been noted, that of Pierre Jean George Cabanis, the French materialistic physician of the eighteenth century, has been overlooked. Yet Cabanis's ideas as put forward in his most considerable work, Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme, cited in the notes to “Queen Mab,” on the important relation between man's physical well-being and his intellectual and moral health appear to have contributed a striking feature to the poet's exposition of his views in “Queen Mab” and even in “Prometheus Unbound.” If it be remembered that Shelley already, by virtue of his vegetarianism, considered that man cannot become morally perfect unless he be physically perfect, it is not surprising that Cabanis's emphasis on the same idea from another angle, namely, the necessity of a mild and equable climate for the best development of intellect and morality, impressed the poet to such an extent that he incorporated the physician's belief in his theory of perfectibility. His ready acceptance of Cabanis's ideas is the less surprising when it is remarked that Cabanis was also a perfectibilian, believing that man “est indéfinement perfectible, et qu'il devient en quelque sort, capable de tout.”

Whenever a poet allows us to follow his creative processes, we are grateful—even though he may be no supreme artist but merely a solid craftsman. An account of the manner in which William Cullen Bryant composed his poems will therefore interest students not only of American letters but of poetry at large. From youth to old age, Bryant believed that great poetry and indeed all true poetry has its origin in the emotions of the poet.

Behind nearly all English literary criticism, particularly that relating to the Neo-classic drama, lies the Poetics of Aristotle. Some writers have been greatly affected by this epochal work; others have come under its sphere of influence to a lesser degree. However, there are few authors of importance upon whom the Poetics has failed to make some profound and enduring impression. Despite the fact that its influence permeates all English literature, excessive emphasis is laid sometimes upon the effect of Aristotle's teachings, to the detriment of such prominent critics as Horace, Vida, Trissino, Giraldi, Boileau, and Fontenelle. This applies especially to commentators on Hume. Indeed, the Scottish philosopher, historian, and critic subscribed to the majority of Aristotle's tenets, but the doctrines of Tully, Horace, Boileau, and Corneille made an equally impressive and indelible imprint upon his mind.

Professor randall stewart, while editing Hawthorne's American Notebooks from the manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library, called my attention to the initials “N. B.—R. L. R.” in the following note and asked me if I could tell him to whom they referred. The present paper is a belated attempt to answer his question.

Although Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) is a well-known document in the history of English criticism, there is, curiously enough, only one modern edition of this work, and there exists as yet no study of Hurd's total accomplishment as a critic. Miss Morley's Introduction to her edition of the Letters has been described as “valuable,” but she has done little more than summarize the contents of the book and reprint Hurd's own notes uncritically.

For a voluminously autobiographical writer, De Quincey on occasion can be surprisingly reticent. His most frankly reminiscent narratives are sometimes colored by circumstances which he elaborately hints at rather than reveals. Peculiarly disconcerting to the student on this account is an article in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine for February, 1841, reprinted by Masson under the title “Story of a Libel, with Thoughts on Duelling,” which tells of his helplessness in the face of a downright insult to his wife perpetrated in 1824 by an anonymous slanderer. His account is both incomplete and ambiguous. He hesitates to be explicit on so ticklish a subject, and yet he cannot let the story alone. For all his suppressions, however, and though Masson has not identified it, the libel is recoverable to-day. With practical certainty we may also name its author. In other essays, once we have the key, we may find allusions to the libel and its author, even answers to some of its charges; in particular, we may see that De Quincey's painful recollection of it shaped some of his alterations in the revised Confessions of 1856.

It has been quite some time since the charge that Schiller's Braut von Messina is a fate-tragedy à la Zacharias Werner was completely dismissed. We can also disregard the mixture of mythologies frowned upon by A. W. Schlegel, since in our day mythologies, like universes, threaten to become relative. The idea that the Braut is a pure imitation of the Greek tragedy, and that its dramatist was following Sophocles particularly, has fallen by implication, since attempts to point out the sources have gone down into ignoble failure.

On the other hand, we may today accept the brilliant critical statement of Wilhelm Dilthey, that the Braut is “das Mittelglied zwischen dem antiken Drama und der neuen Form des musikalischen Drama, die Wagner in den Nibelungen schuf.” This idea has been expanded by Josef Nadler, who does not fail to exclaim against the obstinate misinterpretation to which this drama, together with the Jungfrau von Orleans, has consistently been subjected. Nadler sees in the Braut the culmination of a tendency noticeable in the operatic tones of the Jungfrau, a tendency toward the creation of tragedy out of the spirit of music.

The troubled spirit of Mary Campbell (Highland Mary) has plagued all the biographers of Robert Burns. Fascinated and yet baffled, they have produced a wide variety of hypotheses, but no one of them has been able to write a wholly satisfactory account of her romance with Burns. The lack of information about her has led some critics to question her existence. It is, therefore, of considerable interest that facts have recently come to light which demonstrate her living presence conclusively and which enable a biographer for the first time to present a clear-cut account of her relations with Burns.

Mi Pesadilla,“ alleged to be ”the last tale by Edgar Poe,“ appeared in El Mundo Ilustrado of Mexico City in its issue of March 9, 1902. The translator does not reveal his identity nor does he offer any further information concerning the source of the original. The title is not suggestive of any tale in the Poe canon, and a reading of the story must convince one that it could not be an extravagantly free version or adaptation of any of Poe's known tales. The supposition that ”My Nightmare“ might be another positive contribution to the Poe canon—a tale inedited and lost until its miraculous reappearance in a Mexican review a half-century after Poe's death,—must be discarded as highly improbable.

Die folgenden Briefe, die mir Professor W. Kurrelmeyer zur Verfügung stellte, bilden einen Teil eines Briefwechsels aus den Jahren 1859–62 zwischen Paul Heyse und Feodor Löwe. Franz Ludwig Feodor Löwe, der am 5. Juli 1816 zu Kassel geboren wurde, stammte aus einer Schauspielerfamilie. Während er sich zuerst ganz der Wissenschaft widmen wollte, zwang ihn 1832 der Tod seines Vaters, die Theaterlaufbahn zu ergreifen. Nach seinem Auftreten in Mannheim, Hamburg und Frankfurt a.M. wurde er im Jahre 1841 als Heldenspieler für die Stuttgarter Hofbühne engagiert. Mit glänzendem Erfolg spielte er Leicester, Faust, Karl Moor und Hamlet. Er machte Josephine Stubenrauch, die Schwester der Schauspielerin Amalie von Stubenrauch, zu seiner Gattin. Im Jahre 1846 ernannte ihn die Stuttgarter Hofbühne zum Regisseur. Von der Zeit an beherrschte er dort gemeinsam mit Grunert (s. Anm. 10) das Repertoire. Auch als Lyriker betätigte er sich (z.B. Gedichte, 1854, 2. vermehrte Auflage, 1860; Neue Gedichte, 1875). Die Universität Giessen verlieh ihm die philosophische Doktorwürde. 1881 wurde er geadelt. In seinem dreiundsiebzigsten Jahre musste er sich infolge einer schweren Krankheit vom Theater zurückziehen, und am 20. Juni 1890 starb er.