While learned investigation of Chaucer's text and background has illumined our knowledge of his sources and literary methods, one major mystery has remained unsolved: Who is the Lollius cited by Chaucer in three passages, and why did Chaucer refer to him?

Some years ago Dr. W. W. Greg in an article, “Bibliography—An Apologia”, ably presented the aims and scope of analytical bibliography. Among the phases of that science which he treated at some length was critical bibliography, the study of the transmission of texts. As a bibliographer he emphasized the value of the critical or bibliographical approach, “the humble collation of textual variations and reconstruction of scribal steps”, as contrasted to the metacritical, the intuitional and personal selection of the best or most authentic. Although Dr. Greg's concept applies to the transmission of all texts, I am limiting my study, for the sake of illustration, to a particular case.

It has long been recognized that La prudencia en la mujer, with its powerful portrait of the Queen, Maria de Molina, represented something of a special effort in Tirso's theatre. Not only is it greatly superior to the dramatist's other plays of similar genre, but it is usually conceded to be “the best historical drama of the Spanish classical theatre.” Some of the critics have been struck by its profoundly serious tone, as compared with that prevailing in other plays of the Mercedarian; others have pointed to the loving care with which Tirso has portrayed his noble protagonist and the powerful contrasts that he has worked out between the Queen and the disloyal vassals who surrounded her. Still others have stressed Tirso's success in recreating the anarchic atmosphere that surrounded her regency.

The Canzoniere of Petrarch contains poems written at various times through the long years of the poet's life. It is not a collection made toward the end of his life in a single editorial effort, nor is it a mere gradual accumulation of poems: it is a selective and ordered collection, the fashioning of which, begun in Petrarch's youth, continued to the day of his death. In the present study I am trying to trace the whole course of the evolution of the collection. Much work has been done hitherto, by many scholars, with reference to particular stages or phases of that evolution; but the present study is, I believe, the first to undertake to reconstruct the entire process. Some of the material herein contained is derived from earlier studies, and some of it is new.

Joseph Hall, whom Fuller designated “our English Seneca”, is chiefly remembered as a satirist, character-writer, and indefatigable champion of the Anglican faith against the onslaughts of “Smectymnuus” and Milton. But Fuller's phrase suggests a further claim on our attention. Bishop Hall was the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century, a notable practitioner of the so-called “Baroque” or “curt” style (stile coupé) of the Attic writers. It was to the Neo-Stoic brand of theology which Hall so enthusiastically preached that Sir Thomas Browne had reference when he observed in his Religio Medici that “truely there are singular pieces in the Philosophy of Zeno, and doctrine of the Stoicks, which I perceive, delivered in a pulpit, pass for current Divinity.”

Escasas son las noticias que alcanzamos a recoger de la vida de Diego de Morlanes. Perteneció a una familia distinguida de juristas zaragozanos. El más famoso de ellos fué el abuelo de nuestro poeta, Micer Diego de Morlanes, autor de importantes obras de jurisprudencia. El viejo Morlanes dejó dos hijos: Bartolomé y Agustín. El primero se dedicó a la iglesia; el segundo siguió las huellas de su padre en la magistratura. Este fué el padre del autor del romance que hoy sacamos a luz. Ocuparon todos ellos cargos de importancia en la administración civil del reinó de Aragon. El joven Morlanes murió un “sábado 26 de marzo de 1633, siendo consejero civil de Aragón.”

Lucian, looking inside a gold and ivory statue by Phidias, was shocked ' to see “one tangle of bars, bolts, nails, planks, wedges, with pitch and mortar and everything that is unsightly; not to mention a possible colony of rats and mice.” And Lamb, on seeing the Cambridge manuscript of Milton's minor poems, swore never again to go into the workshop of a great artist. For behind the poem often lie the “unsightly” dictionary of rhymes, the thesaurus, the dictionary of synonyms—all the helps which collectively we call the poet's handbook. Perhaps because of its unsightliness it has never been studied, but it is obviously no less important for an understanding of the poet's craft than the planks and wedges are for the sculptor's.

While some of the most interesting questions regarding the early history of the Canterbury Tales will undoubtedly never be settled, it seems equally certain that in the full corpus of variants prepared by Professors Manly and Rickert evidence lies embedded which little by little should add to our understanding of the conditions in which the first manuscripts were prepared, hence, possibly, lead to a clearer picture of the situation when Chaucer died. The present article will deal with the lost ancestor of the manuscript family which Dr. Manly and Dr. Rickert have called group d, that ancestor to be designated hereafter as √d. Section I will be devoted to the origin of the material used in the preparation of √d; Section II to the √d editor's handling of that material.

Trotz einer umfangreichen, kritischen Literatur bedarf die Ent-stehungsgeschichte von G. E. Lessings beiden letzten und zugleich reifsten Prosaschriften, der Freimaurergespräche und der Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, noch immer in wesentlichen Einzelheiten der Klarung. Dies trifft auch auf die jüngste zusammenfassende Darstellung der vorliegenden Problème zu, wie sie W. v. Olshausen in den Einleitungen zu seiner Ausgabe sowie in den Anmerkungsbänden zu Lessings Werken (bei Bong) geboten hat. Gerade die dort zu Tage tretenden Unzuläng-lichkeiten und Irrtümer geben Anlaß, den einzelnen Ueberlieferungen über den Werdegang beider Werke erneut nachzugehen, ohne jedoch dabei zu übersehen, daß manches jetzt für die hier folgenden Untersuchungen benutzte Material zur Zeit der Abfassung oder beim Ab-schluß von Olshausens Erläuterungen vielleicht noch unbekannt war, während anderes zweifellos erst später veröffentlicht wurde. Andrerseits wird ein fur aile Mal auf Olshausens leicht zugänglichen und teil-weise sehr wertvollen Kommentàr zu verweisen sein, dessen Kenntnis schon darum auch für unsere Erörterungen vorausgesetzt wird, um unnotige Wiederholungen zu vermeiden. Außerdem ist gleich zu Beginn noch einmal an die oft betonten äußerlichen Gemeinsamkeiten der zwei Bekenntnisschriften zu erinnern: beide wurden iiber mehrere Jahre (1777 bezw. 1778–80) als Fragmente und anonym herausgegeben.

Un sort injurieux livra Gassendi au mépris de l'histoire, et déjà son contemporain Descartes l'a considérablement malmené. C'est qu'il est considéré d'ordinaire, non pas comme un philosophe, ni même comme un disciple, mais plutôt comme un compilateur, un commentateur purement philologique, dénué de tout esprit critique en matière de philosophie. Le préjugé courant sur Gassendi peut se résumer dans cette phrase de Fernand Papillon: “En fait, on pourrait supprimer.... Gassendi de l'histoire de l'esprit humain sans la mutiler, sans lui ôter de sa grandeur et de son éclat.”

Recent studies have made evident the profound effect of natural science, especially of physics and astronomy, upon English neo-classical literature. In several of these studies, it has been remarked that Matthew Prior's writings contain many passages referring to scientific doctrines and manifesting an unusual attitude toward them. There has been, however, no thorough investigation of the rôle played by the new science in Prior's thought.

Macaulay's essay on The Life and Writings of Addison has been signalized by his most recent biographer as probably “his soundest piece of literary criticism.” Published in July, 1843, when he was at the height of his critical and stylistic powers, the work reveals both the strength and weaknesses of its author. It takes its point of departure as a review of Miss Lucy Aikin's Life of Joseph Addison, published in 1843 by Macaulay's own publishers, Longman and associates. After paying his respects to the lady author, he brushes aside the contributions in her work with severe strictures on its errors. In the prospect that the charm of Addison's letters, many of them printed in the biography for the first time, might brings a demand for a second edition of the Life, he concludes his remarks by saying: “If so, we hope that every paragraph will be revised, and that every date and fact about which there can be the smallest doubt will be carefully verified.” While making numerous corrections in Miss Aikin's work, Macaulay failed to produce a study any less in need of such checking of facts. As will be shown, this need is most notable in his spirited account of one of the salient episodes in Addison's career—the writing and publishing of the Campaign (1704).

In his successive revisions of the Hymn in the Nativity, Crashaw shows a growing sense of form, and the final version, posthumously published in 1652, has a conceptual unity that raises it to a level of poetry considerably above that of the 1646 version. He achieved this by substituting structural symbols for mere sense images, by emending a few lines, by dropping one stanza, and by adding two very important new stanzas that make the structural pattern of the poem much clearer. These changes had a considerable effect on the rest of the poem because they placed it in a new context. Miss Wallerstein, who notes the “steady pruning of the purely sensuous elements,” and who calls these additional stanzas “the great stanzas which transmute the whole,” describes the final version of the poem as one of Crashaw's “few perfectly realized poems.” A comparison of the text of 1646 with the texts of 1648 and 1652 enables us to study the poet in the process of this realization and to see how large a part clarification of structure played in it.

A. W. Pollard, in his brief bibliographical introduction to the Macmillan two-volume edition of Sterne (1924), has written: “Tristram Shandy is full of surprises, and not the least remarkable of them is the fact that its publication was spread over eight years, thus further accentuating the very leisurely rate of progress of the story itself.” I can attest to many surprises that await the man who looks into the history of the publication of this novel; and these notes—although they solve none of the vexing bibliographical problems—are designed to give a loosening tug to some of these knots. A brief history of the publication of Tristram Shandy runs:

The list of eighteenth-century celebrities who were freemasons is an impressive one with the names on it of Chesterfield, Gibbon, Burke, Boswell, Burns, Mozart, Paine, Washington, Franklin, and scores of other major and minor lights in the earlier as well as the later years of the century. It is rather surprising, therefore, in view of what we know of the temperament, ideas, and career of Sir Richard Steele not to find his name there also. But although the question of his membership has often been raised, no special effort has ever been made to answer it with certainty either in the affirmative or the negative. I have gone into the subject not so much with the purpose of proving that he was or was not a freemason as with the hope of opening up approaches leading to new facts about his life. It has been an interesting pursuit which, though not yielding any documentary proof in the way of lodge minutes or membership lists, has led me to the conclusion that in all probability Steele was a freemason. This summary of my study may lead someone to suggest methods of carrying the investigation further. Possibly it may serve also to call attention to a subject which appears to have had but little study, freemasonry as a social force in the England of George the First.

Although the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher had been revived in great numbers after the reopening of the London theaters in 1660, their popularity declined so steadily during the eighteenth century that by the time of Garrick's retirement from the stage in June, 1776, only two plays, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife and The Chances, both comedies, were still being presented as stock pieces at Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket. Shortly after Garrick's retirement, however, several of the neglected plays were revived, and, in spite of the competition of intensified Shakespearean revival and the unquestioned predominance of assorted spectacle and melodrama, a varying degree of interest in the Elizabethan twin playwrights continued until the retirement of Edmund Kean from the stage in March, 1833. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to determine the extent to which the neglect of Beaumont and Fletcher was amended during the years 1776–1833 and to ascertain the significance of the revivals as related to various contemporary interests as well as to the generally favorable or unfavorable circumstances for production.