The first extant edition of Tamburlaine bears the date of 1590, but we have evidence of its existence as early as 1588 in the well known reference to “that atheist Tamburlan” found in the address To the Gentlemen Readers, which forms the introduction to Greene's Perimedes the Blacke-Smith. Many authorities give 1587 as the date of the play, but there is no direct evidence for it. The date of the first appearance of Tamburlaine on the stage is of such importance in the history of the English drama that any evidence bearing upon the matter, however slight or however doubtful, should be brought to light for the consideration of students of Elizabethan literature. This is my apology for presenting a matter that seems to me somewhat doubtful; it may turn out to be of no value whatever as evidence; on the other hand, some one of keener insight may see in it strong corroboration of other evidence, or show it to be conclusive in itself.

Hermann Kirchner, son of Joachim Kirchner, was born November 11, 1562 at Hersfeld in Hessen. As a youth he was sent to Copenhagen to live with his brother, and there in the Ducal Library he began his higher studies. Thence he went to Rostock, and in 1587 to Marburg, supplied with recommendations from Chrytaeus, the historian, to the poet and dramatist, Aegidius Hunnius, who was until 1592 Professor of Theology in Marburg.

The naturalistic reaction against Romanticism was a more or less conscious return to classical models. Romantic diffuseness was banished. The limpid prose of the classical conteurs came back to its own. The ideal of the naturalistic novelist was to maintain a classical, impersonal point of view, which rendered impossible the gushing of Romantic lyricism. Nineteenth-century science, heir to the raison of Rousseau's enemies, the philosophes, replaced Romantic emotion. Disdaining the fantastic plots of the Romanticists, the naturalists tended to make of their novels merely a series of scenes, like Le Sage, and like Marivaux.

The Ovide moralisé is a portentous performance of about seventy-two thousand lines, extant in some seventeen manuscripts. Fragments of it were printed by Tarbé under the title of Œuvres de Philippe de Vitry, and the first volume of a critical text of the entire poem, edited by Professor de Boer of Amsterdam, is now in print. The work, with its mixture of fairly close translation and amazing allegorization of the Metamorphoses is discussed at length by Gaston Paris in its relation to other mediaeval translations or imitations of Ovid. And in de Boer's Introductions and articles will be found all necessary bibliographical apparatus.

Among the great English poets of the Romantic period Shelley was the poet of religious as well as of social and political revolt. His mind was preoccupied, especially in the formative years of his life, with the subject of religion, and it is significant that the piece of writing which first attracted any considerable attention to him was the essay The Necessity of Atheism, published in 1811 when he was eighteen and a student of Oxford. The essay not only is revolutionary in spirit, but also reveals a mind precociously occupied with religious problems.

The following paper will give a preliminary statement of a new conjecture as to the origin of the Ancren Biwle. It is proposed to identify the three maidens for whom the treatise was composed with the “tribus puellis, Emmae, videlicet, et Gunildae et Cristinae,” to whom, according to the charter printed by Dugdale, the hermitage of Kilburn, with its appurtenances, was granted by the Abbot and convent of Westminster sometime between the years 1127 and 1135. The hermitage was endowed permanently with money, land and beneficia, in return for which the inmates were to be the beadsmen of the abbey and of its confederate, the Abbey of Fécamp. The house at Kilburn was to be under the protection of St. Peter's, but it was to have complete independence in regard to its internal affairs. The establishment thus made had a continuous existence till the Reformation, under the title, which it seems to have acquired very early, of “Kilburn Priory.”