In the June issue of last year (vol. XXXIV, no. 2, pp. 225 ff.) Mr. A. H. Gilbert published supplementary notes to my old paper on Spenser's imitations from Ariosto. Since he has brought the matter forward once more, I may as well supplement his supplement with a few stray addenda of my own, which I have stumbled on at intervals since 1897. Some of these were first observed by Upton, whose notes, as quoted in Todd's edition of 1805, had at that time escaped my attention. The list is confined to the ground covered by my old paper; it has nothing to do with the field opened by Mr. Gilbert, Spenser's conclusions and transitions in the manner of Ariosto.

A writer in The Annual Register, soon after the death of Charles Churchill, gave to the world the first account of his life; this was followed by The Genuine Memoirs of Mr. Charles Churchill. To Bell's edition of the poet's works is prefixed a life of the author by Doctor Johnson; this does not add anything new. Kippis, in his Biographia Britannica, followed most of the inaccuracies of the first biographer, but added some new material from his personal information. Anderson used these sources in the British Poets (1795). Robert Southey in his Life of Cowper, and William Tooke in an edition of Churchill's Works (1804) made more elaborate studies of the poet's life, but, unfortunately, were satisfied with earlier biographies or neglected to give careful references to original material. John Forster, in The Edinburgh Review (1845) pointed out many of Tooke's inaccuracies. Every biographer of Churchill from Chalmers in his English Poets to Leslie Stephen in The Dictionary of National Biography, followed Tooke, or Tooke modified by Forster. In 1903, R. F. Scott in his Admissions to the College of St. John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, made several valuable contributions to our knowledge about the early career of the satirist. Ferdinand Putschi, in Charles Churchill, sein Leben und seine Werke (1909), had not seen Mr. Scott's book, and followed the earlier biographers.

It is a familiar maxim in criticism that the strength of a work of art is measured not by its weakest part, as a chain is by its weakest link, but by its strongest. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is judged by its magnificent speeches and its awe-inspiring close, not by the fooleries of Mephistopheles. Paradise Lost is supremely great despite the long-winded discourses of the later books. It sometimes happens, however, that the excellence that gives a work its position in literature lifts its actual faults into the category of virtues. The average reader is so carried away by the supreme art of the great passages that he does not notice the blemishes. The critic instead of recognizing faults as spots on the sun refuses even to admit that they exist, contending that what are regarded as faults are really special beauties. Usually in time these matters are adjusted so that the man and the work are set into their proper niches. When a piece of literature has stood the test of time for two hundred and fifty years and only once has a considerable voice been raised in unfavorable criticism, and that over one hundred and fifty years ago, he would seem to be a very daring critic who would say that the lone voice was right and all the others wrong. Especially so when the work so criticized is Milton's Samson Agonistes. One takes courage, however, from the fact that the first critic who presumed to find fault with this play was Dr. Johnson.

Of all the agencies involved in the great world-war, the newspapers, at the outbreak of hostilities, were more ready than any other for the demands placed upon them. Regiments had to be raised, munitions and supplies had to be provided, and means of transportation, in the face of dangers never confronted before, had to be assured. But the special correspondents were at once ready to take their posts at the front, and the newspapers at home were equipped to put the news in the most graphic form before the reading public.

Separate editions of Milton's History of Britain appeared in 1670, 1677, 1695, and 1818. It has been included in all the important collections of his prose works. In 1706, moreover, Dr. White Kennett, whose Complete History of England is a series of historical writings from the pens of various authors, chose Milton's work to do duty for the period preceding the Norman Conquest. Foot-notes were added, though of no remarkable value. The first of Kennett's three folio volumes was republished in 1719; in 1870 Milton's history, and along with it two of the other contributions to the first volume, were reprinted under one octavo cover; in 1878 appeared a stereotype reproduction of the volume of 1870.

Of the several agencies whose joint functioning made possible the Elizaibethan theatre, the most neglected, the least understood, and yet in some respects the most important, is the dramatic company. The history and organization of the playhouses have long since attracted the attention of scholars, and the individual fortune of the playwrights and actors has been studied from many points of view. Research on the dramatic companies, on the other hand, has taken but one direction. Fleay, Maas, and Murray have gone far to establish the chronology of the companies, but their real place in the history of the Elizabethan theatre has not been established. General works on the Elizabethan drama and theatre have failed to give them the attention they deserve, and the general student of the period hardly realizes that upon the companies rested a considerable share of the financial responsibility for the drama and the entire burden of producing it. Nor is it difficult to understand why the dramatic companies have been neglected. Writers upon our period have been content to treat of Elizabethan actors in a manner fitting those of all succeeding periods. The function of the modern actor is to act. The theatrical capitalist and the specialized skill of the producer relieve him of all the financial, and a substantial part of the artistic, responsibility which rested upon Elizabethan actors. If, however, the Elizabethan actor had greater responsibilities, he had also greater opportunities. The Elizabethan drama owes far more than has yet been realized to the fact that many of the playwrights and all of the producing managers were great actors, who knew the audience intimately enough to gauge its capacities, who acknowledged no paymaster or employer but that audience, and whose instincts partook alike of the shrewdness of the successful business man and the daring of the artist. This producing and managerial function of the companies justifies a closer investigation than has yet been made of their place in the theatrical activities of the time and of the business organization which enabled them to hold it.