The final episode of the third book of The Faerie Queene has never received adequate interpretation. By analogy to the final episodes of the other books Busyrane should be the great enemy to chastity, and his defeat should be accomplished through the virtue of chastity. Previous interpretations have not defined the allegorical appropriateness of Busyrane and his mask of Cupid as the climactic testing of Spenser's knight of chastity. The problem for the reader is to see how Britomart's experience at the house of Busyrane solves Amoret's problem and at the same time is the final challenge to her own virtue.

Entre las polémicas literarias que hallaron campo propicio en la España del siglo XVII, ninguna fue acaso tan enconada como aquélla a que dió lugar la publicación del Para todos del doctor Juan Pérez de Montalbán. No bien salían de las prensas de Madrid los ejemplares del debatido libro, en mayo de 1632, cuando todo un alud de sátiras, libelos, ataques y contraataques vino a caer sobre su joven autor, victima inocente de las reyertas en que se habían visto envueltos Góngora, su maestro Lope, y sus amigos Luis Pacheco de Narváez y fray Diego Niseno. La mas célebre de estas sátiras (y, al mismo tiempo, la más despiadada, y la primera, cronológicamente, entre las que han llegado hasta nosotros) es la Perinola de Quevedo que, aunque no corrió de molde hasta el siglo siguiente, alcanzó en seguida gran difusión manus-crita, como se echa de ver por sus numerosos textos del mismo siglo XVII que han llegado hasta nosotros. De ella, al decir de un contemporáneo, “en brève tiempo se sacaron tantas copias que en cualquiera taberna y bodegón, con ser excesivo su número, se hallaban a pares.”

“Those who remark their religious experiences are generally looked on with Ridicule;” wrote James Boswell, “but very unreasonably, for they are experimental philosophers upon the most important subject.” No one can read BoswelPs Life of Johnson or any of the Boswell Journals and letters without recognizing the vital place religious thought held in his life, for he was a man who did remark his religious experiences with interest and without embarrassment. An outline of his religious life demonstrates the profound revolutions and constant turmoil of his religious thought and indicates the lasting impression religion made on the man James Boswell.

Most dryden scholars believe that Religio Laici (1682) is not a statement of the Anglican position, though the poet asserts that it is. In fact, the widely accepted view is that it is a Catholic poem in spirit. This interpretation was established by Louis I. Bredvold in a very influential book, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (1934), in which he stated, “Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther are so closely allied in their philosophy that the earlier poem might be regarded as a sort of prelude or introduction to the later.” Prior to Bredvold's pronouncement, some critics had questioned the orthodoxy of Religio Laici as an Anglican poem, and had suggested that Dryden was troubled by religious doubts and that he was halfway on the road to Catholicism in 1682. It was Bredvold, however, who crystallized these views by asserting unequivocally that the poem was fideistic, and hence Catholic in thought and temper.

Herder's whole attitude to language develops quite coherently out of one single remark. This is the description, early in the Fragmente, of primitive language as “sinnlich.” As a qualification this would hardly have ranked high amongst aesthetic criteria at the time. Indeed it is doubtful whether, when here first enunciated by Herder, it was meant to imply praise or even approval. Having just said: “Bei den Gegenständen fürs Auge muste die Geberdung noch sehr zu Hülfe kommen, um sich verständlich zu machen,” Herder goes on to say of this early stage of language “und ihr ganzes Wörterbuch war noch sinnlich.” The wording of this statement is significant. “Die Geberdung muste noch sehr zu Hülfe kommen … ihr ganzes Wörterbuch war noch sinnlich”—in these two noch's there is the suggestion of imperfection. This is not surprising. Adelung suggests that sinnlich, meaning “based on unclear perceptions” is opposed to vernünftig meaning “based on clear perception.” Sinnlich, for him, implied therefore a certain degree of imperfection. It has been suggested that Herder was merely echoing G. F. Meier's rendering of Baumgarten's term sensi-livus meaning “pertaining to the faculties of sensation.” Poetry, according to Baumgarten, was “oratio perfecta sensitiva.” And this is how Herder's apparently neutral description turns almost imperceptibly into a value-judgment; for it soon becomes apparent that he considers poetry not only as the earliest, but as the highest form of literature.

The conclusion of Ants Oras as to the chronology of Milton's major poems, based on his important study of the blank vejse, is, I believe, in serious error. Examining strong pauses, both terminal and medial, the distribution of medial pauses over the pentameter line, run-on lines, feminine and masculine pauses, the distribution of polysyllables over the verse line, feminine endings, rhythmical expressions creating shifted stresses, syllabized “-ed” endings, and pyrrhic verse endings, Oras concludes that the traditional chronology for Paradise Lost (from Book I through Book XII), Paradise Regained (from Book I through Book IV), and Samson Agonistes is correct. As a prosodical study, the statistical data presented lead us to a greater understanding of the aforementioned verse techniques as used by Milton than we have heretofore known. Professor Oras' inferences of dated practice are, however, another matter.

Ever since Thomas Warton, nearly two hundred years ago, decided that the Theatrum Poetarum of Edward Phillips contained “criticisms far above the taste of that period” and therefore revealed “many touches of Milton's hand,” scholars have sought evidence to substantiate this opinion. Sir Egerton Brydges, in 1800, delcared in the preface of his abridged edition of the Theatrum that “the very expressions of Milton break out in every page,” and only recently Harris Fletcher, who has made a minute study of Milton's reading, wrote that “perhaps as much as nine-tenths of the work was almost beyond doubt done by Milton.” A careful study of the sources and methods of composition of this book has convinced me that not only did Milton have no hand in the work but that even his influence, if any, was negligible. Actually, the Theatrum was a hasty, careless piece of hack work, derived for the most part from a few convenient reference works, with a minimum of effort on the part of the compiler.

This paper owes its origin to three statements about Pope:

… I find your Practice the Prosodia of your Rules.—Henry Cromwell, letter to Pope, S December 1710.
… he [Pope] adhered rigidly to the rules laid down in it [his letter on prosody], both in the translation from Statius and in the Pastorals.-Edith Sitwell, Alexander Pope, p. 69.

L'avare is probably Molière's harshest play. Scheming love suits, openly rebellious children, an unloving father, a sordid theme hardly leave our sympathies any acceptable resting-place. Harpagon, moreover, is a monster who, unlike Tartuffe, is firmly anchored to the center of the stage. No jail, not even an omniscient King can rid the unhappy family of the man who is its head. His power may wither, as it must for the comedy to end on a note of relief, but his presence cannot be so decisively expunged from the lives of those around him. When Tartuffe is dragged to jail in Orgon's stead, justice is restored in the state, as is solidarity to the once bitterly divided family. Harpagon leaving the stage to go see his chère cassette is merely shedding his family without another thought, allowing it to find unhoped for reunion under the wing of a new father, Don Thomas d'Alburcy, as generous and loving as the real father had been mean and hateful.

The aim of this essay is to examine Descriptive Sketches (written in 1791–92, published with An Evening Walk in 1793) as a poem with its own personal and stylistic integrity. Though not, of course, a great or even very exciting work of art, its relation to Wordsworth's growth as man and poet has been neglected. One reason for this neglect is Legouis' account of its derivative nature: the many borrowings in it from eighteenth-century writers and the extensions of their technique. Legouis is controvertible only on the ground of method: by atomizing the poem he shows convincingly that a great proportion of phrases have a direct or exaggerated relationship to that “gaudiness and inane phraseology” Wordsworth was later to condemn. His view of Descriptive Sketches as mainly patchwork, though sincere and really alive to nature, has prevailed almost continuously. The few notable attempts to go beyond Legouis should, however, be mentioned. M. L. Barstow, an exact reader, discriminates Wordsworth's “faults” from those of the eighteenth-century landscape school, and states against Legouis that what we find in Descriptive Sketches is “not the remnant of an old style; it is the crude but vigorous beginning of the new.” But because of her specific approach, the study of Poetic Diction, she does not, except in a general way, correlate Wordsworth's stylistic struggle with a particular phase in his personal development.

A number of chapters—some definitive, others suggestive—have already appeared to afford us a clearer picture of the reception of United States writers and writings in Latin America. Studies on Franklin, Poe, Longfellow, and Whitman provide reasonably good coverage on major representative figures of our earlier literary years. There are other nineteenth-century writers, however, who deserve more extended treatment than that given in the summary and bibliographical studies available to date. A growing body of data may soon make possible the addition of several significant chapters with which to round out this period in the history of inter-American literary relations. Bryant and Dickinson will be the only poets to call for any specific attention. Fiction writers will prove more numerous. Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Hearn, Hart, Melville, and Twain will figure in varying degrees of prominence. Of these, some like Irving and Cooper early captured the Latin American imagination; others like Hawthorne, and particularly Melville, were to remain virtually unknown until our day. Paine and Prescott and Mann will represent yet other facets of American letters and thought.

Pourquoi et dans quelle mesure les pensées de Pascal peuvent-elles paraître à la fois si vivantes et si présentes, mais à certains égards si lointaines? A une époque où la multiplication des formes de la violence nous interdit à la fois de nous évader dans le beau rêve d'une Cité de Dieu et de trouver un sens clair à l'histoire des hommes, et où triomphent plus que jamais, en même temps, le dogmatisme et le sentiment de la futilité, il est intéressant d'examiner les pensées de Pascal précisément parce que Pascal, le plus fortement peut-être de tous les penseurs politiques, nous montre comment et pourquoi la vie politique est en même temps et surtout indissolublement futile et sérieuse; tout l'intérêt du problème—et son caractère tragique—venant précisément du fait qu'il est impossible, selon Pascal, de sortir du cercle vicieux du sérieux et de la futilité. Ce n'est pas parce que vous passerez, nous dit Pascal, d'une monarchie à une République, ou d'une République à une autre République, que les choses passeront du futile au sérieux ou du sérieux au grotesque; vos opinions peut-être changeront, car la concupiscence et l'imagination vous égarent—ou servent vos passions—mais pas la nature, l'essence de la vie politique. Urbi et Orbi, l'homme ne change pas, et la politique vaut ce que vaut l'homme, c'est-à-dire rien, ou peu de chose.