Considerable interest has been manifested of late regarding Chaucer's rhetoric. This was occasioned by the French medievalist, Edmond Farai, when in 1924 he edited five poetical treatises which had circulated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Professor Manly in 1926 in a lecture delivered to the British Academy, concluded that the poet had in all probability studied these texts, and that much of his technical art was learned from them, rather than from his French models, as had formerly been supposed. Two years later, Professor Baldwin climaxed his Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic with a concluding chapter on Chaucer's technique, which records the poet's reaction to such doctrines as these works contain. During the past year, PMLA has published three articles related either to Chaucerian rhetoric or the medieval manuals. Two of these, following the thesis of Manly, assume quite definitely that Faral's treatises exerted a primary influence upon the mind of Chaucer. All these studies are based upon a comparison of only the Chaucerian works and the Latin manuals. Consideration has not been given to the poet's source material as a third element of correlation.

The purpose of this study is to set forth the reaction that occurred in novelistic form, and in novels, both in prefaces and in the body of the works, to melodramatic sentimentality in the English novel between 1796–1830. The term melodramatic sentimentality is subject to objection. It includes those things most often reacted to: the romantic, the sentimental, the gothic—in fact, all the unrealistic and unnatural elements that had been incorporated into the novel. But it does not include those novels which were unrealistic because their authors were unfamiliar with their subject matter.

In 1885 Evans undertook definitely to show that the text of the first quarto of Othello was, as compared to the folio at least, quite worthless. More recent editors, on the other hand, are inclined to allow greater authority to some of the texts that precede the folio, and have not hesitated to classify the Othello as one of the “good” quartos. No detailed and analytic study, however, of this version has been made since Evans' attempt, which therefore passes in many quarters doubtless as vulgate doctrine. The present study aims at a complete classification of the variants between these two fundamental texts. In this classification scholars may differ regarding individual items, but these disagreements must be numerous and crucial essentially to alter the results. Part I consists of an enumeration of all the textual differences, and Part II of an interpretation of them with a view to evaluating the F and the Q texts.

Among the manifold etymologies which have been proposed for the verb aller there is only one that is satisfactory phonetically, semantically, and historically: that is its derivation from aliare based on allatus. This simple and direct etymology seems to have occurred independently to various persons, but was first formally proposed in 1878 by J. Baur (Zs. für Rom. Phil., ii, 592). None of the other champions of the idea have ventured to publish anything on the subject. Baur's presentation was brief and unpretentious, for he apparently felt that the merits of the derivation required no elaborate argument.

Nicholas Bishop was a well-to-do brewer of Oxford. As he tells us in the first passage printed below, he was the son of a citizen of that place, Bartholomew Bishop, and of his wife, Isabelle, the daughter and heir of Walter Gregory of Watford. He was a litigious man. In furtherance of his actions at law, he compiled with his own hand a volume of annotated transcripts of deeds from various sources, now Cambridge University MS. Dd. xiv. 2. This volume, although mainly in Latin, contains some very interesting specimens of Oxford English, namely: two passages concerning a litigation of Bishop's with the Abbot of Oseney, a version of the Short Metrical Chronicle made to conform more or less to Bishop's dialect, and a series of historical notes following it, presumably composed by him. A note in the manuscript gives its date:

Lord Berners's translation of Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de Amor presents a number of problems to scholars of English and Romance languages. This sentimental romance, which appeared in Spanish in 1492, was soon turned into Italian and French. The English version, The Castell of love, made by Lord Berners a few years before his death in 1533, does not appear to have been published much before the middle of the sixteenth century. Only four copies of the book in English, representing three editions, are known to exist. The British Museum possesses copies of two editions; a third edition is in the Huntington Library at San Gabriel, California. There is some disagreement over which of the English editions is the earliest, though it cannot be established with certainty that they were not preceded by some impression of which no copy is known today. A question of greater importance is whether or not Lord Berners actually translated the story, as is claimed on the title-page, from Spanish, or if he even translated a part of it from that language. If it can be determined that the claim made for a Spanish original is true, in whole or in part, this book deserves to be recognized as the first published translation from Spanish into English. The influence of the sentimental romances, such as The Castell of love, upon English fiction and wit in the sixteenth century is a subject which remains to be adequately treated.

The complexity of Wordsworth's spiritual troubles during the critical summer of 1793 and the subtlety of his examination of his mind at the time should be excuse enough for another attempt to bring all the aspects of the truth together. The attempt affects the reading of so characteristic and popular a poem as the Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey. These Lines are as obviously autobiographical as the Prelude, and passages in each are admittedly parallel evidence of certain aspects of the poet's development. When, however, we compare the passages which refer to the period of the first visit to Tintern Abbey, we find certain discrepancies which not even the most recent students of Wordsworth's life have been able to reconcile. The contrast between his attitude towards Nature in 1793 and his attitude towards Nature in 1798, which is the substance of the Lines, does not correspond in all particulars with the contrast made in the Prelude between these two periods. Consequently the familiar passage in the Lines is differently interpreted by Wordsworth's readers. If it is to be read as authentic biography, it needs more careful harmonizing with the Prelude. If, on the other hand, such a harmony cannot be made, the shorter poem may have to be accepted as a poem symbolizing two states of mind without possessing autobiographical accuracy. While the poem would thereby lose nothing, biography would gain something in strict truth.

If Shakespeare's plays, as is generally admitted, are incomparably greater than their sources, their greatness must inhere mainly in his changes and additions. Most scholars have attributed this precious residue to the dramatist's imagination, which, they seem to suppose, created it from nothing. Certainly his imagination informed the whole: but the additions that he built into his originals, supplying motivation and verisimilitude, he took from the life around him; for this was the material that both he and his audience knew best: thus he elizabethanized the stories that he used, and made them reflect the popular attitude toward the characters and the themes that he portrayed; for, in an age of little learning, he could not hope, even had he wished, to educate his audience to a different point of view. Dogberry, as a constable, must be stupid; Henry V must appear as a national hero; and interest on money in The Merchant of Venice must be hateful—all to accord with contemporary fact or opinion. But modern readers see such characters and themes quite out of focus, and interpret them in modern ways.

During the latter half of Henry VIII's reign various English presses issued vernacular editions of many of Erasmus' writings. The most popular was a version, published first toward the end of 1533 and frequently thereafter, of the Enchiridion militis Christiani. This treatise had a large circulation throughout Europe. Appearing first in 1503 (or 1504), it received for a decade or so no great attention, but after 1515 edition followed edition in rapid succession. Between 1519 and 1542 it was issued in translation, usually in at least two versions, in eight different languages.

Because of their later apportionment among “Poems founded on the Affections” and “Poems of the Imagination” Wordsworth's “Lucy” lyrics are usually grouped as follows:

I. “Strange fits of passion have I known”
II. “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”
III. “I travelled among unknown men”
IV. “Three years she grew in sun and shower”
V. “A slumber did my spirit seal”

In the third volume of E. K. Chambers' Elizabethan Stage is a short notice of Henry Cheke and his Certayne Tragedie written first in Italian, by F. N. B. entituled, Freewyl, and translated into English, by Henry Cheeke. Although Chambers, probably confused by the entry in the Stationers' Register on May 11, 1561, of a book “of Frewill,” quotes the title with John Tysdale as printer, none of the extant copies bears any mention of printer, place or date. It has been assumed in the past that the entry to Tysdale referred to Cheke's translation, but Dr. Harold Stein has pointed out to me that it must actually refer to one of a series of translations from Jean Veron issued by Tysdale at this time, the title in question reading: A most necessary treatise of free will. Cheke's book is listed under 1589 in Herbert's edition of Ames' Typographical Antiquities, but no printer is assigned and no reason given for the date except the statement that the revolt of the Netherlands is referred to in the play, whereas as a matter of fact it is the revolt of Germany from papal authority in the time of Luther. The question has been pretty well settled, however, by Mr. William A. Jackson, who has made a detailed study of the copy in the Pforzheimer collection. He writes me that the book is certainly the work of Richard Jugge and that a comparison of some of the smaller initial blocks in the Cheke volume with the same ones in Eden's translation of Peter Martyr's History of travayle in the west and east Indies, printed by Jugge in 1577, shows that the blocks are noticeably more worn and broken in the latter volume. Cheke's book was presumably printed, therefore, before that date and after 1572, since the dedicatee, Lady Cheynie of Toddington, did not acquire that title until her husband was raised to the peerage as Baron Cheynie of Toddington in 1572. I incline to a date close to the earlier year.

Spenser-Sidney scholarship has for some time been concerned with the problem of the sources of the Mutabilitie Cantos, of the Garden of Adonis passage in the Faerie Queene, and of the Pamela-Cecropia episode in the third book of the Arcadia, with reference to their expression of natural philosophy. Miss Albright, Miss Wilson somewhat briefly, Miss Whitney, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Levinson have rejected as vaguely remote, or have tried to break down completely, the theory of definite influence of Lucretius. These scholars have, in effect, built up a kind of vari-colored stone wall against Lucretius and against all the emphasis of Mr. Greenlaw's careful researches, tip-toeing around the wall to Empedocles by way of Du Plessis Mornay, and then coming back again to Cicero in his De Natura Deorum, or to Ovid, or, finally substantially neutralizing the whole exhibit by the neutral-toned tendency to fall back upon the theory of general Renaissance culture and commonplaces as the only determinative source of influence. Must we, however, leave the problem at this point? Or is there a very definite, direct source?

… of antres vast and desarts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak, such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

It has usually been assumed that Othello's adventures came to Shakespeare out of the pages of Mandeville or Pliny. There is, however, another possibility and one likely to offer a far more exciting invitation to a poet with Shakspere's keen sensitivity to visual impressions. There is a startling resemblance between the items in the passage quoted and the quaintly decorated Renaissance maps.

It is an old and popular tradition that Elizabeth was a great lover of letters and a patron of the Arts. In 1718 Ambrose Philips sought to animate his country-women

In the first three books of the Faerie Queene Spenser is primarily interested in the virtue of the individual as such: his holiness, his temperance, his chastity—the harmony of the whole nature controlled by reason. Beginning with the Fourth Book he turns to a more definite study of the individual in relation to other individuals. With his classical background it was reasonable that he should put friendship next. Aristotle had upheld the thesis that all social relationships grow out of friendship, and both Plato and his Neo-Platonic followers had expounded a philosophy essentially consistent with this. In the present paper I shall endeavor to show that in the Fourth Book Spenser conceives of friendship as the operation in the world of man of a principle of cosmic love, a conception which he bases on the Hymn to Venus taken from Lucretius; and that there is a striking correspondence between the concord-discord antithesis in the Fourth Book and the conflict in Mutabilitie, a correspondence which not only throws light on the poet's interests in the Fourth Book but also helps to date Mutabilitie.