The most important versification manual in the history of Spanish literature is undoubtedly Juan Díaz Rengifo's Arte poética española, which first appeared in Salamanca in 1592 and was reissued a number of times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That the influence of this Renaissance treatise on Spanish verse has been great cannot be questioned. For approximately four centuries, in fact, it was the handbook on metrics for versifiers and poets. Reasons for the value and usefulness of the Arte poética española are not lacking. Rengifo was a scholarly investigator—scholarly in the modern sense. He worked systematically; he based his conclusions on actual practice rather than on theory; he illustrated his rules with examples chosen generally from the best-known poets; he studied the investigations of previous writers and, in full bibliographical references in marginal notes that correspond to today's footnotes, frankly gave them credit for all ideas and material borrowed from them; he showed unbiased judgment in the presentation of controversial topics; he described accurately, but never prescribed; he wrote clearly in simple language and without unnecessary wordage; he supplied time-saving devices for the reader; and he presented his work in an orderly, logical, and concise manner. His work is comprehensive and well balanced.

The problems of the overcrowded cities of today had their parallels in sixteenth-century London, and Elizabeth and the Council struggled with them during the greater part of the reign. Persistent attempts to check the growing population are recorded in the Acts of the Privy Council in memorandums for letters chiefly to the Lord Mayor, the Master of the Rolls, and the Justices of the Peace for Middlesex and Surrey. These entries give a wryly amusing account of conditions familiar in our own time—high rents, relief rolls, emergency legislation, evasions of the law, and possible favoritism in administering it. They suggest one other point of interest—that the Queen felt very strongly about the situation. Though it may be rash to see an immediate expression of her personal attitude in the communications of the Council, it is difficult to do otherwise.

The Odd corners of scholarship, so very often dusty and unrewarding to the researcher, occasionally provide a forgotten knickknack which completes the décor of a period room. Seventeenth-century scholasticism is for most of us a period room, whose pieces such as triposes, disputations, declamations, quadragesimals, clerums, and so on, we find too uncomfortable for our twentieth-century use and perhaps a bit too ugly for our ranch-style academic taste. To brighten the room a bit, even for themselves, the seventeenth-century Cambridge scholastics made use of a harmless piece of bric-a-brac called the prevarication or varier's speech. It is a tragedy that most of these are now lost, for with proper evaluation a history of seventeenth-century thought might almost be written from them alone.

The Loci Communes is Melanchthon's best known and most important work, the first systematic handbook of reformed theology, first published in 1521 and in numerous other editions since.

In 1949 Professor Carlos Moseley of the University of Oklahoma acquired a copy of the 1548 edition of this book from Germany, which is distinguished not only by the personage of its first owner but also by some autograph entries of prominent leaders of the Protestant Reformation. The copy is bound in a sixteen-century leather binding, brown, with the stamped portraits of Melanchthon on the front and Luther on the back side, each of them accompanied by a distich:

Ingenium referunt clari monumenta Philippi,
Corporis effigiem talis imago refert
Ista representat faciem pictura Lutheri,
Qui puro Christi dogmata corde doce(t).

Epitaphs of somewhat greater literary and historic interest than those usually met with are to be found in two volumes in the Pierpont Morgan Library. Though one was written down in a mediaeval manuscript and the other relates to an English nobleman who died early in the fifteenth century, they may nevertheless be identified with the era to which the Renaissance Society dedicates itself, since both the epitaphs were probably composed in the sixteenth century and they were set down in the Morgan volumes by two writers of the same century.

On the verso of the first fly-leaf of Morgan Ms 771, there is written, in a hand of the early sixteenth century, the following stanza:

La terre monde et ciel/ont deuise ma dame
Anne qui fut des Roys/diaries et loys femme
La terre a pris le corps/qui gist soubz ceste Lame
Le monde ansy Retient/Sa Renommee et fame
Pardurable a Jaymes/Sans estre blasmee de ame
Et Le ciel pour sa part a voulu prendre L'ame

A An unknown work by Antonio del Pollaiuolo for the Monastery of S. Gaggio near Florence

On the back of a simple reliquary crucifix of c. 1500, which comes from the Augustinian monastery of S. Gaggio near Florence and is now preserved in the Museo Nazionale in Florence, there are six obviously somewhat older translucent silver enamel plaques. Their quality is striking when compared to the simple craftlike work of the crucifix itself. The senseless iconographic arrangement of Mary and John at either side of St. Gaggio also attests to the fact that these smalti are not in their original setting.

In Vol. 1, p . 73, of his Manuscritos Peruanos en las Bibliotecas Extrangeras (Lima, Peru, 193 5) Rubén Vargas Ugarte takes the following sonnet from MS 373 (Fonds espagnol) of the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale:

Pensando que ocupava fuerça y arte
Amor, o hermosíssima señora,
en no sufrir desorden como agora
que sufre a mi vajeza desearte;
desarmado de aviso osé mirarte,
mas el cruel que nunca se está un ora
luego desde tus ojos donde él mora me
passó el coraçón de parte a parte.
No sé qué premio espera ni qué gloria
por haberme vencido en tal estado,
no sé qué palma sigue tal victoria.
Suene el gran caso digno de memoria,
hecho fuerte de su reyno a un desarmado;
vencio el Amor, vien sonora es su victoria.

The Vita S. Potiti presents us with a rather strange situation. We have one of the greatest humanists writing a life of a saint, in which he narrates events which he obviously disbelieves. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) had been asked to write a series of lives of the saints, and the one we are discussing was the first. It was also the last, for Alberti abandoned the project. He never gave a reason. It seems that he must have found this type of work too foreign to his way of thought and humanistic ideals. There is an indication of this in his letter to Leonardo Dati, in which he expressed the fear that learned men would find his work not to their taste since it could not be documented and was too much like a fable.

The Palais de Justice, on the He de la Cité in Paris, was the hub of the universe for the officers of the crown, the upper segment of the French bourgeoisie, which really formed a separate class, the noblesse de la robe. They ranked well above the rest of the middle class in dignity and influence, yet clearly below the ancient noblesse de l'épée, whose position rested on their ancient titles and lands. The hierarchy of the royal courts was crowned by the Parlement de Paris itself, whose présidents often held important executive offices from the king as well. Parlement's traditional right to protest before the registration of royal edicts gave it frequent opportunities to modify national policy, a privilege which it sometimes carried to the point of outright refusal to register.

Bearing in mind that science is a product of its environment and at the same time an important modifier of that environment, I shall try to draw an over-all picture of science in the Renaissance. This summary barely scratches the surface of the wealth of material for this exuberant era. The mathematical and physical sciences are emphasized and a number of really important men are consciously omitted.

It would be foolish to plunge into our topic without defining, at least in broad outline, what is meant here by the term Renaissance. Certainly, there is a difference between ancient and modern science.

The moral character of Lady Macbeth has been thoroughly castigated and there is no need to restate an established case. In regard to her ethical and spiritual situation, no one can question the cardinal importance of the inhumanity of the ‘fiend-like queen', and of the crimes plotted and committed after her great soliloquy-prayer 'invoking the Powers of Hell to take possession of her'. Granting the pre-eminence of these sins in Lady Macbeth, I should like to develop here a lesser theme of a lesser evil which Shakespeare has carefully incorporated into her character. This evil consists in Lady Macbeth's usurping, as a wife, that conjugal authority which Shakespeare's age regarded as naturally and irrevocably assigned to the husband.