To our ideas of classicism we have, as a rule, given point and definiteness by contrasting it with its opposite, romanticism; and to make the contrast stronger we usually take extreme cases. This is a perfectly proper, perhaps necessary, proceeding. It is also proper and convenient to speak of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a classical age. The difficulty comes with the next step which our minds and those of our hearers unconsciously, but almost inevitably take, that of assuming that this abstract and extreme classicism was generally held in this classical age. We forget that classicism is one thing and the classicism of the eighteenth century quite a different thing.

The first collective edition of Poe's works was that of Rufus W. Griswold, published in four volumes, the first three volumes in 1850 and the fourth in 1856. The latest collective edition is that of Professor James A. Harrison, comprising sixteen volumes and published in 1902. The Griswold edition contains 42 poems, 68 tales, and 74 essays and miscellaneous prose articles. The Harrison edition—otherwise known as the “Virginia Poe”—contains 55 poems, 70 tales, and no less than 285 essays and miscellaneous articles. There are listed, also, in the same edition, in an appendix to the sixteenth volume (pp. 355-379), some forty other items, which for various reasons are not reprinted in this edition. And there have been pointed out since the Harrison edition appeared a number of additional items, including eleven poems, two tales, and about fifty brief essays; making in all a total of 66 poems, 72 tales, and nearly four hundred essays of one sort or another that are now attributed to Poe.

Those who have doubts as to how far Mr. James has travelled from his earlier style will find interesting testimony in a bit of early criticism. Writing of The Passionate Pilgrim and Transatlantic Sketches J. C. Heywood says, “Ambiguities and obscurities', as well as inadequacies of expression, are so uncommon in these books that those which appear are all the more displeasing and inexcusable, since the writer has plainly shown that they might have been avoided.”

Le 21 juillet, 1672, Mme. de Sévigné écrivit de Lyon à Mme. de Grignan pour lui annoncer son arrivée et le bon accueil qu'elle avait reçu chez la famille de Coulange. Puis elle dit: “J'étais à Pierre-Encise, voir F * *, prisonnier.”

In an essay on Sophocles and Shakespeare, the late Professor John Churton Collins makes, about the latter's use of the motive of suicide, some striking remarks which have hitherto, I believe, been allowed to pass unchallenged. The attitude of the two dramatists toward the crime is, he says, exactly similar:

The liberal use that historians of the French language have made in recent years of the Académie de l'Art poëtique of Pierre de Deimier, arouses interest in the work itself. M. Brunot, in his admirable Histoire de la Langue française, resumes his criticism of the Académie with the words: “Bref, ce livre fait un contraste complet avec ceux qui l'ont précédé.” A study of the sources of Deimier shows, however, that the contrast is far from complete. Whatever contrast exists, lies largely, not in the principles of the doctrine, but in the interpretation and application of these principles.

In my former paper, I have shown that the languages of our family commonly studied in our schools and colleges possess a mood that has the power of expressing volition on the one hand, and mere anticipation on the other; and that, in Latin, Romance, and Germanic, this double power was inherited from the distinct mood, called subjunctive, of the parent speech. In the course of the demonstration, I gave illustrations of some of the volitive and anticipatory uses which may clearly be recognized.