In the course of his insistence upon the necessity of a continued recognition of the popular ballad as a distinct literary type, Professor Gummere points out the value of a collection of Professor Child's critical remarks on the ballad and an attempt to determine their general drift. Such is the purpose of the present paper. Aside from the article in the Universal Cyclopædia, Professor Child's comments are mere obiter dicta, based upon no underlying principle and forming no part of a set purpose. They are, therefore, not easy to classify; the attempt to reduce them to order can be only partially successful, and any arrangement must appear more or less arbitrary. Yet some arrangement has seemed advisable and they have been roughly grouped under the following headings: (1) Authorship and Transmission; (2) Subject-Matter; (3) Technique; (4) A Comparison of the Ballads of 1857–1859 and The English and Scottish Popular Ballads of 1882–1898; (5) A Collection of General Comments upon Specific Ballads; (6) Summary.

Witchcraft in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a subject upon which the dramatists from Marlowe to Shadwell seized with the greatest avidity. There was material of the most pliable sort; it could be moulded into a magnificent tragedy or distorted into the wildest buffoonery. In the sixteenth century it was the darker side of magic which we find in the drama, and though we note as early as 1604 the effort to brighten up Marlowe's tragedy of Doctor Faustus by the introduction of broadly comic scenes taken from the prose tale, yet one can well believe that the theatre audiences from 1590 to 1610 remembered too vividly the cruelties of the witch trials in 1590 to appreciate the buffoonery of Ralph in the comic scenes as deeply as they felt the dark despair of the protagonist Faustus.

An examination, some time since, of scattered notes on allusions to Cain in our literature showed that there was still room for a somewhat more thorough investigation of the subject. The results of such leisure as could be given from time to time are here presented. They cover, it is hoped, the main features of the Cain story, though not unlikely some allusions have been missed. Many more references might also be given to notes on various phases of the subject, but I have preferred not to overload the footnotes with comparatively unimportant ones. In general I have intended to give the more important, preferring earlier to later, and original to derived sources when possible. Lack of time to pursue the matter further at present is the excuse for publishing the paper in this form.

During the year 1906 the four hundredth anniversary of the finding of the marble group of Laocoön and his sons in Rome—“opus omnibus et picturae et statuariae artis praeferendum”—has been duly celebrated. The most conspicuous act in this celebration was undoubtedly Dr. Ludwig Pollak's announcement at a meeting of the German Archeological Institute that he had discovered an ancient copy of the missing right arm of Laocoön, bent backward so that the hand must have been near the head, as has long been supposed. Hardly less noteworthy, however, was the effect of recent additional discoveries of inscriptions in Rhodes that seem to fix the date of the sculptors in the middle of the first century b. c., and Richard Foerster's comprehensive article in the Jahrbuch des archäologischen Instituts—the latest and most authoritative exposition of facts and expression of opinions about the statue.