L'étymologie de la particule anc. française mon, qui se trouve encore dans des passages fameux du théâtre classique (“Ça mon vraiment! il y a fort à gagner à fréquenter vos nobles!”, Molière, Bourg. gent.iii, 3; “Ardez, vraiment, c'est mon, on vous l'endurera,” Corneille, Galerie du Palais, v. 1392), est loin d'être sûrement établie. “Ce petit mot a fait verser des flots d'encre,” nous dit Livet, Lex. de Mol., s.v., ça mon: il a inspiré aux philologues depuis Silvius (1531), R. Estienne et J. Thierry, jusqu'à Ebeling (1900) les explications les plus fantaisistes (v. pour la bibliographie, en outre de Livet, Behrens, Beitr. z. frz. Wortgeschichte, p. 305): multum, meum, munde, minus, germ, mund, suédois monne, grec. et (c'est la dernière, la plus phantastique, qui avait séduit l'esprit bizarre d'un Furetière et qu'un Ebeling, grave et vétilleux élève de Tobler, devait rééditer). On s'arrête généralement aujourd'hui à l'explication de Diez: munde (l'adverbe de mundus ‘pur,’ donc littéralement = ‘proprement, nettement’), que répètent Littré, Meyer-Lübke, Gamillscheg, Dauzat. Cette étymologie, certainement acceptable au point de vue sémantique (cf. l'ital. pure), se heurte pourtant à un fait phonétique: jamais nous ne trouvons en anc. français de -t final, qui pourtant devrait se présenter au moins d'une façon sporadique (cf. mundus ‘monde’ > a.fr. mont à côté du latinisme monde; Meyer-Lübke donne lui-même un a.fr. mont ‘pur’ sous mundus, que je n'ai pu, il est vrai, trouver dans les dictionnaires: il ne me semble exister que le latinisme monde et son opposé immonde). On comprendrait p. ex. qu'on trouve mon pour ∗mont dans des textes du Sud-Ouest ou anglo-normands où -t final disparaît d'assez bonne heure (cf. Pope, From Latin to Mod. French, p. 453: Gaimar rime sumun < submonet avec gerun, passiun)—mais nous ne trouvons pas de trace de mont dans le reste de la France, au moins au moyen âge. Un mont variante de la particule mon n'apparaît qu'assez tard en français, au moment où la spéculation étymologique se mêle à l'orthographe: chez Oresme, qui offre aussi la forme altérée moult (v. Godefroy), et chez des grammairiens du XVIe siècle, avides, comme on sait, d'étymologie. En face de la forme mon, seule usitée en anc. français, l'étymologie munde est intenable. Il y a encore un argument contre l'admission d'un adverbe: c'est le manque total de formes avec -s adverbial, si fréquent dans l'adverbe voir(s) ‘vraiment’: on ne trouve pas de forme ∗mons. Si nous comparons l'adverbe anc. français espoir ‘peut-être,’ qui est la forme pétrifiée de la le pers. du présent de esperer, nous remarquerons là aussi le manque de l’ -s adverbial.

Ever since 1859, when Dietrich suggested hand-mill among the possible solutions for the present riddle, this answer has been advocated time and again without, however, finding general acceptance. Finally, the latest commentators of the Old English Riddles, while hesitatingly offering handbell or flail as possible solutions, label the riddle “unsolved.” In my opinion hand-mill is the subject of the riddle. The reason that this solution has not appealed to readers seems to lie in the fact that so far the repeated references to a ring or a plurality of rings in the riddle have defied interpretation. I offer the following translation which varies from the accepted one only in a few details, and shall then discuss the famoux crux of the riddle.

Remy Belleau, whom Ronsard himself once characterized as the seventh poet of the Pléiade, is a very familiar name to us, and indeed we continue to read certain of his poems with pleasure year after year. Yet, as Chamard has recently remarked in his Histoire de la Pléiade, “l'éclat radieux dont brille le chef de la Pléiade [Ronsard] a fait un peu perdre de vue ses compagnons: depuis quelques dix ou douze ans il semble qu'ils soient éclipsés.” Certainly little has been written on Belleau since the book by Alexandre Eckhardt and an article by Georges Prévot. These studies date from the time of the last war. In the pages which follow I shall try to reexamine some of the influences which could have affected Belleau's composition of his Amours et Nouveaux eschanges des Pierres Précieuses. From this we will turn to a brief survey of the sources of his lapidary material. This last was discussed in 1886 by R. Besser, but I feel that Besser did not always conduct his study systematically without parti pris. My own investigation of sources was made entirely independent of that of Besser, at the outset.

Pattern poetry is verse which by the varying length of its lines forms a picture or design. Although most readers have noticed Herbert's “Easter Wings” or some of the fanciful shapes in Carolyn Wells' Whimsey Anthology, few have realized that these verses are forms which have come down to the modern era from Greek literature and possibly from even earlier oriental writings. My purpose in this article is to bring to light still one more influence which the Greek Anthology exerted on English literature in the sixteenth century and to discuss the first English poets who began to write shaped verses, forerunners of hundreds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century patterns in poetry.

A few years ago one bold critic rose in defense of Jaques and protested against “the disturbing intrusion of antiquarian learning” in the interpretation of Shakespeare. Apparently, however, this troublesome academic ghost is still unlaid. Indeed, so much erudite nonsense has been talked about “Elizabethan psychology” in the last quarter of a century that it has come to seem either mortal ignorance or scholarly apostasy to challenge it. We may no longer read the Elizabethans and Jacobeans for their plain poetical meanings: any phrase that speaks however faintly of souls and deeds, or of thoughts and feelings, we must interpret literally in terms of a dutifully mastered sixteenth century jargon. If a plotting villain who sees his intended victim approaching so much as cries “Dive, thoughts, down to my soul!” his words are found heavy with psychological import he little dreamed of: he is using “words which represent the final perversion of the will. In the light of Elizabethan thinking, they probably mean the wilful subjection of intellect to a mode of thought and action guided by the desires of the heart.”

The tragic history of the royal house of Denmark opens with an episode which seems today, on any rational basis, absurd. Horatio tells Marcellus and Bernardo on the castle terrace at midnight that the elder Fortinbras, King of Norway, challenged Hamlet's father to single combat, agreeing to forfeit all his lands if vanquished, and that the Danish king put up an equal stake. In the ensuing encounter Fortinbras was slain. The elder Hamlet thus appears as a reckless champion, risking life and lands on personal valor, rather than as a careful guardian of his domain. Nowadays, if we give this a thought, we are likely to dismiss it as an odd custom, familiar from Viking days and the time when knighthood was in flower. It is indeed one of the archaic features of the old tale of Amleth which survived into Shakespeare's pages, but it still had, in the Elizabethan age, a validity which is not always realized. Although it is only a small piece in the great tapestry of Hamlet, it will repay, I think, some special examination.

No annotator of Jonson's play The Alchemist has looked very deeply into the mediæval and Renaissance alchemical treatises current in Jonson's day for material in illustration and explanation of the speeches in the alchemical episodes of the play. For the most part, it is true, alchemical lexicons are all that is needed to define specific terms and to indicate their relationship to the theories and practices of the alchemists. But certain of the speeches of the play take on a new and fuller meaning when read against a background of some knowledge of this body of alchemical literature.

If one studies rather attentively either the religious trends or the minor literary movements of seventeenth-century France, one constantly runs across the name of Jean-Pierre Camus, bishop of Belley, and yet one finds that adequate investigation of his work has not yet been undertaken. He does have, however, several claims to our attention. More exactly than any of his contemporaries, he interpreted the spirit of saint François de Sales. Fifty years before Quietism was introduced into France, he wrote at length and with discernment about pure love. He was famous in his day for his fearless attacks on the monastic orders; at the same time, Richelieu considered him one of his most valuable allies in his efforts to reconcile the Protestants and the Catholics. For all intents and purposes, he invented the religious novel, a genre which in our century has again become important in France. Finally he has the rather doubtful honor of being one of the three or four most prolific writers of France.

Libertinism, independent in spirit, anarchistic in morals, hostile to tradition, and scornful of revealed religion, was a necessary prelude to reforms in seventeenth and eighteenth century France: it helped to break down the ideological sanctions of monarchy, feudalism, and Catholicism, and to clear the way for the philosophes and the Revolution. Although Gabriel de Foigny (1630-92) ranks primarily as such a libertine, he was more than a mere iconoclast. Lachévre sees only the destructive element in his life and writings: he regards him as a lover of license and scandal, “un vulgaire paillard, un deséquilibre complet”; but other writers acknowledge the presence of a more positive side to his work. Lichtenberger and Girsberger notice Foigny's utopia, La Terre Australe Connue (“Vannes,” i.e., Geneva, 1676) as a precursor of socialism and communism. Lanson sees in it an early evidence of the philosophic spirit and stresses Foigny's importance as a popularizer of rationalism. Atkinson shows the place of the utopia “between the exaggerated account of voyages actually made and the more perfect form of philosophical-social-exotic novel” which followed it. Wijngaarden relates it to the economic and social background in France, judges it as a reaction against the French governmental system, and finds its chief value in its criticism of institutions and mores. Hazard follows these critics in relating La Terre Australe Connue to the utopias of Veiras, Tyssot de Patot, and Cyrano de Bergerac. He goes on to show the place of such fanciful novels of adventure, social satire, and reform in the whole critical era which undermined the French seventeenth century and brought the Age of Enlightenment. The purpose of the present article is to supplement and develop some of the ideas of these scholars by showing more particularly how Foigny's utopia was conditioned by its author's personality and experience, by throwing new light on the symbolism which he employs, and by interpreting the adventures of the hero, Sadeur, in terms of these symbols.

It is generally conceded that the varied personages of the eighteenth-century conte philosophique are not sufficiently developed to merit the label of characters. Whether in satiric or in pleasant guise, they but project ideas. However, as the conte itself covered a multiplicity of fields and lent itself to a variety of interpretations, so do these personages, the various divisions of ‘philosophes,’ possess numerous phases or nuances. Even a casual reader of the philosophic tale will have met, in the array of types on parade—an oft-repeated “naïf” (who was anything but naïve), at least one famed “candide,” and several “ingénus.” Another of these types engaged in his journey, and one whom a reader can scarcely fail to encounter, is “le solitaire.” He too is evolved by formula, and for his special century. Representing a nuance of the ‘philosophe,’ he is fully as potent an individual as were ever his various brother “naïfs.” If one grants that certain familiar and well-tempered themes have traversed the Encyclopedic and Revolutionary era,—one might say correlatively that this “solitaire” has contributed his very effective share to the creation of one great thematic personage. This philosophe’ could be a variety of entities, each one in turn representing and including a rather set formula of characteristics. Some aspects of the “solitaire” formula for this era alone, are to be considered in the present study.

Theodor Storm's last and longest “Novelle,” Der Schimmelreiter, may be regarded as his masterpiece. Under the stress of experience, especially private sorrow, Storm's art matured and deepened toward the end of his life. The writer of soft, sentimental idylls, perfumed with faded flowers and blurred by hopeless reminiscence, became a tragic poet, coping in strong, sharp-lined, cogent “Novellen” with the bitter realities of life. Among these later works, again, there is observable both a deepening and a simplification. From the historical remoteness of the “Chroniknovellen,” the. stylized “Minnewelt” of Ein Fest auf Haderslevhuus or the artificial archaism of Aquis Submersus, the Schimmelreiter at length comes home to treat, unsentimentally and in timeless terms, the tragedy of a modern man.

Robert Browning's life falls into three sections. Thirty-three years form the first chapter: his birth in Camberwell on May 7, 1812; six years of schooling in Peckham; two years of study under a French tutor; a brief term at London University; two months in Russia in 1834, when he was twenty-two; three months in Italy in 1838; a second trip to Italy in 1844; a considerable quantity of poetic production that brought recognition from a few friends.

Although almost everyone is aware that Bernard Shaw is the chief disciple of Samuel Butler, the fact that Butler's work had an influence on several other English writers of the first part of this century is not generally recognized. Ernest A. Baker, in his History of the English Novel, does list Somerset Maugham, H. G. Wells, Dorothy Richardson, and ten other novelists as members of what he is tempted to call a Butler school. But the least obviously yet most profoundly Butlerian of all contemporary English storytellers is not included in Baker's list. E. M. Forster should assuredly be placed second only to Shaw in any such hypothetical group of disciples.

As his contribution to the Pascal tercentenary number of the Revue Hebdomadaire, dated July 14, 1923, Paul Valéry chose to make public an attack on Pascal that was impious in its brevity. He entitled it “Variation sur une ‘Pensée’,” and took for his theme “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.” Valéry's own recent and perhaps fleeting fame as a lyric poet did not in everyone's eyes qualify him for the task. Some even among his admirers felt that so antithetical a spirit must inevitably fail to understand Pascal. For the skeptic confronts the believer, the idolator of the intellect its depreciator.

The fact that Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf were friends and colleagues in the realm of art needs no demonstration. Not only were they closely associated for many years as members of “the Bloomsbury Group,” but the Hogarth Press, established by the Woolfs in Tavistock Square, published some of Fry's essays. After Fry's death in 1934, it was Virginia Woolf who, at the request of Fry's sister, became his biographer. This portrait of the critic was undertaken, says Margery Fry in the “Foreword” addressed to Mrs. Woolf, as a result of “one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you.”

Late in 1945 appeared a book entitled The Shelley Legend. It was published by Charles Scribner's Sons, and was written by Professor Robert M. Smith of Lehigh University in collaboration with Mr. Theodore G. Ehrsam, Miss Martha M. Schlegel, and Mr. Louis A. Waters. These authors began their labors in 1943 with apparently no previous experience in Shelley research and in less than two years claim to have discovered not only the real Shelley but also the fact that the patient biographical and critical labors of a long line of predecessors are in the main wrong. They even “venture the opinion that at least fifty per cent of the present attitude toward Shelley still stems from this cult [Lady Shelley's] of worshippers.” (p. 305) Their predecessors include Leigh Hunt, Mary Shelley, Thomas Medwin, T. J. Hogg, T. L. Peacock, E. J. Trelawny, Lady Jane Shelley, Richard Garnett, D. F. MacCarthy, W. M Rossetti, H. Buxton Forman, J. Cordy Jeaffreson, Edward Dowden, Mrs. Julian Marshall, J. A. Symonds, William Sharpe, A. J. Koszul, Mrs. Helen Rossetti Angeli, Walter Peck, André Maurois, Newman I. White, and a host of lesser contributors, many of whom are of the highest intellectual and scholarly attainments. It is claimed that these intelligent people, who have accumulated, tested, and published the greatest quantity of materials on any modern writer, have lacked discernment sufficient to free themselves from a false interpretation of Shelley presented to the world by Mary Shelley and Lady Jane Shelley and have been unable to base their conclusions on the facts in hand. This claim is made in spite of the fact, evident from the book itself, that no authors in question except Richard Garnett, Dowden, and Mrs. Marshall can in any way be shown as coming within the sphere of Lady Shelley's influence, and in spite of the fact that some were positive rebels against any possible influence of Lady Shelley; namely, Peacock, Trelawny, W. M. Rossetti, and J. Cordy Jeaffreson.