There are many well-established cases of the influence of an earlier on a later poet—of Marlowe on Shakspere, of Spenser on Keats, of Keats on Tennyson, for instance; but it is not often that we have so clear an example of interaction between contemporaries as that of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. In these days of minute scholarship, it seems strange that so remarkable an instance should (so far as I am aware) have escaped detailed examination, in spite of the unwearying activity of graduate schools and Browning Societies. Both for its human and for its literary interest, the case seems worth presenting, at any rate in broad outline.

The list of doublets in the appendix of Skeat's Etymological Dictionary is the most complete collection so far published, the list in Maetzner's Englische Grammatik being hardly worthy of mention. Professor Skeat's definition of doublets, however, is so broad as to include cognates from the Aryan mother tongue—pairs referable to the same Aryan base, such as beef and cow. brother and friar, cell and hall, chief and head, cool and gelid, cone and hone, core and heart, corn (1) and grain, corn (2) and horn, fell and pell, foremost and prime, genus and kin, guest and host (2), name and noun, two and deuce, verb and word, the list of which might be extended. Professor Skeat would probably now exclude chief and head, for it is doubtful (see Brugmann), tho the consonants agree, whether Lat. caput and A.-S. hëafod are cognates. His definition of doublets is as follows: “Doublets are words which, tho apparently differing in form, are nevertheless, from an etymological point of view, one and the same, or only differ in some unimportant suffix.”

Spanish poets of the seventeenth century were very fond of the contrast between the physical limitations of men, especially when prisoners,—“ ces eternels envieux des mouches et des oiseaux” (Victor Hugo)—and the freedom of birds that fly at will, or of “ fishes that tipple in the deep.” But nowhere has the comparison been given such artistic form and signal appropriateness as in the mouth of Calderon's hero, Segismundo. This young Titan felt himself fettered by stone walls. They were a real prison to him and he rebelled against his lot. He was not in a mood to admit, had it even occurred to him to do so, the superior advantage of man's mental freedom over the physical freedom of fishes and birds and brutes, or running brooks. But the thought was not original with Calderon, nor, according to Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo, was it original with any of Calderon's immediate predecessors, but went back to the Greek philosopher, Philo. Lope de Vega was probably the first to transplant the conceit to Spanish soil,—and it bore abundant fruit. In one of his early plays, El Remedio en la desdicha, written before the close of the sixteenth century, occur the following verses:

Rendido estoy á tu nobleza, y veo
Que mi ignorancia fué mi propio engaño;
Aunque si amor á todos da disculpa,
¿ Porqué no la tendrán mi amor y celos ?
Si tú, si tus soldados, si los hombres
Si las aves, los peces, si las fieras,
Si todo sabe amor, si todo teme
Perder su bien, y con sus celos propios
Defiende casa, nido, mar y cueva,
Llora, lamenta, gime, y brama; advierte
Que celos y sospechas me obligaron
Al desatino que á tus pies me rinde.

To propose to consider the construction of an ideal or standard undergraduate curriculum, even to the extent only of tentative approach, must seem, at first thought, rather rash and even a bit foolish; the attainment of any satisfactory result seems extremely difficult, and the result promises to be useless when attained. Yet when we consider in connection with the undergraduate years the vast number of the works of English literature and the great body of knowledge concerning them, the question must inevitably arise, What out of all this great mass of material should be presented to the undergraduate? in what order, and by what methods should it be presented? Again, when we consider that the undergraduate years are but a single stage in the educational life, with distinct limitations, with other stages before and after, and that the curricula of these other stages, especially the secondary school period, have recently been the subject of much discussion having for its aim the construction of a standard or ideal curriculum, it does not seem impossible that some profit may come from such a discussion as that proposed. If it be true that that which has not been treated ought to be treated, then there is ample justification for the choice of this subject. If one may trust the evidence of pedagogical literature this particular subject has not been treated to any great extent. A somewhat careful examination of pedagogical bibliography has failed to disclose a single title bearing directly upon it, and my pedagogical colleagues are unable to refer me to any. To rush in where even pedagogic angels fear to tread surely gives promise of folly; the rashness of the attempt may pardon the folly. With a full appreciation, then, of the difficulties in the way, but with confidence that there are among us idealists to maintain that what is theoretically true must be practicable, provided the means can be found, I venture upon some consideration of the question, What material out of the great field of English literature, including works of literature, history of literature, and criticism, can best be given to the college student in the several years of his undergraduate life?

Our positive knowledge concerning the date and authorship of the first part of the Roman de la Rose is wholly derived from the lines in which Jean de Meun refers to his predecessor, Guillaume de Lorris:

Vés-ci Guillaume de Lorris,
Cui Jalousie, sa contraire,
Fait tant d'angoisse et de mal traire,
Qu'il est en péril de morir. Michel's Edition, 11291-94.
Ci se reposera Guillaume,
Le cui tombel soit plains de baume. 11326, 11327.
Car quant Guillaumes cessera
Jehans le continuera
Apres sa mort, que ge ne mente,
Ans trespassés plus de quarante. 11352-55.

In the twenty-fifth stanza of the first book of the Troilus occurs a passage which is puzzling in more respects than one. The stanza is as follows:

Among thise othere folk was Criseyda,
In widewes habite blak; but nathelees,
Right as our firste lettre is now an A,
In beautee first so stood she, malcelees;
Hir godly looking gladede al the prees.
Nas never seyn thing to ben preysed derre,
Nor under cloude blak so bright a sterre.

The need for critical research in at least one field of modern literature is exemplified by the lack of exact information regarding the establishment on the French stage of the three dramatic unities that characterized so markedly many pieces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although our knowledge of the history of these unities has been increased by several works that have recently appeared, a number of facts concerning them remain to be determined, as Dannheisser, the chief authority on the subject, has clearly shown. Thus, while demonstrating that these unities of action, time, and place were not imposed at one time, but, developing separately, came only after a half century into general acceptance and a rigorously narrow form, he has left unfixed the date at which they were first singled out in seventeenth century France as the distinguishing marks of the classic drama.

Those who consider punctuation ‘largely a matter of taste’ and look upon the so-called ‘sentence-sense’ as a kind of sixth sense that comes only from generations of gentle breeding, will regard with small favor the attempt to formulate any very definite principles governing the structure of the sentence; but those who have little faith in the subjective conclusions of capricious taste will welcome any systematic presentation of facts that may enable them to settle points of disputed usage for themselves. It is with this conviction that I offer the following contribution to the study of the sentence, not without hope that it may incite others to a more thoro investigation of related problems of English usage.