The four-hundred-odd lines of Beowulf1 between the defeat of Grendel and the attack by Grendel's mother contain two brief digressive passages, set with some appearance of symmetry on either side of the longer Finn Episode (1071—1159): a lay by one of HroSgar's thanes, contrasting the glorious deeds of Sigemund with the downfall of Heremod (874-915); and a pair of allusions introduced by the poet through the device of the torque given to Beowulf, concerning a mysterious exploit of Hama and the fatal expedition of Hygelac (1197-1214). The four basic references which make up these two passages seem designed as piecemeal allusions to stories more or less lost to us—a fact that must necessarily deprive us of much that the lines were meant to convey. Yet even allusion, if it is developed at all, is normally developed in the direction of its intended meaning, so that its general drift can sometimes be understood without a full knowledge of its underlying story. In this paper I will try to show that the Sigemund-Heremod and Hama-Hygelac passages are each organized around a clear thematic contrast, closely related to its context in the narrative; that they are meaningfully related to one another, and together express a theme of importance in this part of the poem; and that their significance grows naturally out of the great heroic ideal of sapientia et fortitudo which I believe lies at the heart of Beowulf? Section I will analyze the two passages themselves and their immediate contexts; Section II will explore their relation to the poem and its governing ideal.

Ernst Robert Curtius has described the wonderful harmony of numbers in the Vila Nuova and the Divina Commedia as the end and acme of a long development, where number, from having first served to give form to the outer framework of poetic composition, became ultimately a symbol of the great cosmic ordo. But when Curtius examined the eleventh-century Old-French version of the life of Saint Alexis with the end in view of revealing the patterns of Latin rhetoric which it displays, he did not realize that Dante's great feat of numbers was anticipated there by some 275 years.

The Influence of Scandinavian on English vocabulary as a result of the settlement of the Northmen in England before the Norman Conquest was well established over fifty years ago by Bjôrkman. Claims have been made by some scholars about Scandinavian influence on English syntax, but these have been the subject of much controversy. As early as 1908 Logeman noted the tendency of both Danish and English to stress the preposition and usages such as “he has someone to work for,” which are not found in the other Germanic languages. Jespersen cited several correspondences between Modern English and Modern Danish, which he felt might possibly date back to the Viking settlements. Specifically he enumerated (1) relative clauses without pronouns, (2) the omission of the conjunction 'that,' (3) the use of 'shall' and ‘will’ in Middle English, (4) the genitive before nouns. Later students have followed Jespersen's lead; e.g. Marckwardt in his Introduction to English (Toronto & New York, 1942) and Pei in his Story of English (Philadelphia and New York, 1952).

Chaucer Writes about more varieties of amatory experience than any other English poet except Shakespeare. Whether in this abundance we have God's plenty or the devil's I will leave to Dryden and Father Denomy and try to comment only on this point of view as he relates the love visions and Troilus and Criseyde.

Though scholars have long recognized the influence of the antifeminist tradition on the Wife of Bath's Prologue, they have overlooked its possible impact on the fate of Jankyn's “book of wikked wyves.” Fansler noted “a rather curious literary precedent” in Marie de France's “Li Lais de Gugemar,” which described a painting of Venus committing Ovid's Remédia Amoris to the flames. A closer parallel to the scene in which Dame Alisoun “made him brenne his book anon right tho” exists, however, in several of the “Eastern” versions of the legend of the Seven Sages, or Books of Sindibad.

At the outset of his first pamphlet . Martin Marprelate announces his discovery of a novel use for the critical precept of decorum personae. The announcement deserves a place among the significant critical declarations of English literary history, for it contains the vital principle of a satirical method which was to develop profound and disturbing implications in Martin's own work, influence the evolution of the Elizabethan novel in an important way, and, in the hands of Andrew Marvell nearly a century later, be adapted surprisingly to what may be called the “pacification” of satire.

If, as Professor Adams complains, Milton's Comus has been “overread,” the chief reason is that we are still trying to find out what the masque means. In spite of the wide acceptance given to Professor Woodhouse's theological interpretation of the work, critics keep twisting the dials, trying to sharpen the focus. The difficulty is that none of the adjustments tried so far brings the whole narrative into focus at once.

Paradise lost, in spite of all the critical and scholarly acknowledgements that it is a “typical” seventeenth-century epic, has not often enough been seriously considered in the context of the Restoration, when, of course, it appeared. The audience that read it was also reading Dryden. And while it was obviously not a “party poem” in the way that Absalom and Achitophel was, it certainly was not detached from its age. In his own way, Milton was responding to contemporary events and issues with something of Dryden's hardness of mind and spirit. Indeed, certain aspects of Paradise Lost may appear in an altogether new perspective when we consider how closely Dryden used Milton's epical material in his own small epic. We may, to pursue one aspect in detail, even turn up a plausible model for Satan.

In his edition of the Vie de Rancé, M. Fernand Letessier traces the composition of the work but does not touch upon the pressures that were brought to bear upon Chateaubriand as he wrote it. However, several letters that passed between Chateaubriand and Abbé Joseph Hercelin in late summer, 1843, and which were published by M. Letessier in the Revue d'histoire littéraire in 1938 have led me to believe that pressure was exerted. Head of the entire network of Trappist monasteries, Abbé Hercelin presided over his order from the remote, wooded cloisters of the Trappists' mother house, Notre Dame de la Trappe, in the Perche country of northern France, where the Breton marshes become Normandy. Chateaubriand had been scheduled to visit the establishment in June, 1843, but had had to postpone doing so because of ill health. When the visit did take place two months later, he talked with Hercelin about a book on which he was then at work. It was to deal with the Trappist monasteries' patriarch, Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé. Little more than a week had elapsed since Chateaubriand's departure when Hercelin observed in a letter to his venerable guest that “Cette religion sainte, continuée dans les bois, n'est pas connue des hommes de l'époque, mais elle va leur apparaître belle et amie de l'humanité, quand votre plume, aussi éloquente que catholique, aura écrit l'histoire de l'illustre réformateur dont vous avez vu le tombeau.” He went on to predict that because of the persuasive “unction” of his words, Chateaubriand would realize with his book a marvelous alliance between “the children of the world” and the “peaceable inhabitants of the cloisters.”

The Goncourt Brothers tell of their visit, at two o'clock in the afternoon of 27 November 1862, to a sixth-floor apartment in the Rue Jacob where a voice rising as though from dream-like depths bade them enter a kind of “chambre de grisette, de couturière.” There, with an unlaced pair of men's boots on the floor and books heaped about everywhere, they were greeted from his bed by “un petit homme, maigre, maladif … un critique en mansarde, un homme d'un grand talent. C'est M. Montégut, l'écrivain de la REVUE DES DEUX MONDES.” He was thirty-seven then, having come from his native Limousin as a young man, already eccentric by virtue of his provincial education and Protestant background, to find his way into the Revue, where, except for brief service with other journals, he remained at his post of literary critic a long life, ending in December 1895.

Entre los numerosos escritos del siglo 18 que son dignos de ser mâs conocidos y estudiados estân los de la pluma del P. Antonio Eximeno. Dos obras suyas, la Apologia de Cervantes y el Don Lazarillo Vizcardi, tienen un in-terés especial porque representan dos modali-dades particulares que tomo el cervantismo en el pensamiento del P. Eximeno. Antes de la expulsion en 1767, era conocido Eximeno por sus brillantes investigaciones filosoficas y cientificas, por ejemplo, su Observatio transitus veneris per discum solarem (Viena, 1761). Como maestro de Retorica y Poesia, y profesor y director de la Real Academia de Artilleria de Segovia, adquirio también renombre. Fué estimado, asimismo, por sus poesias (en latin y en castellano) y sus ser-mones. En Italia logra dominar el toscano, lengua en la que escribe gran parte de sus obras después de 1761. Para Eximeno, como para otros tantos de sus distinguidos compatriotas, en el destierro se amplia no solo el horizonte geogrâfico y linguistico, sino también el cultural. En la basilica de San Pedro en Roma, escuchando una misa de Jomelli, tiene Eximeno una verdadera “revelacion” intelectual que le impulsa al gran matemâtico a rechazar las matemâticas como fundamento vâlido para la musica y a insistir en que solo los acentos de la voz, el habla, y la poesia pueden considerarse como la base de toda composicion musical. La musica y la poesia, regidas por el buen gusto del poeta y del compositor, han de pintar los afectos humanos, imitando constantemente la naturaleza. En Roma, uno de los grandes centros musicales de la época, se dedica Eximeno al estudio teorico de la historia, la estética y la prâctica de la musica y funda su sistema estético-musical sobre la lingüistica y la prosodia. Participa en las aca-demias italianas bajo el nombre arcadio de Aristoxeno Megareo, y entra con toda la fuerza de su vigorosa personalidad, en polémicas te-oricas con el idolo y maestro de los musicos italianos, el doctisimo P. Martini. La obra de Eximeno que levanto acerba oposicion entre los musicos de Italia fué su Del origen y reglas de la música

Commentators on Felix Holt, the Radical have generally assumed that George Eliot started with a political novel in mind. What has never been sufficiently considered is that the genesis of Felix Holt was rather in the adulterous intrigue of Mrs. Transome with Lawyer Jermyn and the bitter consequences of this transgression to herself and their son Harold. The politics, and even the role of Felix himself, were probably afterthoughts.

Let us first of all confess that it is not as if we were writing under the persuasion that we have a novel view to proclaim. It is true that the view which we believe to be correct is often under attack today and is sometimes supposed to be outmoded by recent refinements. Its proponents too are often not sure enough of its actual character to defend it with accuracy. At the same time, a look into some of the most recent handbooks and critical essays reveals that there are some teachers and writers on our subject today who expound this view in a perfectly clear and accurate way. We have in mind, for instance, A Glossary of Literary Terms revised by Meyer Abrams for Rinehart in 1957 from the earlier work by Norton and Rushton, or the handbook by Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, published in 1956 by Harcourt, Brace. In the lengthy Kenyon Review symposium on English verse, Summer 1956, we admire the niceties of Mr. Arnold Stein's traditionally oriented discussion of Donne and Milton. There is also Mr. Stein's earlier PMLA article (lix [1944], 393–397) on “Donne's Prosody.” In the Kenyon symposium there is, furthermore, Mr. Ransom. It would be difficult to frame a more politely telling, persuasive, accurate retort than his to the more extravagant claims of the linguists.

The search for some single myth or hypothesis to explain American character and history has informed much of our recent criticism. Within the last decade at least seven authors have devoted complete books to the subject. And from Emerson's “American Scholar” of a century ago, through Turner's “Significance of the Frontier,” to Matthiessen's American Renaissance, earlier critics had invoked the myth in passing. But now the old, vague “myth of the common man” has been imagined more concretely and in greater detail.

There are a number of passages in Hawthorne's “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent” which seem to allude to Edgar Allan Poe or his writings. The passages are, in fact, so numerous as to indicate that one of Hawthorne's principal reasons for writing the tale when he did was to criticize through personal satire Poe's outlook on literature and life. In this connection it may be rewarding to take another look at this most repulsive of Hawthorne's tales.

Apart from the fact that Henry James may not have wished to create such a black and white situation—the innocent American lamb thrown to the continental wolves of Paris—in his novel The American it is possible that the author himself may have expected a less simple interpretation of his novel than that which such scholars and critics as Joseph W. Beach, Constance Rourke, and even F. O. Mathiessen have afforded it. To accept the popular interpretation of the work as a rather transparent story of the victimization of a “good na-tured” American by a Borgia-like Parisian family seems to involve an oversight of much explicit and implicit information in the novel, which suggests that Mrs. Bread, the true mother of Claire de Cintre, was a blackmailer claiming both Newman and the Marquise de Bellegarde as victims; that Newman, by dint of his characteristic American naïveté and his opacity as a judge of character, was completely “taken in” by her ruse; and that Claire's refusal to accept Newman in marriage came as a direct result of her having been informed by the Bellegardes of her true parents—the old Marquis and his “meanest of mistresses,” Catherine Bread.

In the landscape of Edith Wharton's life the figure of Henry James is of almost too-distracting importance. He was the greatest man she knew. James himself had many friends and acquaintances such as Howells and Stevenson who stood equal beside him—he moved accustomedly among his peers from youth to old age—tout Edith Wharton had few intimates who were her creative equals, and none who towered into that eminence where James stood. Consequently, no discussion of her work can avoid contemplating the effect of his example and association; the danger, really, is that we will assume more effect than is there.