In any examination of Titus Andronicus the student is immediately confronted with the questions: “Are we really to regard Shakspere as the author ?” “How did he happen to choose such repulsive material ?” Or, again, if we assume that he but touched up an old play, there is still the question: “Just how great was this revision ?” In other words, Titus Andronicus interests most readers not for its real worth as a drama, but only for what it may or may not represent in the history of Shakspere's dramatic career. For this reason it seems essential to give, first of all, a brief account of previous opinions as to the authorship of this tragedy, so that we may better understand the importance of determining its sources.

The twofold nature of the participle is sufficiently attested by the fact that it is universally defined as a verbal adjective. The genesis of this twofold nature has been interestingly discussed by Brugmann (I. F., v 88 ff.; Gr. Gr. §§ 479 f.) and by Delbrück (II, p. 477). Mine is the humbler task of pointing out the various manifestations of this dual nature as exemplified in the appositive use of the participle in Anglo-Saxon; to which is appended a brief survey of the same phenomena in the other Germanic languages. This is by no means an easy task, since the same participle may be dominantly adjectival in one sentence, prevailingly verbal in another, and equally divided between the two in a third. Of course, too, a participle may be used as a noun; but in such case it ceases to be a participle; hence in this paper no account is taken of the substantivized participle. However, certain adverbial uses of the participle are treated.

Despite Mr. Ward's thoroughness in his discussion of Geoffrey's Historia, further consideration throws at least grave doubt on one of his fundamental theories, the theory, namely, that Geoffrey published more than one distinct edition of the Historia.

The existence of a primitive Prise d'Orange, now unhappily lost, is better attested than that of any lost poem of the Geste de Guillaume. Indeed, there are more references to this poem than to the majority of the poems still extant in the Geste.

“The best book that ever was written upon good breeding, Il Cortegiano, by Castiglione, grew up at the little Court of Urbino, and you should read it,” says Dr. Johnson to Boswell, of all places in the world, in the Isle of Skye, “roving among the Hebrides at sixty.” But when, in the Life of Addison, we find the Courtyer classed with Galateo, and compared with the social essays of the Spectator and the Tatler, it becomes clear that the Great Cham was so ignorant of the law he was laying down in this instance, that he took Il Cortegiano for a courtesy-book, a book of etiquette:—

To teach the minuter decencies and inferior duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, to remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress hourly vexation, was first attempted by Casa in his book of manners, and Castiglione in the Courtier.” (Works, VII, 428, Addison.

The entries in Henslowe's Diary as to “tittus and Vespacia” and “titus and Ondronicus” seem to me, if they be carefully considered, to support Mr. Fuller's conclusions in regard to the origin of Shakspere's Titus Andronicus. I believe, with him, that we have in the entries which he has quoted in his article the two plays he names as the sources for Shakspere's play—the original of G in “tittus and Vespacia”; the original of D in the “titus and Ondronicus” entered as “ne” Jan. 23, 1593–4, when the Sussex men were playing at the Rose./Note that the title-page of the first extant quarto (1600) says that the play was given by Pembroke's, Derby's, Sussex' and the Chamberlain's companies, and that—this is important—the order of the last two companies on this title-page is the order of their control of the play as shown in Henslowe's Diary. May it not be, then, that the assignment is correct and that the Pembroke and the Derby company, in the order named, used the play before the Sussex and the Chamberlain men ? I think if we assume, for the moment, that whoever put the statement on the title-page was thinking simply of a Titus Andronicus play and not of the special play before him, it may be shown that the statement was entirely correct, and that a Titus Andronicus play passed successively from Pembroke's company to Derby's, Sussex', and the Chamberlain's men. The fact that on this first quarto no author was named for the play may have helped in 'the treatment of two successive Andronicus plays as one.

The French poems Troie, Thèbes, and Énéas, contemporaneous with one another in the sixth and seventh decades of the twelfth century, have many characteristics in common. They each repeat in a modernized form, and with incidents and details suited to their own age, the story of one of the great epics of classical antiquity, the Iliad, the Thebaid, and the Aeneid. They also combine with this traditional outline of adventure and conquest the narrative of romantic love and courtship, as conceived by Western Europe in the Middle Ages. And finally they each and all show an effort to attain some degree of excellence in style and composition. Thus they form a class by themselves, animated, as they are, by the same spirit and having the same purpose in view, and are the first exponents in the modern tongues of the ideals of chivalry. The sources of these poems, therefore, are an object of unusual interest to the student of mediaeval literature.

As teachers of the modern languages, in our survey of our own Association and of the American university system, we must all feel a certain warmth of exhilaration. The progress that our favorite studies have been making is so splendid. Within that period of forty years which the memory of older men among us can now cover, and, for the younger men, in each of the periods into which those forty years could be divided, there has been, in a steady current of progress, so vast an improvement in our methods of instruction, so vast an increase in the magnitude of our work, in the number of our pupils, in the size and qualification of our professorial force. In the national movement of thought and theory in education, we have shared, indeed, with the physical sciences in popular favour; and even as compared with the physical sciences themselves, the growth of instruction in the modern languages has been, I think, the more rapid and the more impressive. Excluded at first, or hardly recognized, as a factor in liberal education, they have now made good their position, in all grades of instruction, in school and college and university. In generous proportion with the financial means of each academic body, the work has from year to year been more highly specialised. Almost everywhere, we have witnessed the establishment of the natural division between Romance and Teutonic philology, and between linguistics and literature; and almost everywhere we have witnessed, in logical connexion with the same movement, the study of English placed in its worthy position, as connecting link between those great forces of literary culture that have formed our speech and our literature. There is not, I think, in the world a country where the boy or the girl, born into the use of one of the great modern languages, can move onward more easily and more surely into the knowledge and enjoyment of two or three others.

Chaucer's prologues and connecting links in the Canterbury Tales deserve special study, for they are by far the most characteristic and original part of his writings. When telling his tales he seems to feel himself in a measure bound to reproduce the stories as he finds them. In the general Prologue, ll. 731–736, he says:

“Who-so shal telle a tale after a man,
He moot reherce, as nv as ever he can,
Everich a word, if it be in his charge,
Al speke he never so rudeliche and large;
Or elles he moot telle his tale untrewe,
Or feyne thing, or finde wordes newe.”

“The fictitious quarrel,” to borrow the thought of Heine, “which Christianity has cooked up between the body and the soul” formed in mediæval times a literary motif which attained to considerable popularity among both authors and readers. The single Latin poem, for example, with which we are here alone concerned, and the authorship of which has long been one of the debatable questions of literary history, has come down to us in at least fifteen manuscripts, and doubtless others will come to light. Of these mss. Wright, in The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes, London, 1841, p. 95, mentions ten, as follows: 1) Harl. 978 fol. 88 v°; 2) Harl. 2851 [fol. omitted]; 3) Cott. Titus A xx. fol. 163 r°; 4) Cott. Calig. A xi. fol. 164 v°; 5) Roy. 8 B vi. fol. 18 v°; 6) Camb. Ee vi. 29 art. 1; 7) Corp. Chr. Coll. 481; 8) Bodl. 110 (Bern. 1963); 9) Douce 54 fol. 36 v°; 10) Univ. Coll. B 14. Wright also refers to the edition of Th. von Karajan (Frühlingsgabe für Freunde älterer Literatur, Wien, 1839, pp. 85–98) from ms. 3121 (formerly Historia Profana 279) in the Wiener Hofbibliothek. Three mss. are mentioned by Du Méril in his Poésies populaires latines antérieures au douzième sièele, p. 217: 1) Bibl. roy., fonds du Saint-Victor 472 fol. 289 r°; 2) Bibl. de Bruxelles 4363, unpaged; 3) Bibl. Mazarine 438, unpaged. Lastly, the fifteenth ms., containing the fragment which is printed below, is now in the President White Library of Cornell University, and may conveniently be called the White ms.

Among Goethe's Sprüche in Prosa we find the following maxim: “Es giebt Problematische Naturen, die keiner Lage gewachsen sind, in der sie sich befinden, und denen keine genug thut. Darum entsteht der ungeheure Widerstreit, der das Leben ohne Genuss verzehrt.”

The Canterbury pilgrims, more fortunate than we, had heard to the end the Squire's Tale, and were busy exchanging with one another looks of approval and satisfaction. Now was the Franklin's opportunity. He determined to be the one to break the significant silence and become the spokesman of the praise of his companions, not only by reason of his very genuine enjoyment of the narrative just concluded, but also because of the chance he thus secured to bring himself into honorable association with the gentles on the pilgrimage.

In Westermann's Monatshefte for January, 1891, and later in his ‘Life of Lessing,‘ Professor Erich Schmidt has outlined the chief features of the history and transformations of the story of the three rings in Europe. On examination it will be found that all the versions of the story belong to one or the other of two types, which are represented by the two earliest forms of the story preserved to us. The oldest version, that of the Spanish Jew Salomo ben Verga, tells of two rings or jewels only, which were in outward appearance exactly alike, and there is no question of one being genuine and the other false, but only of the relative value of the two. In the absence of the father it is found impossible to decide the question, and thus the decision between Christianity and Judaism is simply avoided. In Li Dis dou vrai aniel, a French poem of the end of the twelfth century, three rings appear, and to the original or genuine ring is attributed a marvelous healing power by which it may be recognized, and following which a decision is arrived at among the three religions, in this case in favor of Christianity, although ther were not wanting later narrators so bold as to hint that the true ring was possessed by Judaism. The version of Etienne de Bourbon, the versions of the Cento Novelle, the three versions of the Gesta Romanorum, all belong to one or the other of two types. We may refer to these two types as the Spanish type and the French type. Those of the first type, to which belongs also the version of Boccaccio, the one from which Lessing took his point of departure, avoid a decision, implying that all religions are equally authoritative, but without inherent or inner evidence of their quality. Those of the second type, to which in many of its features Lessing's final version of the story is allied, lead to a decision, making religion of divine origin indeed, but supplying a test, that of good works, whereby the true religion may be recognized.

In the Hous of Fame, Chaucer mentions amongst harpers “the Bret Glascurion” (v. 1208). This personage was long ago identified with Glasgerion, the hero of a famous ballad; and a further identification of Glascurion with the Welsh bard Geraint (Y Bardd Glas Keraint) was made in 1845 by the Rev. Thomas Price. Professor Child was inclined to accept these identifications, though he expressed himself cautiously.