Several of the critics of Fielding have felt strongly in Jonathan Wild an under-significance, chiefly political. None of them, however, has uttered more than a few lines about it; none, apparently, has been able to mark it out satisfactorily even to himself; and none has attempted to prove that the political significance was actually intended or does exist.

Among the mediæval debates which have enjoyed the widest currency and have retained their hold on popular interest for the longest time is the contention between Wine and Water. Poems on this subject are extant in most of the languages of mediæval Europe; and the tradition has persisted with surprising vitality through more than seven centuries down to the present day. The bickerings of these two ancient foes may still be heard on the lips of the peasantry of Germany, France, and Spain, and a fragment of the same dispute was sung not long since as a nursery rhyme in Devon.

At the end of Chaucer's Parson's Tale (I, 1081–92) the writer, speaking in his own person, asks the prayers of his readers that he may be forgiven, especially for his “translacions and endytings of worldly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns”; he gives a list of the principal ones, adding “and many another book, if they were in my remembrance”; and thanks Jesu Christ and all the saints for the works of edification which he has written. The question as to the genuineness of this passage may be approached from a new and more a priori point of view, if it still is a question; if it is not, the following facte will still throw light on the subject. I propose to discuss the history and implications of the word retracciouns, and certain parallels to Chaucer's list of his works and expression of dissatisfaction or satisfaction with them.

The thirteenth-century French prose romance, Les Prophécies de Merlin, of which we have no later edition than the sixteenth century, has hitherto received little attention. Notices of some of the manuscripts; appear in the printed catalogues of manuscript-collections, but none convey an idea of the contents of the romance except the description of two manuscripts in the British Museum given by Ward in his Catalogue. Practically only two other writers have entered upon any discussion of the Prophécies:—Sanesi, in the introduction to his edition of the Storia di Merlino, an Italian version of the romance, and Taylor, who in a recent dissertation on political prophecy, substantially repeats the information given by Sanesi. Both of these works are so important for the student of the Prophécies de Merlin that it is a pity to allow certain statements made by the authors to remain unsupplemented by facts which naturally have come to the notice of anyone who, like myself, is preparing an edition of the French text of the Prophécies.

The French critics of our day judge the work of Casimir Delavigne with a severity which I consider unjust. His Messéniennes, of which the first three were published in 1818, made the hearts of his contemporaries thrill with patriotic enthusiasm, and his Parisienne, music by Auber, written during the Revolution of 1830, was, for a time, as popular as the Marseillaise. One will always read with pleasure his fourth and his fifth Messénienne, Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, and Mort de Jeanne d'Arc, and the second of his Nouvelles Messéniennes, Trois Jours de Christophe Colomb.

The only one who has attempted any very complete classification of the mss. of Godefroi de Bouillon is Pigeonneau, in his work mentioned above, Le Cycle de la Croisade, where are summed up also most of the earlier studies in this field. He has considered all the important mss. and versions that I have given above, except the Bern ms. No. 627, marked S. However, the classification of Pigeonneau is far from sufficient for our purposes. Pigeonneau's purpose was to point out the various versions contained in these mss., rather than to determine their exact relationship to each other, and the proper measure of authority due to each in a critical edition of the text or in the settlement of disputed readings. In general, then, his classification is based on the contents of the mss., the various additions and omissions of each, and not usually, it would seem, on a close line for line comparison. It is, moreover, made for the entire cycle, and the relationship of the various mss. in each of the separate branches is not always specified. This relationship may vary from branch to branch. However, the chief insufficiency, for our use, of Pigeonneau's classification, in addition to that coming necessarily from his different purpose, is his very slight treatment of the Spanish version, and the fact that he did not treat at all ms. S. Both of these are of prime importance in any exact classification of the mss.; and to determine our passages particularly, it is absolutely necessary to know their relationship to the others. Nevertheless, Pigeonneau's classification has been of use as far as it has extended. I shall, then, summarize his results, to show what had been done already, and to bring out as well what remained to be done.

The chief general fact we need notice concerning the animals appearing in our ecclesiastical literature between 650 and 1500 is their double responsibility, to God and man. Toward God their duty is accomplished when, like the birds of St. Francis, they have duly rendered to Him their chorus of praise and thanksgiving. Man they must serve, first, as examples; second, as illustrations to his reflective mood of spiritual truth; third, by direct personal ministration to him.

No one, so far as I know, has attempted to analyze the significant disagreement between the perfervid admirers of Richard Jefferies and those who read his books with mild respect. Henley's familiar phrase, “a reporter of genius,” which from the point of view of those outside the cult seems more than just, falls far short of satisfying those within the cult. They prefer the unmixed adulation implied in the very title of the biography by Walter Besant, The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies. They prefer the judgment of Mr. Henry Salt, who centres his praise, not on The Gamekeeper at Home, but on The Story of My Heart, which future ages are to read with “tears of pity and admiration.” They prefer the poetically phrased criticism of his latest disciple and biographer, Mr. Edward Thomas, who tells us that the mystical Jefferies “fought in the dim, far-off, wavering van, of which we have yet no sure tidings.”

So far as the writer has been able to discover, attention has not been called to the probability that Spenser drew material directly from two French romances of the Grail-Perceval cycle for the episodes of the first two cantos of Book VI of the Faerie Queene.

In a previous study, I have aimed to show that, in Medieval France, personal relationships among men played a more important rôle than they do in modern times; that, therefore, there often arose a fixed code of rules to govern such relations, which assumed the character of formal institutions; that the study of personal relationships in Medieval France is, as a consequence, of greater importance than would be an examination into similar modern alliances; that there were two general kinds of personal relations: the relations between the seigneur and the follower, and the relations between follower and follower.

The expressivness of the progressiv form of the English verb has attracted the attention of many foren grammarians, who briefly but with painstaking care hav endevord to analyze its force. Also more ambitious attempts hav been made to penetrate into its history and meaning. Pessels in his doctor's dissertation The Present and Past Perifrastic Tenses in Anglo-Saxon (1896) has patiently recorded the exampls of the construction in a large number of Old English works. Alfred Åkerlund in his On the History of the Definit Tenses in English (1911) has treated both the older and the modern fases of the development with considerabl penetration. Also a number of other scholars hav delt with different fases of the study or hav investigated the development in particular periods or particular sections of the English speaking territory. Several foren scholars hav studied the progressiv form in other Germanic languages and dialects. A brief treatment of the Gothic progressiv in Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, vol. v, pp. 421-6, by Professor H. Gering is refreshingly suggestiv. In spite of this extensiv literature there remains much to be said, and this paper is offerd as a further contribution to the subject.

Lydgate's St. Edmund was written between 1434 and 1439, probably nearer the former than the latter date. Within a few years after 1439 we meet with the writings of Osbern Bokenham, a member of the house of Austin friars at Stoke Glare in the southwestern corner of Suffolk. Altho the two poets were attached by their sympathies to opposite political parties, Lydgate being a staunch Lancastrian and Bokenham an ardent Yorkist, the monk of Bury had no warmer admirer than the friar of Stoke Clare. We cannot be sure that they knew each other personally, but since they lived within less than twenty miles of each other and were both fond of society, if appears very probable. Not only does Bokenham allude again and again to Lydgate (usually coupling his name with those of Chaucer and Gower), but on one occasion he mentions a particular work of Lydgate's, the Life of Our Lady.

The Visión Delectable was composed by Alfonso de la Torre, probably between the years 1430 and 1440, at the request of don Juan de Beamonte, for the instruction of the young Prince Carlos of Viana. This work, which gained its author the epithet of el gran filósofo among his contemporaries, was published about the year 1480 and subsequently appeared in several Castilian editions. It was translated into Catalan in 1484, and into Italian by Domenico Delphini in 1556, without mention of the original author. This Italian version was re-translated into Spanish by a Spanish Jew, Francisco de Cáceres, and published at Frankfort in 1623.

Die Geschichte Hamlets in Deutschland ist noch nicht geschrieben. Den Anregungen, die Robert Prutz bereits im Jahre 1847 gab, ist zwar durch das Buch von Alexander v. Weilen neuerdings Folge gegeben, aber mit der Bühnenlaufbahn des Dänenprinzen ist die Bolle, die dieser Charakter im Geistesleben der ganzen Nation spielte, keineswegs erschöpft. Als problematische Natur, gab er seit Goethes Wilhelm Meister den Kommentatoren immer neue Rätsei auf, und gleich dem Werterfieber, das durch Goethes ersten Roman entfesselt wurde, kann man von einem wahren Hamletfieber sprechen, das in den Köpfen des beginnenden 19. Jahrhunderts spukt. Schliesslich wird Hamlets Situation das Sinnbild für Deutschlands ganze politische Not, Zerrissenheit und Entschlusslosig-keit: das Gleichnis “Deutschland ist Hamlet” bezeichnet den Höhepunkt der literarischen Epidemie. Zur Geschichte der Vorstellung und des Wortes, das namentlich durch Freiligraths Glaubensbekenntnis (1844) berühmt geworden ist, hat R. M. Meyer in einem Aufsatz mit anerkannter Belesenheit beigetragen. Demnach ist Ludwig Börne (1818) der Erste, der die Selbsterkenntnis, mit der bereits die Bomantiker im Hamletscharakter sich spiegelten, verallgemeinert hat. “Shakespeare ist ein Britte,” sagt Börne in seiner bekannten Hamletbesprechung. “Hätte ein Deutscher den Hamlet gemacht, wiirde ich mich gar nicht dariiber wnndem. Ein Deutscher braucht nur eine schöne leserliche Hand dazu. Er schreibt sich ab, und Hamlet ist fertig.”

Readers of Paradise Lost have always been interested by Voltaire's comment in the Essai sur la Poésie Épique, that French people are inclined to laugh when they are told that England has an epic in which Satan struggles against God and a serpent persuades a woman to eat an apple. Such matter, Voltaire explains, seems in France suitable only for farce. More careful readers, however, may remember that in Paradise Lost only Satan, in the moment immediately preceding his degradation, regards the eating of the forbidden fruit as a subject for mirth. All else abhor the crime; angels flee back to heaven in terror, the guilty pair cower before even their own reproaches, and the very face of nature changes. Clearly, the eating of the apple possesses some deep significance and must be interpreted as a symbol of some important truth. In Christian Doctrine Milton persuades himself that God purposely made an insignificant matter the sole test of man's obedience, since an apparently useless prohibition would offer the surest proof of man's obedience. But in Paradise Lost, and indeed also in Christian Doctrine, the symbolical interpretation is insisted on.

When the student of medieval literature busies himself, as he must so often do, with the chronological sequence of an author's works, he finds himself saying that a given writing was ‘published’ in a given year. What does the word ‘published’ mean? Obviously it must mean something different from the modern process of printer's proofs, advance notices, public sale, and book-reviews. When the textual critic strives to wrest from the existing manuscripts of a medieval work the evidence which shall enable him to reconstruct the author's original autograph, he finds himself speaking of copies made directly from this autograph. Under what conditions were these earliest copies ordinarily made? To both literary historian and textual critic it should be of service to make as clear as may be just what was involved in the act of publication before the discovery of printing introduced the sort of publication with which we are now familiar, and to determine under what conditions an author's work might circulate during his lifetime.