Philip II, as everyone knows, was an armchair strategist; he lacked the physical stamina of a military man, and the nearest he came to seeing a field of battle was his visit to St. Quentin (1557) after his troops had gained him a great victory there. Charles V was wise enough not to push his son beyond his limits; he never made him participate in one of his many wars. Yet a legend of relatively recent origin now sees Philip take part, at the age of fifteen, in the Spanish triumph (1542) at Perpignan.

The facts of this event may be summed up as follows: In the summer of 1542, after not quite four years of the ten-year truce between Charles V and Francis I had passed, French armies under the Dauphin (the later Henri II) set out in June toward Narbonne, aiming to advance on the (then) Spanish county of Rosellón (Roussillon), laying siege to Perpignan in the latter part of August. The Duke of Alba, anticipating their approach, had improved Perpignan's fortifications in good time and lined up an overflow of Spanish armies ready to meet the attackers.

While the influence of Erasmus on his contemporaries has been studied in various ways, it has been little noticed that even at the height of his fame Erasmus could himself be influenced by those who looked to him for inspiration. He probably reached the summit of his prestige as the prince of European letters between 1514 and 1516, when many of his important works were printed for the first time or reissued: Enchiridion Militis Christiani, which P. S. Allen says first attracted wide notice in the edition of 1514; Moriae Encomium (1514 and 1515); Adagiorum Chiliades (1515); the Greek New Testament (1516) and the Epistulae of St. Jerome (1516). Except for the first, all these works were printed by the firm of Johann Froben in Basel. Erasmus came to Basel in the late summer of 1514 to publish his Adagia and, after a brief trip to England in the spring of 1515, returned to publish his New Testament. The men who gathered around him at Froben's press seem to have had more than a little to do with what went into his books.

Elizabethan song-writers commonly strove to achieve a just rapport between the conventions of the music and the meaning of the words. For them the expressive aspect of the music was inseparable from the significance of the verse, and the success of a song depended heavily upon the extent to which verbal sense and musical sound echoed one another.

In the summer of 1618 Francis Bacon wrote the following letter to the Spanish Ambassador to England, the Count of Gondomar, who had just left the kingdom:-

If, in a sense, all artists comment on their times, only a few do so deliberately. Pieter Bruegel the Elder is the first great example of the latter type, the artist as social observer and critic. His detailed scenes of everyday life, his illustrations of proverbs and moral lessons in contemporary settings are all well known. Recently, however, art historians have become increasingly aware of less obvious social and political overtones in Bruegel's work. Paintings from the last ten years of his life, ranging from the tiny Chained Monkeys to vast scenes like The Suicide of Saul, The Conversion of Saint Paul, and The Massacre of the Innocents, have all been interpreted as veiled but pointed commentaries on conditions and events in the Netherlands during the mid-sixteenth century. The facts of history, it appears, may be highly pertinent to Bruegel's art.

Seneca's stoic philosophy of the universal moral community of man has little in common with Machiavelli's very practical theory of the ways and means of political power. Ignoring the question of moral obligation, the Florentine often gives to virtù a special prudential meaning apparently quite different in spirit from the Roman's ethical ideal of virtus. That their intellectual perspectives are in opposition is the judgment of modern scholars, who find Seneca's influence on Machiavelli of no great significance. Nevertheless a rereading of Seneca's moral essays and epistles with Machiavelli in mind reveals neglected parallels in their thought almost as striking as the more obvious differences and which suggest the need of a reappraisal of the relation between the two thinkers. What follows, therefore, is an effort to ascertain the nature of the elements common to their respective outlooks.

Few books have been more successful than Erasmus’ Adagia, judged either by the author's intention or the readers’ satisfaction. In the preface to the modest first edition—Veterum maximeque insignium paroemiarum id est adagiorum collectanea (Paris, 1500)—Erasmus stressed the utility of the volume, saying that it provided a model for style and a storehouse of knowledge and morality. This was Erasmus’ first book-length publication; and generation after generation demanded fresh versions, so that he continued to enhance it throughout his life. There were four more editions of the Collectanea before Erasmus revised and greatly augmented the work for the Aldine press, printed under the title Adagiorum chiliades tres (Venice, 1508). After that, there were at least thirty reprints of the Collectanea by mid-century, and at least forty editions of the Adagiorum chiliades by the end of the century, not to mention great numbers of epitomes and extracts and translations. The Collectanea was a handsome start for a new sort of career: public education through print.

Mopsa, a stupid country wench in Sidney's Arcadia, is such a delightful comic creation that one is curious to know more about her origin and function. William Ringler suggests that the name is ‘probably from Mopsus, a shepherd in Virgil's Eclogues.’ In the Fifth Eclogue one of the two shepherds in the singing contest is named Mopsus. In the Eighth Eclogue the embittered shepherd Damon laments the loss of Nysa, mentioning that she has married Mopsus. Since Sidney uses other names from the Eclogues (Dametas, Menalcas) and since Mopsa is the daughter of a shepherd, Professor Ringler's suggestion has merit.

Virgil is probably not the only source of Mopsa's name, however; I suggest that Sidney is making a kind of pun, humorously combining the name's Virgilian associations with those surrounding the Dutch word mops and its playfully Latinized form Mopsus or, feminine, Mopsa. Mops means ‘pug dog’ and, formerly, by extension, meant ‘countrylout' also; Mopsa in the Arcadia is in a sense ‘doggy’ and is clearly a country lout.

In 1626 Tristan I'Hermite was commissioned to write a poetic description of Berny, the country house near Bourg-la-Reine to which the Marquise de Puisieux had been obliged to withdraw following her husband's disgrace at court. The chateau, a handsome maison de plaisance surrounded by extensive formal gardens, was one of the earliest designed by François Mansard and had been built for the father-in-law of the marquise, the Chancellor Sillery.

Scadbury Park in Chislehurst, Kent, is the site of the once glorious manor of the Walsingham family, a seat presided over from 1589 to 1630 by Thomas IV, favorite of Queen Elizabeth, cousin of Sir Francis Walsingham, and patron of poets Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe, and George Chapman. The original moated manor house is now in ruins, but there is extant among the family papers of Major John Marsham-Townshend, present owner of the Scadbury estate (and through the Betensons a collateral descendant of the Walsinghams), an informative document of 1727 entitled ‘An inventory of the household goods and furniture of the dwelling of the Hon Sr Ed Betenson at Scadbery in Kent, May 26th 1727.’ This manuscript excites speculative interest because of its listing of thirty Indian pictures.

Thérèse Goyet dit, à propos du mot humanisme: ‘Littré ne reçoit le substantif que dans son supplément de 1877,’ et lui donne pour deuxième acception: ‘Théorie philosophique qui rattache les développements historiques de l'humanité à elle-même.’ En note, Thérèse Goyet exphque cette acception en écrivant: ‘Référence de Littré à la Revue Critique, 5 septembre 1874, page 156. “Rattache” et “historiques“ sont tout à fait vagues. Malheureusement, nous n'avons pu retrouver le texte: Il semble que la référence de Littré soit erronée.'

Or, je consulte le Supplément du Dictionnaire de Littré (Paris, 1883) et la Revue Critique d'Histoire et de Littérature, No 36—5 septembre—1874 (huitième année), p. 156, et je lis: ‘Il montre ensuite l'unité des Frères moraves naissant du hussitisme, le désir d'une réforme de l'Eglise s'emparant d'un grand nombre de personnalités marquantes et l'humanisme venant s'offrir à elles comme l'instrument d'une science plus sérieuse et d'une culture plus générale.'

Renaissance scholars such as W. S. Howell, T. W. Baldwin, W. G. Crane, and Walter J. Ong have observed in general terms the influence of Rudolph Agricola's dialectic upon northern humanist thought; so far, however, no one has investigated that influence in detail. It is my purpose in this paper to initiate such an examination by describing how Agricola's place-theory made its way into the treatments of invention in the three major English logics of the early Renaissance, those of Thomas Wilson, John Seton, and Peter Carter. Although my account is for the most part restricted to the subject of invention (in bulk at least a lesser part of dialectic than judgment) and deals only with English logicians, the popularity of Agricola's views on dialectical invention may, I think, be taken as symptomatic of a more pervasive influence emanating from Heidelberg, an influence extending to dialectical judgment as well as invention and affecting continental as well as English scholars.

In my edition of The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, I pointed out that the text of the Helmingham Hall manuscript was badly disarranged towards the end of the volume. I there expressed the conviction that the confusion was due to twin faults, first that the leaves in the 'Vorlage’ (cited as V) used by the scribe of the Helmingham Hall MS. (cited as HH) had become jumbled and secondly that this scribe had mechanically and thoughtlessly followed his exemplar without paying the slightest attention to the text. Having recently had the occasion to examine this MS once again (now Glazier MS. 66), it occurred to me that some further deductions might be drawn from this scribal lapse.