Thomas Deloney's four novels are generally praised for their vigor of style and their realism. Indeed, his modern editor, Mr. F. O. Mann, in singling out for commendation “his faithful and sympathetic rendering of commonplace human life,” insists that in Deloney is to be found “the highest achievement of the Elizabethan novel.” Not infrequently, however, Deloney's “commonplace human life” yields to high-flown and altogether improbable romances of earls and ladies, princes and princesses, kings and queens, just as his ordinary familiar prose style at times is embellished with all the euphuistic tricks he was capable of imitating. In particular his apparently casual references to strange birds, queer beasts, and other wonders of nature and to historical and mythological characters give a surprising air of learning; and the notes of his various editors suggest that he was acquainted with such authors as Boccaccio, Belieforest, Pliny, Sextus Empiricus, and Cornelius Nepos.

Soon after the death of Lope de Vega in 1635 Calderón was recognized as the foremost playwright of Spain and of the pleasure-loving court of Philip IV. It was not long before Philip decided to bestow upon his protégé the coveted order of Santiago. Pope Urban VIII signed the pontifical dispensation on April 28, 1637, and from that day on Calderón wore the insignia of his newly acquired honor.1 But the rise of Calderón as a court dramatist had begun several years earlier when some of his plays were being produced in the Salón de las Comedias of the old alcázar.

The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate on the basis of internal evidence that the anonymous play, The Drinking Academy, or Ike Cheaters' Holiday, which was recently printed for the first time, is in all probability the work of Thomas Randolph. As has long been known, much genuine material was omitted by Randolph's literary executors in the first and subsequent editions of his collected works. At least one lost play is known to us by title, and modern scholars—Hazlitt, Parry, and more recently Professor Moore Smith—have had notable success in recovering authentic poems and fragments from Randolph's pen. Under these circumstances there is nothing essentially unreasonable in proposing, even at this late date, to claim for Randolph a play whose authorship has hitherto been wholly unknown.

IN a recently-published volume, Anatole France: critique littéraire,1 Mlle. Annette Antoniu gives a very closely-documented and, in the main, trustworthy, account of the intellectual and critical development of the great novelist. This work, however, confines itself to the consideration of Anatole France's pronouncements in his works of criticism and is, by the very nature of its subject, somewhat diffuse in its treatment. It may, therefore, be of some interest to study France's attitude towards poetry and poets as expressed in his novels and short-stories, in his volumes of essays and in his reminiscences of childhood, as well as in his conversations with some of the numerous “literary reporters” who, during the past decade, have been basking in the glory of the deceased master. Such an examination is of importance in view of the many bitter attacks that have been leveled at France by critics who are not content with attempting to expose what they consider to be the dangers inherent in his skepticism, and have left no stone unturned in the effort to prove that, both as man and as thinker, he was totally devoid of the moral sense. Thus, for example, in his Historie du Parnasse,2 M. Maurice Souriau would have us believe that France dealt treacherously by his erstwhile comrades, the Parnassians, and, more especially, by their principal leader, Leconte de Lisle.

BYRON'S Cain, to no one's surprise, is a Byronic hero—disaffected, self-pitying, self-hating, suicidal—but he can be distinguished from such Byronically heroic figures as Lara and Manfred because, for one thing, he is not directly presented to us agonizing over his guilty past. Cain is presented in fact with no past except divine history and he protests, again and again, that this belongs not at all to him but to his blundering parents and God. There is no crime, then, no wretchedly sinful experience, for which this hero can be held responsible, and he is thrust upon us, embittered and complaining, without any personal history to account for the difference between himself and his pious community. Ultimately, however, there is the murder of Abel and, to compare Cain with other Byronic heroes, it should be said the murder replaces the sin or crime in the hero's past which Byron ordinarily leaves obscure. More relevant to my present concern is the fact that the murder has the effect of identifying Cain to himself and his community as none other than Cain, the infamous Biblical murderer. “Am I then my brother's keeper?” he asks.1 The addition of “then” to the notorious question suggests that Cain has read the Bible; it also reveals the curious way in which Byron has conceived this particular hero—as reliving rather than living the Biblical myth. In effect, Byron's Cain is a dramatic creature who plays Cain until, voilà, he murders his brother and discovers he is Cain.

One of the points always brought out in a study of the prosody of Milton's later poems is the manner in which he breaks away from the end-stopped lines, and moulds his verse into long majestic periods, like the paragraphs of prose. But while this aspect of his poetry has often been admired, the prosodical devices by which it is made noticeable and effective have never been studied. Accurate knowledge of these devices depends: first, on an analysis of Milton's punctuation, as the number and position of the full stops determine the extent and effect of the verse paragraphs; and second, on an analysis of the rhythms immediately following the full stops, that is, at the opening of the succeeding sentences.

Notice of King John has been concentrated on questions of date; revision; polemic purpose; treatment of history; influence of the Image of Hypocrisy, Kirchmayer's Pammachius, Lindsay's Satire of the Three Estates, and Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man; and relation to the morality play and the chronicle play, between which it seems transitional, with its effect upon the latter, especially upon the Troublesome Reign and Shakespeare's King John. Herbert Barke notices here and there the historical basis of its use of the Roman rite. Otherwise there has been almost no notice of a substance and technique that, beyond this basis, articulate structure, unite allegory and history, and must have made the propaganda emotional for a mid-sixteenth-century audience.

Tyrwhitt's dating of the A-text of Piers Ploughman in the year 1362 from the allusions in the Second Vision (Passus v, 10–20) to the “pestilences” and “this south-Westerne wynt on a Saterday at even,” which seem to refer to the plague of 1361 and to the terrific gale which swept southern England on January 15, 1362, has long gone unchallenged. Skeat accepted it without question when he edited the poem for the Early English Text Society in 1877. Tyrwhitt found records of the storm in the chronicles of Thorn, Walsingham, and Murimuth; Skeat added Fabyan, Hardyng, John of Bridlington, the Eulogium Historiarum, and others to the list. That these two scholars have established the reference in the early lines of Passus v is clear enough, but it does not follow from this that the poem was written in 1362. It must have been written some time after 1362. I shall endeavor to show in this paper that the Prologue and First Vision (Passus i-iv) were written as late as May, 1376.

Let me tell an old British tale in my own plain way; for I am unversed in ornaments of style. This is all that the Franklin's prologue means on its surface. The connotation beneath is inviting. Are “aventures,” “layes,” “rymeyed,” “instruments” intended precisely? How much grasp they suggest of early medieval poetic is perhaps beyond our determination. But the term “colours of rethoryk” occurs also in the Hous of Fame. The interlude before the Clerk's Tale has a sarcasm of the Host against these same “colours” in the same connection. The Squire's disclaimer has the same significant terms as the Franklin's, and the same point as the Clerk's reply to the Host. The satire in the Tale of the Nun's Priest on Geoffrey of Vinsauf confirms the suspicion that in all these passages Chaucer implies specific criticism of a certain later medieval poetic, the poetic current in the Latin manuals entitled poetria. For the language of the Franklin's prologue, in spite of his disclaimer, is literary. Chaucer knew as well as Shakspere that he who announces “a plain, unvarnished tale” may command a better art than the rhetoric that he disclaims. It is worth while to explore, therefore, the mention of rhetoric in connection with story-telling, the conjunction of Cicero and Parnassus. As Sir Thopas parodies not only the conventional motives of romance, but also particular faults in its conventional technic, so Chaucer's references to “colours of rethoryk,” instead of being taken as general disparagement of grandiloquence, may well be sounded for their particular significance. In any age, indeed, the man of letters contemplating the rules of his art laid down by the pedagogues is moved to sarcasm; but Chaucer's sarcasms may suggest specifically wherein the pedagogues that he knew went wide of the narrative art that he came to comprehend as artist and as critic. His reference in the House of Fame merely glances at “prolixitee.” The passages in the four Canterbury tales, ampler and more specific, together suggest that the application of “colours of rethoryk” to narrative is a perversion, that Cicero is out of place on Parnassus.

The Middle English poem Patience, it will be remembered, is in the main a paraphrase of the book of Jonah. In the main also, the medieval writer has followed the biblical narrative, as he has in Clannesse when narrating the fall of the angels, the flood, the destruction of Sodom, and the capture of Babylon. But just as in these latter stories the English poet has taken considerable freedom with the biblical account, both in vividness at the expense of a literal rendering and in the use of medieval scripture interpretation, so in recounting the life of Jonah there are passages which have no close connection with the book of the prophet. The most remarkable of these is the extension of two sentences in the book of Jonah into some thirty-nine lines, describing vividly and picturesquely the storm at sea which overtook Jonah and his companions. Of this striking extension, and of certain additions which also occur in it, no source has ever been pointed out so far as I am aware. Nor has attention been called to a close parallelism between this portion of Patience, and a similar extension of the same story in the poem De Jona et Nineve, formerly attributed to Tertullian.

But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
“That portion of the river of my mind
Came from that fountain?“ (The Prelude, II, 203ff).

To what extent, it may profitably be asked, did German literature exert an influence, direct or indirect, upon the life and writings of Wordsworth?

Swift's influence on Keats has gone unrecognized although Keats refers to Swift in several of his letters, imitates his style on occasion, and, I believe, incorporates reminiscences of Swift's work in at least five of his poems. The evidence to be given seeks to explain several hitherto unexplained references in Keats's letters, to clarify a much-debated passage in I Stood Tip-toe, and to show the persistence in Keats's mind of a favorite image. Incidentally it reveals something about Keats's methods of composition; and it shows how Swift was regarded by Hazlitt, Keats, and their circle, calls attention to Keats's early and long-continued interest in Homer (whose work he first knew in Pope's translation), and indicates in Keats a catholicity of taste and an interest in satire to which perhaps more attention might be paid.

Terza Rima is a series of threes, the two outer lines of each riming with each other, the inner line riming with the two outer lines of the next three; in homely terms, like a pile of paper cones set into each other. The first rime in a canto and the last therefore occur only twice, but all the rest three times; none is dropped before a new rime is begun, or, except at the beginning and end of a canto, is confined to a single terzina. A consequence of this structure is that, while (if the sense permits) one or more terzine may be cut off at the beginning or end of a canto without detection of the loss, this is impossible anywhere else; the alternation of rimes and the linking with the preceding and following terzine would be upset. Accordingly omission of lines or passages occurs in the manuscripts with notable rarity.1 This result of the verse form no doubt is well known to some, but, so far as I find, it has never been mentioned in print.

During the year 1818, while Washington Irving was at work on the sketches and stories of The Sketch Book, he wrote to his friend Brevoort: “I have been for some time past engaged in the study of the German language, and have got so far as to be able to read and splutter a little. It is a severe task, and has required hard study; but the rich mine of German literature holds forth abundant reward.” The first of the “abundant rewards” which he won from the “rich mine of German literature” are to be seen in his use of German materials for the four so-called short stories in The Sketch Book (1819–1820). At the end of his Dresden diary, which came to a close on July 11, 1823, he wrote, perhaps with himself in mind:

Solitary miners of literature in Germany—men working hours and hours each day in dull little towns.

The Dialect of Pistoja and of the Pistojese mountains forms one of the group of Tuscan dialects. The writer spent six months in 1892 at Pistoja and in the villages of the Pistojese mountains, in order to collect material for the following monograph, which is based chiefly on the patois spoken by the natives of this district.

The anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes is a master of deception. He makes his protagonist supremely attractive to the reader by contrasting him with unlikable characters (the blind beggar, the priest, the squire) and by the intimacy of autobiography. The reader increasingly sympathizes with Lazarillo, reaching in the third chapter a point of genuine admiration for the boy’s self-sacrifice at the time of greatest physical suffering. The author then creates an illusion of passing time to reach the book’s final scene, in which the mature Lázaro profits from the sexual exploitation of his wife. Lazarillo de Tonnes, comic only on a superficial level, presents a corrupt society that forces its materialistic values on even its most virtuous members; Lázaro, like all men, eventually compromises. The reader, so attracted by the young Lazarillo who dominates the work, often fails to see the odious Lázaro who finally emerges and obliterates his former self.