Throughout his prose works Milton shows familiarity with the theological literature of his time. In particular, he shows, by citation and reference, that he used on occasion, especially in the divorce pamphlets, certain commentaries on Genesis written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He mentions by name the commentaries of four authors: John Calvin, Paulus Fagius, Andreus Rivetus,and David Pareus. Because he knew their other theological works, he may also have been familiar with the commentaries on Genesis of Wolfgang Musculus, Peter Martyr (Pietro Martiro Vermigli), and Hieronymus Zanchius. He almost certainly knew the commentaries on the Old Testament, including Genesis, of Hugo Grotius and John Diodati.

Human experience, according to Santayana, may be described as a conflict between the spirit and the imperfections which distract it from the pure and ideal toward which it aspires. And yet, to complete the paradox, there is no spirit without these imperfections, the matrix of flesh and world, space and time, which contains it. This is as much as anything a poet's dramatic vision: it is Yeats's with his passion to preserve the senses in an eternity of time, and it is Wallace Stevens' with his more realistic search for a balance between the antinomies of self and world. For Stevens, the imagination is the single power that can effect the vital unity, in life or in poetry: it alone can provide the aesthetic economy of experience so urgent for the modern romantic sensibility. Stevens is a romantic, or better, a neo-romantic poet who has gone to school to the French Symbolists and post-Symbolists only to conclude that the ends available to the artist are not metaphysical but aesthetic, and thus human. The romantic poet necessarily lives in two worlds: that of his sensual experience and that of his imaginative vision. In those moments when he manages to blend the two, he achieves not only a poem but that singular experience of “truth” from which he draws his spiritual sanctions. And if God is absent from his universe, as he is from Stevens', the moments of reconciliation become increasingly problematical but no less pressing.

IN commenting on Chapman's tragic heroes, Robert Ornstein observes that “Dangerous as it would be to identify Chapman with his Stoic heroes, I cannot but feel that he shared their spiritual isolation and their sense of alienation from an unworthy society.”1 However dangerous (and unfashionable) it may be to look for the author himself in dramatic works, I think a case can be made that Chapman does reveal himself not only in his Stoic heroes but also in many of his poems, plays, and translations, and that he deliberately sought subject matter which best expressed his own outlook and personal feelings. Critics have had a way of not looking into Chapman's works as a whole,2 but to do so is to see a relatively constant pattern, and when the usual pattern does not occur (as sometimes it does not in his comedies and tragedies), even then we have but a variation on it. The good man's confrontation with a corrupt, harsh, hostile, and often destructive world is the image of reality Chapman favors writing about, but a quest for consolations for numerous adversities is not infrequently a concomitant part of that experience. Many characters, fictional and actual, past and present, in the essentials of their experiences, can be read as guises for Chapman's own struggles with the world.

It is so unusual a circumstance at this late day for an entirely new English ballad to come to light that we are justified in hailing its appearance as an event of general interest to the world of English scholarship. From the completion of Professor Child's magnificent work up to the present no ballad has been discovered, which would merit insertion under a new title in that corpus. Variants of ballads already known continue to be unearthed with gratifying frequency, but so well did the great collector glean the field that it can seldom fall to the lot of any follower to bring to light a new specimen. The honor due for such a discovery belongs, however, to Mr. Frank Sidgwick, who printed in 1905 a ballad called The Withies, or The Bitter Withy in Notes and Queries.

ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE HAUNTS THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, OUR MENTAL MAPS OF SHRINKING RAINFORESTS MATCHED BY images of melting icecaps and dying polar bear cubs. As the thawing tundra releases an amplifying store of methane, the goal of Bill McKibben's 350.org, to reduce carbon in the earth's atmosphere to 350 parts per million, seems wildly optimistic.1 So, too, does much of the discourse of sustainability. How can humans depend on the biosphere's capacity to regenerate, having already destroyed entire ecosystems and caused countless extinctions and continuing to do so at an accelerating rate? Isn't it already too late? What tends to get lost in the linked discourses of climate change and sustainability is the rising seawater—salt water, the stuff that covers seventy percent of the planet's surface. If the ocean, as Christopher Connery claims, “has long functioned as Western capitalism's primary myth element” (686), then literary scholarship engaged with the discourse of sustainability should reexamine narratives of oceanic catastrophe.

Several recent articles have called attention once more to the problems presented by Spenser's Mutabilitie. Two of them, by Ronald B. Levinson and Evelyn May Albright, deal with certain portions of a series of three essays which I published several years ago, and concern Spenser's use of materials drawn from various sources on the general subject of what Mr. Grierson has called metaphysical poetry. Three others, by Miss Albright, H. M. Belden, and by Miss Albright in reply to Mr. Belden, raise questions concerning the dating of the poem and its relation to Harvey's criticism of the first draft of the Faerie Queene. Since with the single exception of the problem of historical allegory, no topic in Spenser criticism is of comparable interest just now, it is important to review the present state of the inquiry and to consider what remains to be done.

The emergence of Spain as a world power in the early sixteenth century compelled a radical change in its language and literature. reflecting the country's global expansion, Spanish culture moved beyond its medieval belatedness to compete with Renaissance Italian culture, whose superiority was based on the humanist rebirth of ancient values. The cultural rivalry between Spain and Italy is documented in the prefaces that follow, written by the Catalan poet Juan Boscán (1490?–1542) and the Toledan noble Garcilaso de la Vega (1499?–1536). Through these poets' efforts, Spain became the first European nation-state not only to appropriate Italian versification and prose style but also to displace Italy from the political and literary spheres of power (King 240–41). The political and cultural significance of Boscán's and Garcilaso's revisionary poetics makes their prefaces the first literary manifestos of early modern Spain.

One of the chapters of M. Maurice Souriau's Histoire du Parnasse is entitled “la Question Déroulède.” In this chapter, M. Souriau describes the popularity of Paul Déroulède's Chants du soldat (1872) and of its sequels, such as Nouveaux chants du soldat (1875), as well as the hostility of Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle, and most of the Parnassians to this type of poetry. Insinuating that this hostility was due, in part at least, to the huge sales of Déroulède's volumes, Souriau attacks this attitude bitterly, praises Déroulède's modesty, and allows his critical judgment to be so completely warped by his own chauvinism as to find in Déroulède both an important writer and a great thinker, even greater, perhaps, than Leconte de Lisle because his work “a communiqué à ses' auditeurs le plus vivifiant patriotisme” while that of Leconte de Lisle “a développé trop souvent, trop longtemps, devant ses lecteurs, le plus noir pessimisme.” He calls attention to Calmettes' criticism of Leconte de Lisle as “un adversaire déclaré des Muses patriotiques” and adds: “Il l'était pendant le siège.” He concludes his chapter with the words: “Il [Déroulède] a comblé la lacune du Parnasse.”

Since the appearance of Professor Berdan's edition of Cleveland's poems little has been added to our knowledge concerning the poet's biography. The purpose of this paper is to present certain biographical data which supplement those given by Professor Berdan.

Hawthorne attempted not only to change his readers' understanding of historical events but also to undermine their complacency about historical understanding. In The Marble Faun, he questions the positivistic assumptions and complacent moralism of nineteenth-century historiography by representing sympathy and estrangement as principles of knowledge. The story of Kenyon and Hilda, Miriam, Donatello, and the model, set amid the ruins of Rome, indicates that both the truths of history and the truths of the human heart are produced in narratives that reflect the affective links between the tellers of tales and the objects described. For Hawthorne history and romance are not morally or epistemologically distinct. Sympathy does not solve the problem of historical knowledge but reposes it in a form more proper to the ambiguities of romance as Hawthorne used the genre than to the certainties of history as traditionally conceived.

Franz Kafka’s “Eine alltägliche Verwirrung” ‘An Everyday Confusion’ is a skeletal, or “poor,” text in that one code of reading—the referential—dominates it, while other codes present in a classic, or “rich,” text are almost absent. Using a method freely adapted from Roland Barthes’s S/Z, my article closely examines the referentiality of Kafka’s text, juxtaposing the proverbial (or common-language) response evoked by the text with the personal reactions of a single reader. Kafka’s theme, the inability of common, proverbial language to make real communication possible, is allegorized in the brief tale of A and B, whose comings and goings are mirrored, and at times interfered with, by the language in which these events occur.

At the heart of much Victorian fiction is a moral ideology based on the assumption that human nature is essentially flexible, always at least potentially capable of change and renewal. Anthony Trollope devotes much of his own fiction to a systematic critique of such an assumption, arguing that individual character is at bottom irrevocably fixed. Three important novels in particular are built around progressive discoveries by major characters that they are, by their natures, incapable of change: Orley Farm, He Knew He Was Right, and The Duke’s Children. In books like these we discover a skeptical and somber vein in Trollope’s imagination that critics of his work have typically failed to recognize.

The object of this paper is to show that Lessing's knowledge of Shakespeare and his influence in introducing and popularizing the great English poet in Germany have been generally overestimated. To forestall any preconceived opinions it may be stated that the position advocated has not been suggested by such works as Franz Mehring's Die Lessing-Legende or Paul Albrecht's Lessings Plagiate, in which the sole purpose of the authors seems to be to pluck the laurel wreath from the head of one whom Herder regarded as the greatest critic of Germany and Macaulay as the first of Europe.

Of Della Casa's life (1503-1556), little need here be said. Brought up in Florence and educated at Bologna, at first he showed, though a keen student, more interest in the amusements than in the serious things of life. In his middle twenties he went to Rome, where he continued his study of the classics and developed still further his aptitude for gaiety. A taste for high life and for classic study led inevitably to the church: at the age of thirty-one he definitely embarked on an ecclesiastical career, held various offices and commissions under different popes, and divided his time between Venice, Florence, and Rome. Towards the end of his life he became secretary of state to Paul IV, but was never made a cardinal. He was always interested in letters, was a member of various academies both gay and learned, and wrote much both in Latin and Italian, prose and verse.

The lay of Yonec is composed of 562 lines of eight syllables, riming in couplets. The substance of this charming lay of Marie de France is as follows:—

There lived in Britain an old knight, who was so jealous of his young wife's beauty that he confined her in a tower and placed her under the care of his sister, an aged widow. The knight passed his time in the chase, while his young wife had no solace but in her tears. One morning in April, after he had set off on his usual occupation, the fair lady began her lamentations as she was wont to do. She execrated the hour when she was born, and the avarice of her parents, who had married her to an old jealous tyrant.