Within the past few years several scholars have been attracted by a challenging passage from the “Preface to the following Hymns” in the second edition of Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans (1655): you will (peradventure) observe some passages, whose history or reason may seem something remote; but were they brought nearer, and plainly exposed to your view, (though that (perhaps) might quiet your curiosity) yet would it not conduce much to your greater advantage.—Silex Scintillans, Part ii, Sig. B-3-v.

Swift wrote brilliantly of the Dissenter, or Puritan, as revealed in the person of Jack, one of the three brothers in the Tale of a Tub, but there was a century of attack on the Puritans behind him. It is not the purpose of this paper to try to show that Swift was influenced by earlier writers. All that will be attempted is the analysis of the various themes of the attack on the Puritans in the Tale of a Tub, and a comparison of the results with those obtained from a similar analysis of the more prominent earlier satires of the Puritans. There may well have been various influences of earlier men on Swift, but, as has been said, this question will not be raised. The real contribution of Swift—what he alone thought and said about the Dissenters—will be more easily seen if we first eliminate the themes which had already been used. Of equal importance is the listing of the points Swift definitely avoided using or emphasizing but which the earlier men had delighted in employing.

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.

In the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery there is a letter from Sir Philip Sidney to the sons of Joachim Camerarii, which has been published once, without comment, but I am now able to offer improved readings and to trace some of its background. As this letter was not printed with complete accuracy before, the text is now given in full:

This text was written as a talk for a particular occasion, the Presidential Address on 9 January 2015 during the MLA Annual Convention in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have not removed the traces of this occasion from the text because they are integral to its argument about sites of memory. I hope my readers will imagine themselves as auditors gathered in a large room in the West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre, built on the edge of a waterway called Burrard Inlet (fig. 1). That waterway, which is represented in several of the images that accompany this text, had—and still has—a different name in the languages of the indigenous peoples who have inhabited the Vancouver area since before it became part of an American hemisphere. Names, in languages that are ancient but also modern, are a key topic in the reflections that follow.

I'm grateful to you for the gift of your time. Though my talk explores a view of historical time as a multidirectional and multidimensional phenomenon, I'm aware that our shared time in this room goes in one direction in the simple sense that we'll all be older when this session ends, and probably even more hungry, thirsty, and tired than we are now. I've found that the MLA convention sometimes feels like a memory marathon, with special testings of the brain muscles that allow us to recognize faces and recall the first and last names of acquaintances, and even of good friends, whom we haven't seen for a while. Such experiences of remembering and forgetting contributed to my decision to focus on the MLA itself as one of the two sites of memory I want to explore with you this evening. The other site I want to think about is Vancouver, the place where we are now: a modern city built on a site where humans have been living for the last eight to ten millennia (Carlson 12-16).

In 1786 Gilbert Wakefield pointed out in a very specific way the similarity of certain passages in the poetry of Lucretius, Thomson, and Gray. In our own day, Miss A. L. Reed and Professor H. W. Garrod have indicated the same parallel passages in the three poets, as well as in Collins. My purpose here is to classify this Lucretian influence as definitely as possible, and to describe its genesis and diffusion as part of a broader Vergilian stream.

It is dangerous writing on marble, where one cannot make errata, or mend in a second edition,“ Jonathan Swift once remarked about an epitaph to be placed in St. Patrick's Cathedral. The Latin phrases he framed for his own epitaph, to be set up in that cathedral in Dublin, have been variously considered ”scarce intelligible,“ ”terrible,“ the ”best clue to Swift,“ and ”the greatest epitaph in history.“ They have more than once been offered as proof that he was not deeply a Christian but that he ”hated the chains of oppression more than the shackles of sin.“ Because of W. B. Yeats's version of it in the form of English verse, Swift's epitaph now has a double identity: as an unusually controversial eighteenth-century biographical document, and as a familiar twentieth-century work of literature.

Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) is remembered primarily for the two feats of which she was proudest, publishing Ulysses and “STEERing a little bookshop for about twenty-two years between the two wars,” as she puts it in the text reprinted here. Her “little bookshop,” Shakespeare and Company, was for Ernest Hemingway “a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living” (35). In 1919, with support from Adrienne Monnier, the owner of a neighboring bookstore, Beach launched the Left Bank shop that would serve as a hub for French and expatriate writers.1 In her 1959 memoir, Shakespeare and Company, Beach tells stories of her friends and patrons, who included F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valéry, Simone de Beauvoir, HD (Hilda Doolittle), Samuel Beckett, and many others. Beach also describes there her other great feat, the publication of Ulysses. When British and American printers were prevented from publishing Joyce's Dublin epic because it was considered too obscene, Beach stepped in. Her fortuitous situation as a seller of English-language books in Paris inspired her to risk bringing out Ulysses herself. In February 1922, after a legendary struggle, the first edition of Ulysses appeared under the imprint “Shakespeare and Company.”

Robert Burton has never been known as a commentator on The Faerie Queene and he certainly did not aspire to that honor, but it is my purpose in this article to show that unconsciously he left a valuable set of notes on Spenser's work. Burton was not a critic and his one critical remark about The Faerie Queene sounds oddly to-day, although readers of M. Jusserand's remarks in his Literary History of the English People on Spenser's borrowings from Ariosto will remember some ideas that chime with what Burton says in the passage in question. In his analysis of love-melancholy in the Third Part of The Anatomy of Melancholy he remarked casually:

Our new Ariostoes, Boyards, Authors of Arcadia, Urania, Faerie Queene, &c., Marullus, Leotichius, Angerianus, Stroza, Secundus, Capellanus, &c., with the best of these facete modern poets have written in this kind, are but so many symptoms of love. Their whole books are a synopsis or breviary of love, the portuous of love, legends of lovers' lives and deaths, and of their memorable adventures, nay more, quod leguntur, quod laudantur, amori debent.

So many things about the Middle Ages seem strange to the modern reader that it is easy to over-emphasize the differences between the points of view and the methods of medieval and of modern writers. Especially is this true of the writers of fiction. We seldom get more than a brief glimpse of the medieval fiction-writer, specifically the author of medieval romances, actually at work; for example, when we find Chrétien de Troyes using the old book from the cathedral library at Beauvais in the composition of Cligès. Generally we have only the finished product on the one hand, and on the other hand, “sources” of various kinds, folk-tale or saga or classical story. Where the relation between the finished product and the source is close and obvious, as in such romances as Sir Amadas and Sir Isumbras, the mere identification of the source reveals the method of the writer: he found an attractive old story and retold it, adding such embellishments as his audience would probably like. Nothing could be simpler. But the writers of the more courtly and sophisticated romances were not mere redactors; they were authors, in very much the same sense as the modern novelist is an author. And like most modern novelists, they showed their inventive powers, not often in finding new material, but usually in making recombinations of old material. They sometimes had the advantage over the present would-be producer of “best sellers” in writing for specific courtly groups presided over by single leaders of taste. It was therefore relatively easy to discover what their public wanted. Thus Chrétien wrote his Chevalier de la Charrette to satisfy Marie de Champagne, though it seems not to have been exactly in accordance with his own ethical standards.

The chief source of information concerning Nicholas Breton's early life is the will of his father, written in 1557-8, probated in 1558-9. This will, a lengthy document, provides liberally for the wife and the five children, devises generous legacies to a number of household servants, remembers various hospitals, the “poorest creatures” in several parishes, “poorest Skoolers of the university of Cambrydge,” and even sets apart a sum of money for “repayringe the hyghe wayes brydges and other most needful and necessary thinges.” There are mentions of “jewelles” and plate and valuable furniture and clothes, and the whole tone of the will indicates that its maker was a man who had wealth and was accustomed to use it freely and generously. That he was as liberal in thought as in money-matters, that he had due regard to the preferences of others, may be fairly inferred from a bequest to one Henry Knighte, “so that he continew to study at the Lawe, or use any other honest exereyse of Lyvinge.” That the wife was a woman of and this association takes the reader away from the atmosphere of Early English poetry.“

Some have credited Coleridge's Kuhla Khan with a “magic” lacking to almost every other poem in English. Though more finished in its artistry, Kuhla Khan is, however, no more “magic” than parts of Chatterton's African Eclogues; in fact, as E. H. W. Meyerstein in his excellent Life of Chatterton was apparently the first critic to point out, there are sundry arresting likenesses between these Eclogues and Kuhla Khan. Since the Rowley poet is in his strange “romantic” way similar to Coleridge, is it possible to penetrate the “shaping spirit of imagination” behind the African Eclogues, as Mr. Lowes has penetrated the imagination behind Kuhla Khan? The purpose of this discussion is to show the manifold effects of the Rev. Alexander Catcott's Treatise on the Deluge on three “magic” poems.

Describing a year's activity in a half-hour report is an annual challenge that grows more difficult as the pace and scope of the activity increase. The Foreign Language Program is in some ways the victim of its success. One of our early goals was to become an information center and we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Requests for materials, information, opinions, and assistance threaten to overwhelm us daily. Three members of the staff do nothing but answer these requests. The ones that are unanswerable are put in my in-basket. Telephone calls and visitors multiply. All this activity we are tempted to think of as interruptions to our real job, long-range planning, deep thinking, foreign languages in the next century. But in a very real sense the magnitude of the interruptions to our job is the sign that we are succeeding, that more and more foreign-language teachers and students and more and more people in general want to know the answers to questions and the solutions to problems of which they were hardly conscious a few years ago. There has been a revolution in language learning in this country and among recent visitors to our office have been language teachers and administrators from all over the world (France, England, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Africa, Australia), who have come to find out what we are doing.

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.

Under every great political, social, religious, and educational movement, there are found certain truths or principles that act as motive power. The movement may be very complex and varied in its manifestations, but the underlying truths or principles are generally clear and simple. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, for example, with all the civil and ecclesiastical disturbances it brought about, was based on these two well-known principles: 1. Men are saved by faith alone; and 2. The Bible is the only rule of faith and practice in religion. The American Revolution, with all its multiplicity of events, was founded on the principle that taxation without representation is tyranny. Illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely; but the truth will hardly be questioned that great movements in society generally derive their impulse from one or more principles which admit of perspicuous statement.

The year 2008 was one of fruitful disjunctions. I spent the fall teaching at Stanford but commuting to the University of California, Los Angeles, to cochair the inaugural Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities. During the same period, I was curating—at the Canadian Center for Architecture, in Montreal—an exhibition devised to mark the centenary of the publication of “The Founding Manifesto of Futurism,” by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Whereas other centennial shows (at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, and at the Palazzo Reale, in Milan) sought to celebrate the accomplishments and legacies of Marinetti's avant-garde, the Canadian exhibition, Speed Limits, was critical and combative in spirit, more properly futurist (though thematically antifuturist). It probed the frayed edges of futurism's narrative of modernity as the era of speed to reflect on the social, environmental, and cultural costs. An exhibition about limits, it looked backward over the architectural history of the twentieth century to look forward beyond the era of automobility.

An Understanding of the purposes and the popularity of Young's Night Thoughts is possible only through a realization of their relation to contemporary currents of thought. For the most part critics have confined their attention to the so-called personal element and the treatment of the theme of death, and have neglected perhaps the most outstanding feature of the Night Thoughts, the interest in Christian apologetics. Though the nine poems reveal a shift in emphasis and purpose—the first five, of 459, 694, 536, 842, and 1068 lines respectively, chiefly concerned with moral reflections on life and death, and the last four, of 819, 1480, 1417, and 2434 lines, almost wholly devoted to apologetics—there is throughout a fairly definite effort to defend one phase or other of religion. This rationalistic defence of religion places the poems in the current of apologetic literature so outstanding in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Analysis of Young's aims and arguments will show to what extent he is following those of the outstanding defenders of religion and demonstrate that the Night Thoughts are to be considered as largely an expression of contemporary apologetics.

Among the many baffling problems of Chaucerian scholarship are those connected with the Squire's Tale. To undertake a satisfactory solution of these is to court disaster. The attempt confounds us. One may, however, with all modesty endeavor to fix one's bearings in the area of story-land to which this poem belongs. To know where we are is almost as gratifying as to discover a source, and it is sometimes more instructive. If, then, I can do anything to further a survey of the narrative neighborhood of the Squire's Tale and its nearest analogue, the Cléomadès, my work may be serviceable. Perhaps, too, this paper may put in a clearer light the probabilities in regard to Chaucer's method and inspiration while at work upon one of his best known Tales of Canterbury.