The question has recently been raised as to whether or not the order of the publication of the Waverley Novels is also, as Lockhart implies, the order of writing. Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, writing in the New York Saturday Review of Literature for April 23, 1932, (p. 686), appeals to lovers of Scott for help in the solution of the problem of the chronology of his novels. She states her reasons for believing that St. Ronan's Well, though later revised, was written seventeen years before Waverley. In a similar communication published in the London Times Literary Supplement for April 28, 1932, Dame Una Pope-Hennessy outlines the genesis of her skepticism as to the usually accepted chronology of Scott's novels:

No systematic study of the parallels in the Orlando Innamorato and the Faerie Queene has hitherto been presented. Random references to analogues were noted by Upton,1 but most of them remain of little value as positive proof of influence.

In a review-article dealing with four recent monographs, all of which were to some extent devoted to problems connected with the genesis of Zola's novels, M. Jean Onimus points out that it is hard to think of another author in whom such problems can be more satisfactorily studied. The survival of the dossiers of each of the novels in the three great cycles makes it possible to elucidate almost the entire process of composition in respect of each component work and hence to generalize about this process with considerably more assurance than is permissible to the student of any other major French novelist. “Ce que nous cherchons avec tant de difficulté chez Balzac, ce que Stendhal nous livre au hasard de ses ‘pilotis’ et des commentaires en marge de ses manuscrits, ce que Gide nous a donné dans le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, Zola nous le révèle pour toutes ses œuvres et jusque dans le dernier détail.”

In Romania LXXVII (1956), 66 ff. Irénée Cluzel has re-edited three of the Catalan troubadour's poems composed in a more popular vein. It is with the second of them (No. 3 of M. de Riquer's edition, Barcelona, 1947) that we are going to deal here.

In no other part of his writings was Geoffrey Chaucer more original than in the series of sketches of the pilgrims in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Though the Sources and Analogues is able to provide the source or at least an analogue for every complete tale, it gives (no information of any similar series earlier than Chaucer's time. Clearly the plan was the result of “inspiration.” Much has been written, however, on the sources of particular elements in the prologue. It may be worth while to consider in one place these and other features which contributed to the success of Chaucer's design.

Whatever might have been the court's verdict on Pound as an American, had he come to trial in the late 1940's in Washington, his biographers and literary contemporaries have consistently affirmed not only the propriety of the epithet, but also its ineluctable pertinence. To his long-time friend and literary associate, Wyndham Lewis, his Americanism seemed to be of “primary significance.” “Pound is—was always—is, must always remain, violently American,” Lewis wrote in 1949, seeing in him a composite of the gait of Tom Sawyer, the “manly candour” of Whitman, the “tough guy” of Hemingway, and the “strenuousness” of Theodore Roosevelt. “The universality in his work is conscious but it overlies an ineradicable Americanism,” a friend and biographer, Patricia Hutchins, has recently written—a view akin to Donald Davie's conclusion a year earlier that Pound was “thoroughly aware … of himself as indelibly American.”

Virginia Woolf's “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40) develops her most radical ontological and pedagogical insights, which are inseparably connected by her concept “moments of being”—redefined in this essay as pedagogical accidents. This redefinition opens readers to an unexplored dimension of Woolf's late thought: namely, the reorientation of learning and teaching around the creative function of accidents, the unhinged temporality of “sudden violent shock[s]” that repeat their difference across one's lifespan, and the prioritization of feeling. The nonlinear, nonrealist, and nonsequential temporality of these events serves Woolf as a model not only for the memoir but for the double task of learning how to write her life otherwise and of teaching her potential readers the shapes and intensities of their own selves and lives. My reading of Woolf's memoir as a work of “sensuous pedagogy” attempts to account for the importance of feeling to this task.

Spanish poets of the seventeenth century were very fond of the contrast between the physical limitations of men, especially when prisoners,—“ ces eternels envieux des mouches et des oiseaux” (Victor Hugo)—and the freedom of birds that fly at will, or of “ fishes that tipple in the deep.” But nowhere has the comparison been given such artistic form and signal appropriateness as in the mouth of Calderon's hero, Segismundo. This young Titan felt himself fettered by stone walls. They were a real prison to him and he rebelled against his lot. He was not in a mood to admit, had it even occurred to him to do so, the superior advantage of man's mental freedom over the physical freedom of fishes and birds and brutes, or running brooks. But the thought was not original with Calderon, nor, according to Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo, was it original with any of Calderon's immediate predecessors, but went back to the Greek philosopher, Philo. Lope de Vega was probably the first to transplant the conceit to Spanish soil,—and it bore abundant fruit. In one of his early plays, El Remedio en la desdicha, written before the close of the sixteenth century, occur the following verses:

Rendido estoy á tu nobleza, y veo
Que mi ignorancia fué mi propio engaño;
Aunque si amor á todos da disculpa,
¿ Porqué no la tendrán mi amor y celos ?
Si tú, si tus soldados, si los hombres
Si las aves, los peces, si las fieras,
Si todo sabe amor, si todo teme
Perder su bien, y con sus celos propios
Defiende casa, nido, mar y cueva,
Llora, lamenta, gime, y brama; advierte
Que celos y sospechas me obligaron
Al desatino que á tus pies me rinde.

The traditional treatment of the adverb has posed problems of classification in the three languages under consideration. English very has traditionally been classified as an adverb, and the efforts of structural linguists to reclassify it as an intensifier may be extended to French très and Spanish muy as well. However, the three intensifiers do not pattern in the same way, for very patterns with adjectives and adverbs, but not with verbs or nouns; très and muy pattern with adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and with the past participle of verbs. The patterning of très and muy with nouns raises the question of the basis for differentiating adjectives from nouns. While the distinction between these two form classes in English is sometimes arbitrary, the line separating them is even less clear-cut in French and Spanish, languages in which nominalization is more widespread than in English. The unsatisfactory treatment of the three intensifiers in bilingual dictionaries of the French- English and Spanish-English type is due to the failure of lexicographers to link illustrative phrases and sentences to relevant structural features of the languages concerned, a practice all too common in dictionaries not compiled in accordance with scientific principles of lexicography.

The first Italian grammar published in England, in 1550, written by William Thomas, clerk of the Council to King Edward VI. and one of the first Protestant victims of the succeeding reign, contains “a Dictionarie for the better understanding of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante.” The title indicates that the great Italian poets of the trecento were first studied by English readers, and Boccaccio and Petrarch are here named before Dante. Indeed, after a most careful search, I cannot find any Elizabethan translation of any work of Dante. The first English translation of Dante in the British Museum Catalogue is that of Henry Boyd, L'Inferno, in 1785, La Divina Commedia, in 1802.

The letters of Dr. Gui Patin (1601–72) are deservedly famous as a source for seventeenth-century medical matters and other contemporary comment. In a letter dated 23 November 1669 to Dr. André Falconet (1612–91) of Lyon, Patin writes that it is rumored Molière wants to do a comedy about a certain Dr. Cressé and his pending court trial. A month later, 25 December 1669, having given details of the affair in previous letters, Patin writes more specifically: “Le procès de M. Cressé est sur le bureau, mais je n'entends point dire qu'il avance; on m'a dit que M. de Molière prétend en faire une comédie ridicule sous le titre du Médecin fouetté et du barbier cocu” (iii, 728). As far as I know, the outcome of this affair has never yet been presented. The Commentaires de la faculté de médecine for 1669–70 (Vol. xv) which gave more exact data led me to discover in the Archives Nationales the hitherto unmentioned final court settlement, dated 4 February 1670.

Because most early modern readers did not leave behind traces of their reading practices and thus remain anonymous, a more inclusive history of reading requires a willingness to engage in speculation. In the case of Tudor editions of the romance he Historye of Blanchardine, responsible speculation involves resisting the desire for textual stabilities, including the author's name and the work's status as a reprinted text. Doing so reveals that what appear to be reissued editions of William Caxton's version of this romance, Blanchardyn and Eglantine (1489-90), are in fact a network of adapted texts whose representations of gender challenge current understandings of the Elizabethan romance, its producers, and its target audience. More specifically, what seems to be a fragment of the 1597 edition is instead an early example of fan fiction, a modern narrative mode that offers a methodological model for scholars interested in adopting more inspired approaches to material evidence.

The meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society with the Modern Language Association of America on the one hand and with the American Anthropological Association on the other in 1938 illustrates very clearly the wide range of interests covered by the term folklore. A century ago no such term existed, but the need for one was greatly felt. Students of the popular ballad, of popular antiquities, and of superstitions all recognized that they had something in common, and, as soon as the word folklore was proposed in the 1840's, it was adopted, not only by the English-speaking public, but by the whole world. It is now as ubiquitous as the Ford car and moves uneasily in Russian or Hungarian texts, not to speak of such familiar literatures as French or German. During the ninety years in which this word has been spreading over the world, it has extended its meaning until no man today can take all folklore for his province.

Dr. Johnson said of The Two Gentlemen of Verona: “When 1 read this play I cannot but think that I discover both in the serious and ludicrous scenes, the language and sentiments of Shakespear.” But this play has since fared ill with the critics. Ignored by Coleridge, it was passed off noncommitally by Hazlitt with a few quotations from Speed and Julia. The depreciation of the play for various kinds and degrees of ineptness and obtuseness by such observers as Dowden, Chambers, G. P. Baker, Quiller-Couch, Dover Wilson, Tannenbaum, Charlton, and Van Doren, has tended to obscure its true import. Even the well-intentioned defenses of W. W. Lawrence, Alvin Shaler, and S. A. Small have not been able to reinstate Two Gentlemen into a position of genuine significance in Shakespeare's development.

Garrod, in his essay on Keats, equates Wordsworth's “wise passiveness” with Keats's “negative capability.” At least, he fancies that Keats's expression embodies “a quality not essentially different” from Wordsworth's. I contend that, in truth, the two are poles apart.

In context, Garrod is referring to Keats's attitude toward Coleridge, as set forth in his famous letter of December 1817 to his brothers. Going to and returning from a Christmas pantomime with his friends Brown and Dilke, Keats had “not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects”; whence, suddenly “several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously— I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.”2

Das schwache Priteritum ist hinsichtlich seines Ursprungs und seiner Entwicklung in vorhistorischer Zeit vielleicht die am heissesten umstrittene Formengruppe der gennanischen Grammatik. Dass es den Forschern schwer fällt sich vollig miteinander zu verstandigen, daran sind wir ja auch sonst gewohnt. Aber beim schwachen Prateritum scheint der Gegensatz der Ansichten grösser und die Einigung demgemass schwieriger als bei anderen Problemen. Was hilft es, hier von einem dentalen Präteritum zu sprechen, wenn der eine in dem Dental eine idg. Tenuis, der andere darin eine idg. Aspirate oder Spirans sieht? Und wie konnen wir auf Einigung hoffen, wenn wir die Wahl haben, dieses Präteritum mit dem griechischen Passiv-Aorist, dem idg. PassivPartizipium, dem idg. Aktiv-Aorist oder medialen Aorist, dem idg. medialen Perfekt oder gar dem Prasens lateinischer Factitiva zu verbinden? Es wird nicht notig sein, diese Vorschläge bier des Nilhcren vorzuführen und zu priifen. Man findet die Erklärungsversuche, welche bis dahin gemacbt waren, einigermassen vollständig in meiner Monographic Das schwache. Präteritum und seine Berkunft aufgezählt. Das Verzeichnis ist bis auf die Gegenwart weitergeführt von A. W. M. O&t in der Abhandlung “Das schwache Präteritum in den Genmanischen; Sprachen.” Ich kann mir Odé's Urteil über die neueren Theorien in vielen Fallen zu eigen machen. Auch trifft der neue Erklärungsversuch, den er vorlegt, meiner Meinung nach wenigstens bis zu elnem gewissen Grade das Richtige. Aber es bleibt doch ein beträchtlicher Rest von Meinungsverschiedenheit, der zu dem Versuche weiterer Verständigung cintädt.