Among the classical scholars in Spain in the latter half of the sixteenth century, Antonio Agustín occupies an important place. Born on March 4, 1517 at Saragossa, he attended the Universities of Alcalá and Salamanca, and in 1536 went to Italy and studied at Bologna and Padua. During a second sojourn at Bologna, he profited by the instruction of Andrea Alciato and became acquainted with the methods of the nova jurisprudentia, which sought to replace the study of scholastic commentators by careful consultation of the original sources. He went to Florence in 1541 to study the celebrated manuscript of the Pandects and there prepared his great work, Emendationum et opinionum libri, in which he questioned the accuracy of Politian's collation of the famous manuscript. This work was published at Venice in 1543 and won him the esteem of the most noted scholars of the time, a remarkable achievement for the young man of twenty-six years.

No investigator of the expressed theory of pre-Richardsonian fiction need labor long before he discovers that all the declared aims of writers of prose fiction may probably be reduced to five: desire to entertain the reader, to edify him, to impart information to him, to depict life for him, to arouse his emotions. Gradually, however, if the student analyze these intentions, he will become aware of what might be called a sixth expressed aim—the conscious effort of an author to gain the implicit credence of the reader. Yet this effort is so much more than a mere expressed aim that it is perhaps best described as a striving toward a crude form of realism. As such, and in its effect upon both content and structure of nearly all types of early fiction, it merits close study. And nothing save quotation upon quotation can indicate the hold upon pre-Richardsonian fiction of this effort to force belief—so the movement may well be termed. For the phrase, “conscious effort,” does not here imply any consideration of such points as the grave, matter-of-fact tone of Robinson Crusoe or the carefully-maintained scale of measurement in Gulliver's Travels. Only direct remarks in prefaces—only deliberate interpolations of theory into the body of a narrative—will here be used as evidence.

The personal history of Mrs. Behn, commonly called the first Englishwoman to earn her livelihood by authorship, has long been regarded as unusually interesting. The daughter of a barber named John Johnson, she was baptized at Wye, Kent, 10 July, 1640. She was buried in London, 20 April, 1689. We find that her career, as generally related, falls into three principal episodes. (1) With a relative whom in Oroonoko she calls her father, and who was appointed lieutenant-governor of Surinam, she went to that colony, where she met the royal slave who is the hero of her story, and where she remained until about 1658. (2) She married a London merchant of Dutch extraction, named Behn, but was widowed by 1666. (3) In the latter part of 1666, while acting as a political agent at Antwerp, she gained, through a Dutch lover of hers named Vander Albert, early information of the famous raid by De Ruyter on the English ships in the Thames and Medway; but her timely warning was ridiculed by the British government officials, and she retired from the secret service to devote herself to literature. Momentary doubts whether these data are not in some particulars inaccurate have occasionally been expressed during the last sixty years; but the suspicions, never very strong, have always quickly died away. The story as outlined above has been substantially accepted and retold, not only by the compilers of popular works of reference, but by scholars like Walter Raleigh, Richard Garnett, W. H. Hudson, H. S. Canby, and Miss C. E. Morgan, as well as by those who have made a special study of Mrs. Behn,—namely Edmund Gosse, P. Siegel, and E. A. Baker.

Marc-Michel Rey, l'éditeur d'Amsterdam, ne fut pas seulement le premier qui imprima, d'après les manuscrits de l'auteur, le Discours sur l'Inégalité la Lettre à D'Alembert, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Le Contrat social, la Réponse à l'Archevêque de Paris, et les Lettres de la Montagne; il fut en outre un ami de Rousseau, fidèle, généreux, sincère. Il a droit, dans la biographie du citoyen de Genève, à une place beaucoup plus grande que celle qu'on lui a accordée jusqu'ici. Nous avons sur lui une quantité de renseignements inédits dans les Lettres de Rey à Rousseau, conservées à la Bibliothèque de la Ville de Neuchâtel, en Suisse. Nous avions d'abord pensé publier telle quelle cette assez volumineuse correspondance; et puis nous avons renoncé parcequ'il nous a paru que les frais seraient disproportionnés avec la valeur d'une partie de ces lettres; et nous nous sommes arrêtés à la façon de procéder dont ces pages donnent un échantillon, c. à. d. draînant tout ce qui s'y trouve de nouveau et d'utile sur chaque sujet particulier.

Owing to the lack of a complete Corpus of the Sicilian poets, the student of this period has to seek the repertory of the group in a number of different sources, and it is in the hope of greatly lessening his labors that the following study has been prepared, offering the essential materials in a compact form, and so arranged that it may be quickly and easily consulted. First we discuss the constitution of the Sicilian group of the age of Frederick II, then give an alphabetical list of the poets, with a few biographical notes and references under each, and the numbers of their poems, in the accompanying Index of First Lines. In the Index of First Lines there will be found under each poem references to the important manuscripts and editions; also an indication of the metrical scheme. As such a collection of material offers a natural opportunity for an examination of the metrical forms of the period, an analysis of the technique of the canzone and the sonnet is added.

A Warning for Fair Women was published anonymously in 1599, with the statement on the title-page that it had been “lately diuerse times acted by the right Honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his Seruants.” The attribution of the play by Edward Phillips to John Lyly is too absurd for serious consideration. Almost as absurd is Collier's attribution of the play to Shakespeare. Fleay suggested Thomas Lodge, though not without hesitation, for he adds the warning: “I cannot state too emphatically that any attribution of this play to Lodge is conjectural, and founded less on positive evidence than on the method of exhaustion.” The “method” referred to is thus explained: “The other writers for the Chamberlain's men at this time were Shakespeare and Jonson. Objectors to my hypothesis of Lodge's authorship may adopt one of these, or (the usual resource) imagine some unknown playwright not elsewhere heard of.” But Lodge was probably not engaged in play-writing at this time; so that according to Fleay's “method” we should be forced to choose between Shakespeare and Jonson.

In an interesting article on the Shepheards Calender, Professor Greenlaw has argued that “outside of a small circle even the authorship of the Shepheards Calender was unknown for a considerable time after its publication, and that the work itself attracted no great attention until the popularity of the Faerie Queene made the earlier poems of the author important” (p. 423). He further speaks of the praise which Sidney bestowed upon the Calender as “singularly cold” (p. 420) and explains the fact on the basis of his theory that Spenser, as well as Sidney and Leicester, was in disgrace at the time of the Alençon negotiations, so that “it would not have been politic for Sidney to praise too highly a work under suspicion in itself and written by a man whom it had been found expedient to send out of the country” (p. 450).