Though we are particularly fortunate in knowing a good deal about the life of Chaucer, nevertheless some of the facts are not wholly intelligible. More and more, however, as “men observingly distil them out,” various cruxes are being disposed of. One of the most important of these perplexing problems, which if solved will clear up much besides, is the poet's sudden loss of Aldgate in 1386. This year was a crucial one in the poet's career: for the political happenings at that time—not only were national issues at stake, but London was passing through its most critical period in history—seriously affected Chaucer's welfare. There is, also, a possibility that the poet's sudden misfortune at that time is reflected in some of his poems.

The Endymion myth, which grew up in the popular traditions of Elis in the Peloponnesus and of the Ionian cities in Caria, received literary treatment in a lyric poem of Sappho which is now lost. It does not exist in full development in extant classical literatures, although allusions to it are found in Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, Apollodorus, Pausanias, Lucian, Ovid, and Cicero. After the Renaissance when the study of classical literature was revived, it became a favorite subject for poetical allusion in the literatures of modern Europe. But the only poet before Keats who treated the myth at length was Michael Drayton; and, therefore, if Keats owed any suggestions for the plot of Endymion to his predecessors, he would most likely have derived them from Drayton.

In the article on the life of Henry Mackenzie in Lives of Eminent Scotchmen is contained the statement that he translated, together with two or three other dramatic pieces from the German, Lessing's Set of Horses. A search for these translations disclosed that they appeared anonymously in 1792 under the title Dramatic Pieces from the German. The little volume contains a translation of Goethe's Die Geschwister, Gesner's The Conversations of a Father with his Children, and Emdorff's Set of Horses. It is evident that the statement ascribing the Set of Horses to Lessing is inaccurate. A colleague, who has investigated Mackenzie's life and works, has assured me that Mackenzie frequently makes incorrect statements concerning his own writings so that it is very difficult to ascertain the actual facts concerning them.

The contribution made to the liberalization of neo-classical criticism by the small but interesting body of Shakespearean comment in the Tatler and the Spectator, deserves more than the passing mention it has hitherto received. The first to point out the entirely unclassical character of some of this material was apparently John Foster, Victorian biographer and man of letters. He notes specifically the absence of any set analysis or fine spun theory about Shakespeare's art, and the spontaneous outbursts of admiration for his philosophy, poetry, ethics and passion, which characterize much of Steele's remarks. G. A. Aitken, in his edition of the Tatler, refers to Steele's plan for improving the “vitiated tastes” of his contemporaries by means of stage representations of the noble characters of Shakespeare and others. Lounsbury discusses Addison's attitude towards the problems of poetic justice and tragi-comedy. Mr. Harold V. Routh observes that Steele discovered in Shakespeare a sublime moralist of middle class life at a time when a poet was generally valued for his rhetoric rather than for any serious reflections on men and manners. Professor Nichol Smith, in his volume of Shakespearean essays, dwells upon Addison's attitude towards Shakespeare's disregard of the “rules,” that veritable touchstone of neo-classical criticism. These remarks are obviously in the nature of chance observations. No attempt has yet been made, as far as the writer is aware, to examine this critical opinion in its relation to the whole history of eighteenth century criticism of Shakespeare. This, therefore, is the purpose of the present paper.

“Of all the great German writers, Wieland's mind is the most French,” remarked Henry Crabb Robinson to Madame de Staël. “I am aware of it,” was her reply, “and therefore I do not think much of him. I like a German to be a German.”1 Had these two hero-worshippers become a bit better acquainted with Schiller than they were, it is easily conceivable that they might have made some such observation concerning him, substituting in the foregoing formula “English” for “French”; for, with all his characteristically German idealism, Schiller, whose “love of freedom, reverence for women, enthusiasm for the fine arts” the same Madame de Staël emphasizes, had much in common with the English temperament.

The troubled tone and unsettled mood of Drayton's The Shepheards Sirena at once calls to the reader's mind Drayton's statement that in his pastoral poems he wrote “of most weightie things.” Rarely ever does this statement seem to be applicable to Drayton's pastorals, for though in many of them there is some veiled allusion to contemporaries, it hardly seems to be “weightie,” even from Drayton's point of view. In The Shepheards Sirena, however, there is the atmosphere of a dark conceit; things of weight, at least to Drayton, seem to be dimly shadowed forth. Dorilus, a shepherd well past his younger days, is cast “in sorrowes deepe” by the necessity of deciding between two courses of action in his relations with a fair shepherdess, the “Bright Sirena”:

Hard the Choise I haue to chuse,
To my selfe if friend I be,
I must my Sirena loose,
If not so, shee looseth me.

Everyone is agreed that the historical importance of The Siege of Rhodes easily surpasses its intrinsic interest, and everyone knows that the play was one of the most influential of the pioneer works of Restoration drama—and of the heroic drama in particular. Even those who like to discount the value of “source-hunting” in general will be inclined to admit its usefulness in establishing the antecedents and relationships of a work which in so many ways marks the beginnings of a new era. It is not surprising, therefore, that the sources of the play have been studied with care and to good effect. One fact about them has been established so clearly by the several investigators that it may be dismissed here with a mere mention; namely, that D'Avenant drew chiefly upon Knolles's Historie of the Turkes (1603) for such incidents of the historical siege of Rhodes as he wished to use. As D'Avenant tells us, however, he undertook to “soften” for the sake of variety, “the martial encounters between Solyman and the Rhodians” by “intermingling the conjugal vertues of Alphonso and Ianthe.” The scholars who have looked into the matter are not altogether agreed as to where to place the ultimate blame for the softening: as to how much of the romantic story D'Avenant may have invented, or whence he may have drawn it.

If Chaucer knew nothing at all of the Decameron, his failure to get hold of it has every aspect of mystery. If Chaucer was acquainted with that rich human document, the use which he made of it is to many of us a still greater mystery. Accordingly we are led to inquire how much the England of Chaucer's time, or even of the century after his death, may have known concerning Boccaccio's hundred tales, aside from the story of Griselda's persecution told at second- or third-hand. The facts concerning England's discovery of the Decameron are of course not summed up in what we know about Painter.

“Cain's jaw-bone, that did the first murther!” Is there anything more in this phrase than meets the casual eye? Though the skull and jaw-bone of Hamlet's brooding comment are without doubt human, it has been suggested by no less an authority than the late Professor Skeat that here is an allusion to an old tradition according to which Cain killed Abel with the jaw-bone of an ass. The suggestion might seem almost fantastic were it not for several corroborative circumstances: namely, that the tradition was English; that it was wide-spread and familiar; that it found a place in the mystery plays; and that Shakspere was not unaccustomed to making allusions to the primitive and cruder art of the religious drama.

Without the last nine years of William Blake's life, and without a few letters, we should have, on one side, his writings; on the other side, the works of his biographers, and between, a great gulf fixed, where the unpremeditated record of his everyday friends and companions ought to be. But these nine years throw a bridge across the gulf, a bizarre bridge, to be sure, the foundations of which, nevertheless, go down to the rock of first-hand evidence. During them he was as companioned as, in the just preceding years, he had been neglected; during them he was known and observed by a variety of men, quack astrologers, young painters, a persistent reporter, a steady-going friend.

Professor Alwin Thaler's paper, “Strolling Players and Provincial Drama after Shakspere,” was of particular interest to me for the reason that his interpretations and conclusions were based so extensively upon the Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft, a document which I have taken as the subject for repeated studies. Indeed, in attempting to illustrate the life of Holcroft, radical, novelist, and playwright, I had myself been led to collect a considerable amount of material relating to the strollers of the eighteenth century. In presenting the notes which follow my purpose is to offer an additional contribution to the subject, supplementing the material assembled by Professor Thaler, but taking pains not to duplicate his references.

When, at the end of 1664, the second list of donations to authors and wits appeared—awarded by Colbert upon the recommendation of Chapelain,—it presented again, like the one of the preceding year, a mixture of feeble and profuse poetasters and of writers of outstanding value. Corneille, Racine and Molière contrasted oddly with Benserade, Cassagne, or Cotin. As in 1663, some of the most quarrelsome watchdogs of contemporary literature—La Serre, Furetière, and the brothers Boileau,—had been forgotten, intentionally or not. Chapelain, always over-anxious to please everybody and the minister, had committed a tactical mistake in excluding these satiric wits. That they would attack him at once was quite consistent with the literary customs of the time and with the habits of the Genus irritabile of all centuries. Moreover, his name was a symbol of a passing generation in literature, against which the New School was arrayed in battle. The first epigrams against Pucelain were coined, no doubt, during the gay after-dinner hours in one of the renowned Cabarets, or during an animated discussion in one of the literary drawing-rooms. When their authors or the listeners took the pains of noting them down, they were circulated in more or less reliable manuscripts and generally attributed to several among the literati. There can be no doubt that the greater number of these ephemeral satires, parodies, vaudevilles, and the like, have perished; others have remained unpublished. The best known among these satires is the celebrated Cid parody, Chapelain décoiffé, which, composed glass in hand at a riotous feast, was soon recited everywhere and handed around in numerous copies—to the lasting dishonor of Chapelain's venerable wig and of the mediocrities he steadfastly protected.

The romantic career of that unhappy favorite of Queen Elizabeth, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, like the histories of Mary Stuart and of the Maréchal de Biron, has been often used as a subject for tragedy in Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English. Several of these plays have been studied more or less carefully at different times, so that I shall not do more than summarize those versions briefly before passing on to my main subject, the relation between Niccolo Biancolelli's Regina Statista d'Inghilterra and its commedia dell'Arte variants, of which the one presented here is hitherto unpublished.

Pater's thought is thoroughly pervaded by the Teutonic element; indeed, when he begins his essay, Apollo in Picardy, with an unidentified quotation which reads like a synthesis of his own reflections and credits it to “a writer of Teutonic proclivities,” the observant reader is inclined to suspect that Pater is really quoting from himself. Even if this identification should prove to be mistaken, Pater's interest in Goethe, in Hegel, and in Winckelmann still points to his indebtedness to Tuetonic thought, for the substance of his work constantly shows how the ideas of these Germans fertilized his own thinking on such matters as the aim and ideal of life, the fundamental principles of æsthetic theory, Romanticism as a mood of the mind, Greek art and Greek mythology. The present paper is not concerned with this Teutonic influence in all of its phases, but confines itself to a single theme, to be traced not only in Pater's critical essays but also in his more creative and fanciful pieces, in which an idea derived from Heinrich Heine comes to its blossoming. Pater met with this idea in the writings of Heine as early as 1869 and he continued to show his interest in it down to 1893, so that its influence is discernible throughout almost the whole course of his literary career.

Probably none of Victor Hugo's works has sources more complicated than Quatrevingt-treize. Accordingly, in order so far as possible to avoid confusion, the following paper has been divided into three parts, of graduated complexity. In the first part, a study is made of minor details in Quatrevingt-treize which Hugo borrowed from Blanc, Duchemin-Descepeaux, Lamartine, Garat, Du Rosel, the official Moniteur, as well as from other sources. The second part is devoted to the principal characters in Quatrevingt-treize, Marat, Robespierre, Danton; Cimourdain, Lantenac, Gauvain; l'Imânus and Michelle Fléchard. An attempt is made to discover the origins of the principal elements of these characters, and to demonstrate, to some extent, how these elements are welded together. The third part deals with the general plan of Quatrevingl-treize.