bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
Authors: Holt Lee Elbert
Published: February 2007

During most of his life Samuel Butler carried a note-book in his pocket in which he wrote down thoughts that he wanted to preserve. After 1874, in an attempt to make his copious collection more useful and interesting, he began to revise the entries, transcribing them into a larger book, and keeping an index. For eighteen years he followed this system until his collection had grown so enormous that it was once more disorganized and hard to use; then, in 1891, he began a second thorough revision, re-editing all the notes, copying them neatly on good paper and, when enough pages had been filled, having them bound into large volumes provided with careful indexes. He used copying ink in this work or had his secretary Alfred use the typewriter, and as an insurance against total loss of the notes by fire he made a pressed copy which was kept in the rooms of his friend Henry Festing Jones. By the time of Butler's death in 1902 his notes had grown to fill six large volumes of about two hundred pages each. These volumes were bought by Mr. Carroll A. Wilson and are now in the possession of the Chapin Library at Williams College as part of the Butler collection.
The Planet Portraits of Robert Henryson
Authors: Stearns Marshall W.
Published: February 2007

The description of the seven planets in the Testament of Cresseid by the Scottish Chaucerian, Robert Henryson (c. 1425–c. 1500), is perhaps the most lively and arresting in English literature. Approximately one-third of the poem is devoted to the planets, and they play an essential role in the trial and punishment of Cresseid, who becomes a leper here and hereafter in the Troilus-Criseyde story. This note is an attempt to clear the way for the study of the origins and sources of the planet portraits and to shed some light on the competence of the poet.

By substituting astrological qualities for the mythological qualities of the ancient gods, Chaucer had pioneered and had made poetic capital of the astrological magic in which his age had come to believe. Henryson took full advantage of this fact. The Testament of Cresseid contains many elements of astrology: in the opening lines, the poet dates the poem by means of an astronomical periphrase in which he describes the Sun and Venus in opposition, a combination which signifies “A barren time … the Native impudent and bold in his wantonnesse and Lust, wholly occupied in scurvy and sordid actions, whereby he incurres great Infamy, Scandall and Disgrace,” and which sets the tone for the burden of the poem; the planets are ranked according to their astrological order, and Mercury is chosen speaker, a choice which accords with his influence over logic and debate; the choice of Saturn and Cynthia to deliver the verdict of leprosy is fitting, according to the astrological qualities of the humours, and the poet's treatment of the disease shows a detailed knowledge of astrological medicine.
Richard Taverner's Interpretation of Erasmus in Proverbes or Adagies
Authors: White Olive B.
Published: February 2007

For his work on the Bible in English and for his translations from Erasmus, Richard Taverner has had a modest importance in early Tudor literature. In other respects, he has been an easy man to disregard. He misses the pioneer's distinction in both his fields; he obscures the interest of his own utterances by offering them in the guise of translation; even what we know of his life suggests no highly individual achievement. In summary, his biography traces a path well worn by his generation of humanists—scholars trained at Renaissance Oxford and Cambridge, men matured in the dramatic, dangerous school of experience that was England between the fall of Wolsey and the death of Henry VIII. The times welcomed such a useful scholarship as Taverner devoted to education, politics, and religion. We, in turn, may increase our understanding of those times by recognizing, not simply the work he did, but also his methods and some of his results. For such a study, his little book preserved in exemplars of six editions, Proverbes or Adagies … gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus, has the double interest of revealing more of Taverner's thought than we should expect to find in it and of helping to color the fame of Erasmus in England.
Is Gargantua a Reworking of Pantagruel I?
Authors: Armitage R. H.
Published: February 2007

Critics are now agreed that Rabelais' Gargantua, which takes its place as the First Book in the author's complete works, was composed and published approximately two years after the first book of Pantagruel. The latter must have appeared first at the autumn fairs at Frankfort in 1532, and it is highly improbable that the former was launched before August of 1534. During the two intervening years the author had suffered the censorship of his first work in October, 1533, and had profited from his first trip to Rome in the entourage of DuBellay early in 1534. Quite some time, eight years to be exact, elapsed after the publication of the Gargantua before the appearance of his promised continuation of the Pantagruel in 1542.
“Ist Fortzusetzen”: Zu Goethes Gedicht auf Schillers Schaedel
Authors: Mautner Franz H. , Feise Ernst , Viëtor Karl
Published: February 2007

Karl Viëtors Studie in PMLA, LIX, 142–183 hat unter anderem überzeugend dargetan, daβ der Zusatz Ist fortzusetzen zu Goethes Gedicht auf Schillers Schädel weder eine Wiederaufnahme des Wilhelm Meister im Sinn hat, noch besagen will, daβ das Gedicht als solches fortgesetzt, gewiβermaβen verlängert hätte werden sollen. Goethe habe vielmehr an ein zweites oder eine Reihe weiterer Gedichte gedacht, die sich mit Problemen der Naturphilosophie befaβt hätten, wie sie im Gedicht angedeutet sind.
Des Guillemets Qui Changent Le Climat Poétique: (Correction et commentaire à la première strophe du Fragment d'Alexandre d'Albéric)
Authors: Spitzer Leo
Published: February 2007

Dans la Xe édition de la Chrestomathie de l'ancien français de Bartsch-Wiese on lit le début du plus ancien texte a. fr. traitant la matière d'Alexandre, dans la forme suivante:

Dit Salomon al primier pas,quant de son libre mot lo clas,'est vanitatum vanitaset universa vanitas.'poyst lou me fay m'enfirmitas,toylle s'en otiösitas,solaz nos faz' antiquitas,que tot non sie vanitas.

Cette façon de ponctuer, qui ne se trouve pas dans les autres éditions (qui, il est vrai, n'introduisent pas de ponctuations: P. Meyer, Stengel etc.), semble intimer que le poète, après avoir cité les deux lignes extraites de l'Ecclésiaste, veut nous apprendre que, étant infirme, il a trouvé moyen (il lui ‘est donné lieu’: l'explication de Foerster, ZRPh, vi, 423) d'occuper ses loisirs (forces) par l'étude de l'antiquité—étude qui nous délivre de la vanité du monde [et ainsi il étudiera l'histoire du héros ancien Alexandre]. Le poète (Foerster dit expressément: “meine [des Verfassers] Krankheit”) aurait alors mis en scène sa propre personne en nous informant de l'état de sa santé physique (infirme comme celle du vieux roi biblique)—et peut-être morale (serait-il sage comme Salomon?). Le cas rappellerait trop la fameuse explication, désormais datée, du dernier vers de la Chanson de Roland par feu Holbrook: [Ci falt la geste] que Turoldus declinet ‘car la vie de T. décline’ = il est vieux et ne peut plus continuer (après avoir composé 4000 vers!). Les anciens trouvères n'étaient pas à ce point autobiographical-minded—ils effaçaient leur personnalité devant les grands thèmes qu'ils chantaient. C'est le biographical approach des critiques modernes qui soupçonne des personnalités là où il n'y a qu'objectivité.
Donne's Prosody
Authors: Stein Arnold
Published: February 2007

From the Elizabethan prosodists we shall obtain no more than a few scattered hints concerning Donne's versification. Prosodists are notoriously conservative, and the Elizabethans are no exception. Putten-ham, in spite of his evident pleasure in the sound of verse, still places his confidence in the final arbitration of the eye; and it is thus that he comments on the diagram of a stanza-form: “most times your occular proportion doeth declare the nature of the audible; for if it please the eare well, the same represented by delineation to the view pleaseth the eye well, and e converso.” This ocular prosody leads him to say that “it is somewhat more tolerable to help the rime by false orthographie then to leave an unplesant dissonance to the eare by keeping trewe orthographie and loosing the rime, as for example it is better to rime Dore with Restore then in his truer orthographie, which is Doore.” Even with the rise of lyric and of dramatic blank verse this attitude does not disappear. Campion, for instance, makes the sensible remark that normal accent “is diligently to be observ'd, for chiefely by the accent in any language the true value of the sillables is to be measured.” And he knows that “we must esteeme our sillables as we speake, not as we write; for the sound of them in a verse is to be valued, and not their letters.” Yet he inconsistently admits length by position, as in Trumpington.
Comment Descartes Combattit Gassendi
Authors: Beyer Charles Jacques
Published: February 2007

On a voulu voir dans le “cartésianisme dynamique ”de la fin du XVIIè siècle un mélange de méthode cartésienne et d'empirisme positiviste. Cette idée, que nous avons récemment critiquée, méconnaît l'opposition radicale qui sépare le rationalisme cartésien de la pensée empiriste. Il est intéressant, à ce propos, de remarquer que Descartes, lui, ne s'y est pas trompé; et son attitude envers Gassendi, ainsi d'ailleurs qu'envers Hobbes, nous le montre bien. Nous nous proposons dans cette étude d'examiner, d'un point de vue psychologique, les relations de Descartes avec Gassendi, et, sous l'opposition des doctrines, celle des tempéraments. Car il y a une histoire bien humaine derrière le célèbre dialogue: “O Esprit!—O Chair!”
Thomas Manns Goethebild (Fortsetzung)
Authors: Blume Bernhard
Published: February 2007

In einer Rede auf Gerhart Hauptmann, in deren Mittelpunkt, wieder einmal, das Thomas Mann so tief anrührende Problem der Krankheit steht, kommt der Dichter auf das Thema der Wende zu sprechen, jenen Augenblick der Umkehr, wo die geistige Neigung zur Krankheit sich als Beginn höherer Gesundheit erweist. Thomas Mann führt das aus an drei Erkenntnissen seines Helden aus dem “Zauberberg. ”An einem bestimmten Punkte des Romans, sagt Thomas Mann, äußere der junge Mann die Einsicht: “Und wenn man sich für das Leben interessiert, so interessiert man sich namentlich für den Tod. Tut man das nicht? “ Aber eine Zeit vergeht, fährt Thomas Mann fort, und zu dem selben Gedankenpunkt zurückgekehrt, wendet der Lernende das Aperçu; er sagt: “Denn alles Interesse für Tod und Krankheit ist nichts als eine Art von Ausdruck für das am Leben. ”Und hier nun entdeckt der junge Mann den Weg, von dem im dritten Erkenntnissatz die Rede ist, jenem vielzitierten Satze, der in der Tat einer der Kernsätze des Thomas Mannschen Lebensgefühls ist: “Zum Leben gibt es zwei Wege, der eine ist der gewöhnliche, direkte und brave. Der andere ist schlimm, er führt über den Tod, und das ist der geniale Weg!”
Tamburlaine's Malady
Authors: Parr Johnstone
Published: February 2007

The considerable amount of commentary published on Marlowe's Tamburlaine in recent years makes highly significant the fact that Tamburlaine's catastrophe remains one of the unsatisfactorily explained enigmas of the play. The unwary reader doubtless assumes that at the end of Tamburlaine II the Scythian conqueror simply—though somewhat vitriolically—dies, and that Marlowe should be called to account for marring his play with a badly-motivated catastrophe. The careful reader of Marlowe's text doubtless perceives (or at least suspects) that Tamburlaine's “distemper” at the end of the play is linked definitely with Renaissance medical, physiological, psychological, and astrological concepts. Yet no satisfactory analysis of how these concepts are involved in Tamburlaine's death has been made. Carroll Camden hazards the suggestion that Tamburlaine's death is immediately resultant upon his choleric humour. Miss Una Ellis-Fermor, the most recent editor of Tamburlaine, attempts to supply adequate annotation regarding the physician's diagnosis of Tamburlaine's “distemper,” but her footnotes are woefully inadequate as well as inaccurate. Don Cameron Allen, believing that “Marlowe conceived of his hero as a typical representative of the fortunati,” a Renaissance type of fortunate man upon whom Fortune never failed to smile, contends that Tamburlaine comes to no catastrophe at all but triumphantly “dies of old age.” Roy W. Battenhouse has recently considered Tamburlaine an instrument by means of which God, in His providential justice, scourges the world, and then, when the mundane chastisement is completed, strikes down His tyrannical instrument. Although in this article Professor Battenhouse does not explain, or even consider, the express bodily workings of Tamburlaine's malady, in his recent book he assumes (following Camden) that Tamburlaine is—among other things—a typical choleric man, and affirms that the physician's diagnosis indicates that Tamburlaine dies in a mad frenzy brought on by that disastrous affliction of the “humours” which Elizabethans termed choler adjust.
Goethe, Freiheit und Sturm-und-Drang
Authors: Ehrlich Godfrey
Published: February 2007

Gewöhnlich charakterisieren literarhistorische Betrachtungen den Sturm-und-Drang als eine dichterisch-weltanschauliche Revolution, die in wuchtiger Auflehung gegen die Aufklärung für die Freiheit des Gefühls, der Individualität und der literarischen Form kämpfte. Dabei wird Goethe, dem Dichter des Götz, Urfaust, Werther und anderer artverwandter Dichtungen eine führende Rolle zugeschrieben. In seinem klassischen Werke Geist der Goethezeit hat Korff eingehend den philosophischen Hintergrund für diese Bewegung gezeichnet und nachgewiesen, wie sie sich in der Dichtung im Sinne politischer, sozialer, metaphysischer und formaler Freiheit ausgewirkt hat.
Marie De France and the Tristram Legend
Authors: Frank Grace
Published: February 2007

Chievrefueil,the shortest and perhaps the most charming of the lays by Marie de France, has troubled critics because, unlike her other poems, it seems to lack clarity. Is it not fair to assume, however, that in this instance the usual limpidity and forthrightness of Marie's narrative style may have been clouded by her modern interpreters, rather than by Marie herself? I hope to show that to her mediaeval audience the lovely lines of Chievrefueil presented no difficulties whatsoever, needed no esoteric subtleties for their understanding, and that their Old Norse translator as well as the scribes of both our surviving manuscripts readily comprehended Marie's lucid phrases.
Coleridge on the English Language
Authors: Neumann Joshua H.
Published: February 2007

Coleridge's interest in philology, more specifically in English linguistics, was one manifestation—by no means the least important—of his amazing myriad-mindedness. His lectures, essays, notes, and reported conversations abound with allusions, comments, and speculations on the nature and problems of language in general and of English in particular; and his experiments in vocabulary bear additional testimony to his interest in the subject. Although increasing attention has recently been paid to this aspect of his genius, a systematic study of the subject awaits the publication of a definitive edition of his works. Nevertheless, an attempt might be made to examine certain limited phases of his interest in linguistics, particularly his theories about the nature and development of language, his observations on the character of English, and his own remarkable contributions to the enrichment of its vocabulary.
Emerson and the Bardic Tradition
Authors: ADKINS NELSON F.
Published: February 2007

Emerson saw in the art of poetry a process veiled in mystery, and no one fully acquainted with his writings is unaware of the manifold ways in which Emerson approached that mystery in an attempt to explain it. As early as 1838, he began what he hoped would be a long poem on the poet and his art. Occasionally returning to the composition over a period of some years, in the end he left only fragments of his original plan. The essay entitled “The Poet”, published in 1844, integrated more fully many of the conclusions to which Emerson had come on the subject. But still he was apparently unsatisfied. Further early experiments in suggesting the function of the poet are revealed in four poems in the 1847 collection of verses. In “The Problem”, “Saadi”, and “Bacchus” Emerson viewed in different ways the origin of the artist's and poet's power. And in the last poem, entitled “Merlin”, he turned back, for the embodiment of the ideal poet, to the ancient bard.
Richard Dehmels Auseinandersetzung MIT Dem Kultus Des Lebens
Authors: Jászi Von Andrew O.
Published: February 2007

Die Jahrhundertwende ist die Spätzeit der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und ihrer Dichtung. Immer mehr lösen sich die sozialen, geistigen und ethischen Formen auf, denen der Mensch vergangener Epochen eingegliedert war. “In solchen Zeitaltern vereinsamt der geistig Schaffende auf eine eigentümliche Art.” Der Künstler sieht sich der Hülle einer schützenden Tradition beraubt, unter der er seine Werke gestalten könnte. Es erwacht in ihm die Sehnsucht nach einer neuen Daseinsform. Typisch für das fin-de-siècle war diese gemeinsame Not und Sehnsucht, und daß es sonst so wenig Gemeinsames hatte. So geschah es, daß gerade die bedeutendsten Männer der Jahrhundertwende, Nietzsche, George, Hofmannsthal, Rilke oder Dehmel, zu Suchern und “Pilgern” wurden. Doch auch in den Reihen der kleineren Geister verbreitete sich eine angstvolle Unruhe, bis es schließlich kurz vor dem Kriege zu einem allgemeinen, verzweifelten Aufbruch kam. In der Literaturgeschichte pflegt man diese Bewegung als Expressionismus zu bezeichnen.
Inscape and Instress: Further Analogies with Scotus
Authors: Coogan Marjorie D.
Published: February 2007

At the risk of setting up further waves of what Joyce calls the “true scholastic stink” I feel it necessary to add a few more observations to the many already made on the philosophic clarifications of his own aesthetic position that Gerard Manley Hopkins found in Duns Scotus. The attention of critics is becoming more and more absorbed in studying the poetic process itself, the poet's perception of complexity and coherence, and his attempt to express them in terms of aesthetic structure. For such a study Hopkins offers rich materials. His own critical acumen forced him early to coin new terms, “inscape” and “instress”, in order to express more accurately the nature of poetic insight and response. It is apparent, therefore, that the more we can find out about inscape and instress, the more fully we shall grasp the nature of Hopkins' poetic experience, and ultimately the quality of the poems to which it gave rise. It is this purpose which justifies further explorations into fourteenth-century philosophic subtleties.
Point of View in Dickens
Authors: Boege Fred W.
Published: February 2007

It does not seem that Dickens' use of point of view has attracted much attention. The general limits of the subject have been fixed, but what lies between them has seldom been considered. Those limits are pretty-well determined by his dates. Like most other predecessors of George Eliot, Dickens is pre-eminently an objective novelist: hardly to be surpassed in the external treatment of his characters, but quite inadequate when he deals with their inner lives. George Eliot herself has stated this view as well as anyone.

We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character—their conceptions of life, and their emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But… he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness.

Essays (Edinburgh—London: Blackwood, 1885), p. 194 (from the essay “Natural History of German Life”).
“That inward Sphere”: Notes on Hawthorne's Heart Imagery and Symbolism
Authors: Shroeder John W.
Published: February 2007

We can posit, without much initial discussion, at least three requisites to any serious critical study of Hawthorne's writings: we must identify his symbols as such, define the nature of his symbols, and examine their consequences for the total meaning of his works. In some cases, Hawthorne's symbols are painfully superficial; “Little Daffydown-dilly” is a first-rate example. In other cases, they can be got at only by considerable digging. And in still others—I suggest “The White Old Maid” as an instance—they are either not present, or else are so hidden as to cause us to suspect that they may never be satisfactorily brought out.
Donne's Metrical Practice
Authors: Moloney Michael F.
Published: February 2007

Of commentaries upon Donne's prosody there would seem to be no end and of final agreement upon the details of his metrics there would seem to be no hope. Nevertheless, in still another attempt to probe Donne's technical mystery, it may be useful to recall the rather large area of agreement in principle which can now be assumed as undebatable. As opposed to Dryden's implication of a lack of metrical skill the modern student may be certain with Gosse that “what there was to know about prosody was … perfectly known to Donne.” Most careful readers, too, will accept the essential Tightness of Saintsbury's generalization that Donne's poetic manner is not of one piece. Fletcher Melton's thesis-arsis variation principle remains significantly valid despite the injudicious lengths to which it was pushed. Mario Praz has stressed the contrast between the “traditionally poetical and the normally prosiac” in Donne's poetry, and Sir Herbert Grierson has pointed out that historically the “poetic rhetoric” of Donne was continued with characteristic originality by Dryden. Arnold Stein, the most recent contributor to the literature of Donnean prosody, has written with graphic illumination of Donne's use of stress-shift and of his matching of feminine with masculine rime.1Concerning elision in Donne's poetry Stein has commented at some length:
How the French Humanists of the Renaissance Learned Greek
Authors: Stevens Linton C.
Published: February 2007

The history of Hellenism in the French Renaissance includes not only the leading intellectual figures of France, but also the record of an heroic and idealistic enterprise, embarked upon with courage and enthusiasm, carried on with tenacity, and brought to a brilliant and successful conclusion in the numerous editions of the Greek classics which appeared from 1507 to the end of the century. Ample testimony is available concerning the modest beginnings from the time when Robert Gaguin and Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples acquired a smattering of Greek from Gregorio Tifernas during his short stay in France in 1456, to the period of official recognition of Greek studies by the founding of the College royal in 1530.
Sources and Symbols for Melville's Confidence-Man
Authors: Shroeder John W.
Published: February 2007

Melville criticism seems fated to a slow and uncertain growth. We have come a long way, to be sure, beyond the author who dismissed Melville as one among “several minor writers resident in the city or state of New York.” But one chief fault we seem not to have corrected: it is perhaps not over-rash to say that this criticism learns only reluctantly from what it has already accomplished. We know, for instance, that Melville's literary borrowings in such a work as Moby-Dick are worth close scrutiny; we also know that the allegory and the symbol lurk everywhere in Melville's pages. But our knowledge is not regularly put to use as a hypothetical principle for the examination of other works. Now I suggest that there is still a good bit to be done with these tools alone, and in this present paper I mean to try to do a part of it. I propose to identify and follow out certain of the sources and symbols which went into one of Melville's least-known works, The Confidence-Man.
Wordsworth and Ticknor
Authors: Lyon Judson Stanley
Published: February 2007

It has long been known that the journals of George Ticknor contain a most interesting series of impressions of the later Wordsworth, gathered during Ticknor's two visits to Europe in 1819 and 1835–38. Ticknor's description of the aging poet, his family and friends, his way of life, his poetry, and his opinions, while it is certainly not blindly adulatory, serves as an agreeable antidote to the rather astringent and far more widely known description by another travelling American, Emerson. The relations between Ticknor and Wordsworth are of interest not only to students of the two men individually, but also to anyone who is curious about the literary connections between the two cultures, for “the friendly daily intercourse of Wordsworth and Ticknor, a prominent and influential man of letters in America, was undoubtedly also a means of promoting in this country an interest in the poet and his work.”
The Gardens in the Decameron Cornice
Authors: Kern Edith G.
Published: February 2007

The fifth edition of Attilio Momigliano's Storia della Letteratura Iialiana (Milan, 1946) still insists on the mainly ornamental function of the Decameron frame story: “II motivo del verde e dei fiori che inghirlandano la lieta compagnia, ha per lo più la superficialità e la povertà di un ornamento: è più decorazione che pittura. Ed è questo il carattere di tutta l'intelaiatura del libro : un largo affresco aristocratico da guardare nel decoro del complesso senza meditazione e senza analisi” (pp. 79 ff.). Yet a number of modern critics have seen in the cornice more than an ornament and have considered it rather an organic part of the entire work. Some of these writers see symbolic significance in the brigata's departure (or escape) from the stricken city to more ideal places, and their assumptions seem to be borne out by the statements of Boccaccio, who actually leaves no doubt about his artistic intention and consciousness in writing the frame story. However, it seems strange that even those critics who see symbolic significance in the brigata's departure from the city should look at the remainder of the cornice as a single setting and should overlook entirely the group's wanderings from garden to garden. Although a detailed study of these gardens has not hitherto been made, they and the group's peregrinations suggest symbolically the philosophy of the whole work and are thus essential to its interpretation.
Wallace Stevens: The Life of the Imagination
Authors: Pearce Roy Harvey
Published: February 2007

One thing we can now surely say of the achievement of Wallace Stevens: He has written, over some thirty years, a whole and continuing poetry whose subject is the life, the form and function, of the imagination. In the recently published Transport to Summer that subject receives its broadest, most complex treatment, yet remains essentially as it was in his first volume, Harmonium: in his language, a problem in the relation of the imagined to the real; in more general language, of the world as known to the world as outside knowing. From beginning to end what has been basic is the predicament of the man who would know. If, read in and of themselves, the poems in Transport to Summer contrast vividly with those in Harmonium, the contrast is as much an aspect of continuity as of difference and opposition. It is a continuity that represents the growth and achievement which, for good and for bad, make the total of Stevens' work greater than the sum of its parts. Viewed thus, the poems in Transport to Summer are inevitable precisely as they show Stevens trying to finish what he began in Harmonium.
Melville and the Midwest
Authors: Nichol John W.
Published: February 2007

When Herman Melville was twenty years old he started on a trip which was to give him a massive store of detail and imagery for books which he had not yet begun to write. This journey was not one of the sea voyages for which he is so well known; it was an inland trip into the new and exciting trans-Allegheny America, to the very edge of the frontier as it existed in 1840. This early western trip, however, was sandwiched in rather obscurely between two ocean voyages, one to Liverpool in 1839 and the other aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841; very little is really known about it at present. In writing a sketch about his uncle Thomas Melvill (sic) who moved in his latter years to Galena, Illinois, Melville said, “In 1841 [more probably 1840] I visited my now venerable kinsman in his western home.” This allusion, made known only in 1947, constitutes the core of the external evidence of the journey. It is my intention here to use the internal evidence from Melville's work to reconstruct his trip to and from Galena, and to indicate the extensive use of western imagery throughout his writing, imagery which very possibly was suggested from personal observation. It is well known, of course, that Melville made continuous and skillful use of other people's books, and no one can say with certainty whether or not any one of his western allusions was the result of first-hand experience. Yet it is common sense to assume that such a trip occurring at the time that it did in his life and in the life of America must have made a lasting impression on him, and that when he began to write he had little need to borrow what he already owned in abundance.
Pierre Bayle and Moby Dick
Authors: Bell Millicent
Published: February 2007

When Melville bought an English translation of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique early in 1849, he obviously anticipated—with mock alarm—an “influence.” He wrote Evert Duyck-inck, in whose library he may have come across it earlier: “I bought a set of Bayle's Dictionary the other day, & on my return to New York I intend to lay the great old folios side by side & go to sleep on them thro' the summer, with the Phaedon in one hand & Tom Brown in the other.” It was, of course, a moment for influences, the most receptive and most productive period of Melville's life. That year, he saw Mardi and Redburn into print, and made the memorable trip to England with the MS. of White Jacket. A few months later he moved to the Berkshires, where he met Hawthorne and began work on a new book about a whaling voyage. Though we hear no more of Bayle's Dictionary we can feel sure that the program of summer reading was carried out. I shall show how pervasive were its effects on Moby Dick.
Henry Norman Hudson and the Whig Use of Shakespeare
Authors: Stafford John
Published: February 2007

In the winter of 1843–44 Henry Norman Hudson, a Yankee schoolteacher in Alabama, began a series of Shakespearean lectures in Huntsville, Alabama. After repeating the lectures in Mobile and, in the spring, in Cincinnati, he moved on to Boston the following winter, “where the lectures were listened to by large and intelligent audiences, bringing the author both fame and profit.” From Boston he turned to other cities for single lectures or courses of lectures: Emerson pressed “Mr. Hudson's claims on the Curators” of the Concord Lyceum and Hudson lectured to Concord on Macbeth, 1 January 1845; the literati of New York were stirred into one of their innumerable controversies by his relatively unsuccessful course of lectures there in the winter and spring of 1845. Horace Howard Furness in later years remembered “the enthusiasm which attended his early course of lectures in Philadelphia and the unexampled crowds which attended them.” In short, according to his friend A. J. George, “Hudson soon became as popular as Emerson himself in lecture courses in all the great cities.”
Tennyson's Development During the “Ten Years' Silence” (1832–1842)
Authors: Green Joyce
Published: February 2007

Tennyson once remarked that he had been nearer thirty than twenty before he was anything of an artist, and his 1842 poems, which were his first mature publication, pre-eminently reflect an assiduous artistic novitiate. They have also been alleged to show how early he began that feeble self-adjustment to public taste which supposedly undermined his genius. Since they did appeal more directly than their predecessors of 1830 and 1832 to the prepossessions of the middle-class reader, and since they were produced during the years when he was supposedly kept silent by critical hostility, the disinterestedness of the 1842 volumes can plausibly be suspected. Yet important though it is to know how far this charge is justified, no adequate enquiry has as yet been made into the influence exerted on them by the reviews, for the statistics which must be thoroughly sifted before any reliable verdict can be reached have been over-simplified in the only two detailed enquiries which have as yet been published.3
Swift's View of the Dutch
Authors: Leyburn Ellen Douglass
Published: February 2007

In the midst of the large passionateness of Gulliver's Travels it is something of a shock to come upon the passage near the beginning of the Voyage to Laputa: “I OBSERVED among them a Dutchman, who seemed to be of some Authority, although he were not the Commander of either Ship. He knew us by our Countenances to be Englishmen, and jabbering to us in his own Language, swore we should be Tyed Back to Back, and thrown into the Sea.” He continues to be vindictive until Gulliver gets into the canoe: “while the Dutchman, standing upon the Deck, loaded me with all the Curses and injurious Terms his Language could afford.” Swift emphasizes his cruelty by contrast with the lenity of the Japanese pirates. The idea that Dutch Christianity is a mockery suggested by this contrast with the heathen pirates is intensified at the end of the book when Gulliver pretending to be a Hollander yet contrives to avoid trampling on the crucifix, so that the Emperor began to doubt “whether I were a real Hollander or no; but rather suspected I must be a CHRISTIAN. However, for the Reasons I had offered, but chiefly to gratify the King of Luggnagg, by an uncommon Mark of his Favour he would comply with the Singularity of my Humour; but the Affair must be managed with Dexterity, and his Officers should be commanded to let me pass as it were by Forgetfulness. For he assured me, that if the secret should be discovered by my Countrymen, the Dutch, they would cut my Throat in the Voyage” (200–201). Such venom against a particular nation is out of keeping with Swift's claim that the same vices and follies obtain in every civilized country of Europe and that all are equally indicted in his work. Furthermore, it interrupts the artistic scheme which demands that the satire, both general and particular, be digested into the allegory. Swift's rancor against the Dutch must have had a peculiar force to make him thus break the announced largeness of his plan of vexing the world rather than particular nations and break also the artistic pattern of his mockery.
New Light on the Antidoto Against Gongora's “Pestilent” Soledades
Authors: Gates Eunice Joiner
Published: February 2007

Manuscript 3726 in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid contains two unpublished documents concerned with the controversy that raged over the poetry of Luis de Gongora: the Antidoto contra la pestilente Poesia de las Soledades, aplicado a su Autor, para defenderle de si mismo; and the Annotaciones y defensas a la primera Soledad de Don Luis de Gongora by Pedro Diaz de Rivas. It is the purpose of this study to discuss these documents in terms of the new light which they shed on one aspect of this controversy.
Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Comedy
Authors: Krieger Murray
Published: February 2007

Commentators on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, in addressing themselves to a variety of problems, have arrived at equally varied conclusions about the quality of the play. Behind all of these comments, however, whether favorable or unfavorable, lies one common assumption: that the play, on the surface at least, is not entirely satisfactory and therefore requires a somewhat exceptional elucidation. It is conceded even by defenders of the play that there are apparent moral inconsistencies which need to be resolved, that many questionable actions must be accounted for if the Duke and Isabella are to be saved as completely “good” characters. For example, attention is frequently called to the shifty delays and intrigues of the Duke, to Isabella's self-righteous prudery which would at once sacrifice a brother—indeed would violently damn him for asking her to yield her virginity to save him—and sanction the substitution of Mariana for herself. Also there is some question whether the play conforms adequately to a legitimate dramatic genre. Shakespeare has been charged with taking the stuff of tragedy and forcing it into the mold of comedy by asking his audience to accept Angelo's last-minute repentance and marriage to Mariana. Finally, there are certain apparent inconsistencies in the dramatic action, which suggest to some commentators a possible corruption of the text. For example, at the beginning of the play the Duke characterizes Angelo as without blemish; yet later he reveals that Angelo wrongly deserted Mariana before the start of the action. Similarly, Mariana states that she has often been comforted by Friar Lodowick (the disguised Duke), although we know that the Duke has just adopted this disguise.
Giraldi's Hecatommithi, Deca II, 1: Central Version in the Diffusion of the Courtly Cid Theme
Authors: Fucilla Joseph G.
Published: February 2007

Guillén de Castro in his Mocedades del Cid presents us with a characterization of his hero which differs radically from the Cid of the Romancero and the Crónicas. He transforms the renowned medieval warrior into a courtly knight. Ernest Mérimée in the Première Partie des Mocedades del Cid de Guillen de Castro (Toulouse, 1890, page cvi) takes note of the metamorphosis and attributes it to the playwright's inventive genius. But in his brochure, The Cid Theme in France in 1600 (Minneapolis, 1920), Gustave L. Van Robsbroeck casts some doubt on this point of view by bringing to light a novel by Antoine Du Périer, La Eayne et l'Amour d'Arnoul et de Clayremonde (Paris, 1600), containing features similar to the Castro story including the element of courtliness, which, of course, obviously antedate the play. His conclusion is that “There existed a common source—probably a Spanish source—for both the Eayne et L'Amour d'Arnoul et de Clayremonde and Las Mocedades del Cid” (p. 15). Barbara Matulka further enlarges on the subject in her The Cid as a Courtly Hero: from Amadis to Corneille (New York, 1928, pp. 6–40). She notes an early treatment of the courtly Cid theme in Feliciano de Silva's Florisel de Niquea (1532–51) representing books x, xi, and xii of the Amadis series, and cites Jimenez de Ayllon's Los Famosos y Herôicos Hechos del Invencible Cavallero el Cid Ruy Diaz de Bivar (1568) to show that the Cid had been introduced to court prior to the Mocedades and to point out that Ayllon's epic contains situations and details similar to those found in the play. These works, Miss Matulka claims, have been influential through intermediary links between them and our dramatic piece. There is no question but that she is partially correct in her contention, and this we shall endeavor to prove through the discussion of materials which she failed to utilize at the time she made her investigation.
The Meaning of Bonaventure Des Périers' Cymbalum Mundi
Authors: Spitzer Wolfgang
Published: February 2007

The meaning of the four dialogues entitled Cymbalum mundi (published in 1537) is still enigmatic and it is to be feared that the aura of mystery which hovers over this witty, graceful work of incipient French humanism has repelled many readers whereas the Joyeux devis et nouvelles récréactions of the same author have, from La Fontaine to the present day, found a sympathetically appreciative public. It is our conviction that when some of the clouds which weigh heavily on the Cymbalum have been dispersed, this work, so full of genuine esprit gaulois and of a levity borrowed from Greece, will emerge in its true light.
The Biblical Characters of Chaucer's Monk
Authors: Johnson Dudley R.
Published: February 2007

Of the seventeen tragedies which Chaucer's Monk bewails, seven (or eight, if Lucifer merits inclusion in the category) have as protagonists characters drawn from the Bible. It has generally been assumed that for the greater part of the Biblical information in The Monk's Tale Chaucer used the Vulgate, while he gleaned a few details from Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum et Feminarum Illustrium, which served as model for the collection of tragedies. There are, however, in Chaucer's work various divergencies from, or augmentations of, the Biblical narratives which can be explained neither by the Vulgate nor by the Boccaccean collection. In an article entitled “Vincent of Beauvais and Chaucer's Monks Tale,” Miss Pauline Aiken has presented her theory that the influence of Vincent's Speculum Eistoriale may be detected in eight of the Monk's tragedies, but that “among the sources of this tale the first place is to be assigned to the Vulgate Bible.” I should like to propose another source for the Biblical portions of The Monk's Tale: a French version of the Scriptures, the Bible Eistoriale of Guyart Desmoulins.
The Relationship of the Old English Andreas to Beowulf
Authors: Peters Leonard J.
Published: February 2007

Ever since 1879, when Arthur Fritzsche in his discussion of the authorship of Andreas suggested that the Old English religious poem was heavily indebted to Beowulf for its military and seafaring elements, scholars have generally assumed that the Andreas poet not only used Beowulf as a model for his life of St. Andrew but also consciously borrowed therefrom numerous phrases in order to adorn his work with the military spirit of the heroic poem. George Philip Krapp, in his edition of Andreas, discusses at some length the general similarities between Andreas and Beowulf, and then gives as evidence of literary indebtedness the impressive number of approximately 145 verbal parallels to Beowulf distributed throughout Andreas. Klaeber, without reservation, agrees with the conclusions of Krapp; he remarks in his edition of Beowulf that “the legend of Andreas exhibits abundant and unmistakable signs of having been written with Beowulf as a model. Wholesale borrowing of phrases, which more than once are forced into a strange context, and various parallelisms in situations and the general heroic conception of the story leave no shadow of a doubt that the author of the religious poem was following in the footsteps of the great secular epic.”
Robert Burton's Frontispiece
Authors: Mueller William R.
Published: February 2007

In his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton acknowledges the wide diversity of taste in a reading audience and suggests that there are those who desire “a fine frontispiece, enticing pictures.” In the third edition of 1628, there appeared a frontispiece engraved by one Christian Le Blon, little known except for his contribution to the Anatomy. Le Blon's work was probably directed by Burton, for the engravings suggest a detailed knowledge of Burton's text and of the relationship which certain birds, beasts, herbs, and planets bore to the very prevalent disease of melancholy. The frontispiece contains ten “enticing pictures”, and centered within their rectangular mass is the title-page of the two earlier editions; the only significant change in the title-page is in motto—from Macrobius's Omne meum, Nihil meum to Horace's Omne tulit punclum, qui miscuit utile dulci. Burton finds the latter more complimentary to his life's work; he asserts at the beginning of the third partition that his “earnest intent is as much to profit as to please.”
Lamennais, Le “Nouveau Pascal”
Authors: Demorest J. J.
Published: February 2007

Lamennais a rendu actuel le Pascal romantique lancé par Chateau briand, et La Chênaie fut en sorte le Port-Royal du Romantisme. Pascal et Lamennais, comme le rapprochement était facile, émouvant et séduisant! Aussi, l'époque romantique a chaleureusement lié deux noms que les circonstances dramatiques de l'évolution spirituelle de Lamennais ont finalement déliés. Le désir de cette identité était tellement général que, malgré l'évidence, on a longtemps persévéré à les considérer comme solidaires l'un de l'autre.
Cowper and the Evangelicals: Notes on Early Biographical Interpretations
Authors: Hartley Lodwick
Published: February 2007

If Contemporary critics are inclined to see William Cowper as “first and foremost … an Evangelical preacher”,1 the tradition (though not in every respect the judgment) is well founded. Significantly enough, the first serious biographical interpretation of the poet was not a biography at all but an Evangelical sermon preached by the Reverend Samuel Greatheed at Olney on May 18, 1800, shortly after Cowper's death. Greatheed was one of the pupils of the Reverend William Bull— Cowper's beloved “smoke-inhaling Bull”—at his academy in Newport Pagnell for the training of members in the Independent Church; he was a friend and correspondent of Cowper in the last years of the poet's life; and he became one of the first editors of the Eclectic Review when it was founded in 1805.4 The sermon was preached while Greatheed was supply pastor for the Reverend Thomas Hillyard's Independent Congregation in Olney, and it was shortly afterward published at Newport Pagnell and in London.3 In the year of its publication, it appeared in digested form in the Evangelical Magazine4 and quotations from it formed the bulk of “An Account of the Life and Death of William Cowper” in the Gospel Magazine and Theological Review.6 For the next three years it became the basic source of Evangelical comment on Cowper in periodicals and in at least two “memoirs” in book form. However, in spite of its interest as an early biographical source, its importance is greater as an opening gun in the long (and even yet inconclusive) warfare engaged in by critics and biographers over the part that Evangelicalism or Methodism played in Cowper's madness.
Pascal's Montaigne
Authors: Chambers Frank M.
Published: February 2007

A casual reading of the Pensées is apt to leave one with the conviction that Pascal held Montaigne in low esteem. When Montaigne's name appears, it is usually coupled with a word of disapproval. And yet, as everyone knows who has studied the sources of the Pensées, Pascal owes more to Montaigne than to any other writer. Nearly every one of the most famous fragments contains at least a passing allusion to the Essais, and many owe their whole idea, even their expression, to Montaigne. The editors have duly noted these debts, until, as Léon Brun-schvicg says, an edition of the Pensées becomes almost inevitably a partial reëdition of the Essais.1 Even in the matter of style, Montaigne seems to have exerted a considerable influence. It is evident, then, that Pascal read Montaigne carefully and extensively, that he was profoundly impressed by him, and that he saw much in him to admire. On the other hand it is equally evident, from the explicit criticisms, that he found Montaigne distasteful, even reprehensible. How can we explain this double attitude? The present paper is an attempt to do so.