The following pages are a discussion of the origin of the second half of Chrétien's Ivain; the part of the story, namely, in which the hero wins the title Chevalier au Lion. They are a continuation of a study published in 1903, which dealt chiefly with the first half of the romance. That study, to which frequent reference must necessarily be made, endeavored to show that the Ivain is a partly rationalized fairy mistress story. The kernel of the evidence there presented was a detailed comparison of the Ivain with stories in the Lebor na h-Uidre (LU) and the Book of Leinster (LL), two Irish manuscripts that were actually written before the time of Chrétien de Troyes. The first part of the Ivain was shown to be founded, almost incident for incident, on the well-known Celtic tale, of which the Serglige Conculaind is an ancient example, about a mortal who is invited to fairyland, journeys thither successfully and weds a fairy queen, but disobeys her injunctions, loses her, becomes insane and has to be cured by a magic remedy.

Listening to an orator delivering a speech or to a reader reciting good prose, we may notice, running through the speaker's utterances, a characteristic and persistent tune. The voice rises and falls, increases and diminishes, moves now slowly, now rapidly, throws emphasis upon one phrase and takes it away from another, not waywardly and erratically but in accordance with some underlying pattern or scheme of movement. It is this tune or pattern, in some of its simpler and more obvious features, that I mean to consider in this paper. The pattern is the rhythm of prose, and to chart it and discover its law is to effect for prose what metrical scansion does for verse.

For some reason, the dramatist Kyd almost entirely dropped out of public notice during the 17th and 18th centuries. This is the more remarkable when we remember the popular favor which greeted certainly the Spanish Tragedy and perhaps other of his productions during the last decade of the 16th and the first quarter of the 17th century. It was one of the achievements of 19th century scholarship to restore Kyd to his place among the great Elizabethan dramatists. In this restoration, a single paragraph from Nash's prefatory Epistle to Greene's Menaphon has played a conspicuous role. It has now come to be all but universally accepted by scholars that this paragraph refers to Kyd, and in it are found not a few otherwise unknown facts of his literary history. This paragraph also has the distinction of containing the first reference in the English language to Hamlet; and a study of the context has led students to the opinion that, according to Nash, Kyd was the author of the Ur-Hamlet.

The following discussion of the actual dates of the composition and revision of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women takes up the question at the point where it was left in a previous article on the Prologue as related to its French and Italian sources and models. The attempt was there made to show, on the basis of such relations, that B. was the original version and A. the revision. Assuming the soundness of such a conclusion, is it possible to fix at all definitely the date of each? The present paper essays an answer to that question and includes as a corollary a discussion of the chronology of certain of Chaucer's other works specifically named in one or both forms of the Prologue itself.