Thomas Warton's Observations on the ‘Fairy Queen’ of Spenser has hardly yet received due recognition as the first important piece of modern historical criticism in the field of English literature. By the variety of its new tenets and the definitiveness of its revolt against pseudo-classical criticism by rule, it marks the beginning of a new school. Out of the turmoil of the quarrel between the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’ the pseudo-classical compromise had emerged. The ‘moderns’, by admitting and apologizing for a degree of barbarity and uncouthness in even their greatest poets, had established their right to a secure and reputable place in the assembly of immortals, although on the very questionable ground of conformity with the ancients and by submitting to be judged by rules which had not determined their development. It was thus by comparisons with the ancients that Dryden found Spenser's verse harmonious but his design imperfect; it was by applying the classical rules for epic poetry that Addison praised Paradise Lost, and that Steele wished an ‘Encomium of Spencer also.‘

The Middle English metrical paraphrase of the gospel narrative bearing the title La Estorie del Euangelie has been printed hitherto only from the fragmentary text in the Vernon MS. Indeed, Horstmann was not aware that any other MS. of this poem existed. In the following pages, the Evangelie is printed from two additional MSS.: (1) a fragment of 519 lines in Dulwich Coll. MS. XXII (D), which Sir George Warner dates about 1300, and (2) a complete text from Bodl. MS. Add. C 38 (B), which according to Mr. Madan was written between 1410 and 1420.

No reader of Renaissance literature need be reminded that when Spenser wrote, friendship rivalled love as a poetic theme. High friendships give life whatever good it has, says one of Castiglione's courtiers; and the Elizabethan gentleman agreed with him. If the Elizabethan gentleman was also a story-teller, the thought of friendship, it seems, usually put happy devices into his plot-making, as the thought of Helen's beauty, if he was a poet, kindled his style. Yet Spenser, who himself enjoyed friendships with the best, and who of all men should have risen to the theme of friendship, wrote of it very lamely. At least, so his critics decide. Their general verdict is that of the six books in the Faerie Queene the fourth, on the virtue of friendship, is, in spite of splendid episodes, the least satisfactory as a story and the least comprehensible as an allegory.

If there were ever an occasion when, to paraphrase the words of Sir Benjamin Backbite, a neat rivulet of text might meander through a meadow of marginal annotation, the Finnsburg Episode would provide it. Hardly any passage in Beowulf has gathered to itself such a mass of exegesis. This is not surprising when we consider the highly allusive manner in which the story is told, the unusual words and idioms, and the corruptions of the text. In the Finnsburg Fragment the same obscurities and corruptions abound, and if the narrative itself is less broken and allusive, these textual difficulties and the loss of lines at the beginning and the end make its interpretation difficult. Unfortunately, many problems still remain to be settled; the labors of scholars have failed to bring agreement upon many important matters.

If history is to giv us a tru picture of human life in the past, it cannot limit itself to political events. The chief end of man never was to frame, uphold, and overthro governments, stil les to wage war and sign treaties. These ar accidents or epiphenomena. Man's primary concern is and was from the first his daily fight for existence, the necessity of getting food and shelter, the desire of getting them with a minimum of painful exertion. Man does not merely adapt himself to his surroundings: he attempts to alter his surroundings so as to suit himself. Thus he creates new conditions from which new problems arise. Human society groes ever farther away from that brutish state of automatic adaptation which poets call the Erthly Paradise. From the erliest stone implement to the aeroplane, from the first concerted hunt to the elaborate insurance system of the German Empire, we see the progres of this warfare against nature. The result of these efforts is what we understand by civilization.

P. 530. Description of the MS. The stain in the ms. at ff. 81–84 extends through a number of preceding folios, and therefore occurred since the fragment of the quire was bound up in the present volume. The Latin fragments on the first three pages of the quire are theological commonplaces, and the conclusion of a tract which I have not been able to identify; probably a summary of one of Augustine's sermons, copied in the same illiterate Latin as that of the rubrics.

That Thomas Middleton was the author of the London Lord Mayor's Show for 1623 has long been known; that he was not the sole author no one has suspected. His pamphlet describing the occasion is entitled The Triumphs of Integrity; it was printed by Dyce, and from him by Bullen; Dyce does not tell where the pamphlet which he reprints may be found; and I have not been able to discover it in the libraries of the British Museum, the Guildhall, the Society of Antiquaries, or the Bodleian.

There are so many, points at issue regarding Shakespeare's Sonnets,—the authenticity of the Quarto arrangement, the question of their autobiographical interest, the date, the identity of W. H., of the Dark Lady, and of the Rival Poet,—there has been so much written on all these problems, and the solution of them is so wholly a matter of conjecture, that I shall be obliged for the most part merely to record my own convictions and refer to rather than repeat the sets of arguments which have led me to one opinion instead of to the contrary view; and even in presenting what I offer as my own contribution to the subject I must omit many if not most of the minor considerations which have influenced me.

It has for a long time been generally agreed among Chaucerian scholars that the most serious defect of the Chaucer Society's arrangement of the Canterbury Tales is its placing of the Physician's Tale, Pardoner's prolog, and Pardoner's Tale, which constitute what is generally known as Group C, between the Nun's Priest's Tale and the Wife of Bath's prolog. This arrangement has absolutely no ms. authority, for no ms. is known to exist in which Group C either precedes Group D or follows Group B. Nor does Group C contain any references to time or place which make the Chaucer Society's arrangement a probable one. Indeed, the arrangement was adopted for no better reason than to make the tales of the third day not less than those of the second, a reason which we can only characterise as a trivial one.

In Richer's History of France, written in 996 for Gerbert of Rheims, there is an account of one of Odo's campaigns against the Normans, which critics have uniformly rejected as being too romantic to rest on facts.

In Theodor Fontanes Roman Effi Briest heisst es einmal: “Auf zwanzig Deutsche, die nach Frankreich gehen, kommt noch nicht einer, der nach England geht. Das macht das Wasser… Das Wasser hat eine scheidende Kraft.” Zu dem Wasser, d. h. der geographischen Lage, kommt die Geschichte Englands, um einen Inselgeist auszubilden, den die fremden Besucher Englands während der letzten 300 Jahre alles andere nur nicht entgegenkommend und liebenswürdig nennen. Man lese etwa nur das Buch von Edward Smith: Foreign Visitors in England. Und die Haltung der Engländer dem Ausländer gegenüber ist nur ein Symbol für die geistige Abgeschlossenheit und Unzugänglichkeit ihres Landes, dem das Gefällige und Mitteilsame der französischen Kultur mindestens ebenso fehlt wie Deutschland.