to Regard the Merchant's tale simply as a conventional piece of anti-feminist literature, exemplifying the faithlessness of married women, is to overlook the Merchant's simultaneous concern with the role of the husband in matrimony and with his joint responsibility for the success or failure of his marriage. That responsibility is brought out in the course of the argument which takes place between January and his brethren when the old knight announces his intention of wedding a young girl. The debate emphasizes the folly of the proposed step, as much through the sycophantic approval of Placebo as through the objective and wise warnings of Justinus. But it is more than a question of folly. The Merchant draws attention to the knight's lechery, his indifference to a young woman's feelings, and his jealousy; and these weaknesses are stressed as the counterparts to May's wantonness, her indifference to January's feelings, and her infidelity. If May does wrong in breaking her marriage vows, January is also at fault in marrying for completely selfish reasons; and from the medieval theological standpoint, he is clearly wrong in arguing (E 1836–41) that in wedlock his lechery is not sinful.

Ronsard's Hymne de la Philosophie, published in 1555, which in the single line, “Tout l'Univers discourt en sa pensée” (v. 28), sets the farthest limits of the cosmos as the boundaries of the soul's philosophic inquiry, contains in miniature a rudimentary version of the Hymne du Ciel, also of 1555:

Elle premiere a trouvé l'ouverture
Par long travail des secretz de Nature,
A sçeu de quoy les tonnerres se font,
Pourquoy la Lune a maintenant le front
Mousse, ou cornu, & pourquoy toute ronde
Ou demi-ronde elle apparoist au Monde,
A sçeu pourquoy le Soleil perd couleur,
Que c'est qu'il est, ou lumiere ou chaleur,
A sçeu comment tout le firmament dance,
Et comme Dieu le guide à la cadance,
A sçeu les corps de ce grand Univers,
Qui vont dançant de droit, ou de travers,
Ceux qui vont tost au son de l'harmonie, Ceux qui vont tard apres leur compagnie,
Comme Saturne aggravé de trop d'ans
Qui suit le bal à pas mornes & lens.
(viii, 90–91)

Our major activities this year, as in each of the past five years, have been undertaken either with foundation support or through contracts with the United States Office of Education under the National Defense Education Act. In February John Harmon became Director of the Materials Center, changing places with Glen Willbern, who became Director of Research. Under Mr. Willbern's direction and through a government contract we have just completed a survey of modern-foreign-language enrollments in junior and senior colleges as of the fall of 1963. We are currently negotiating several contracts through Title VI of the National Defense Education Act. The first is to gather statistics on offerings and enrollments in all foreign languages in public and non-public secondary schools. The second is to make a survey of current college enrollments in all foreign languages. Since gathering statistics on the classical languages is not a justifiable expenditure of national defense funds, the Modern Language Association will pay out of its own funds the proportion of the total cost needed to gather the facts on Latin and Greek in schools and colleges.

Among the Biblical types which Milton used to enrich his theme in Paradise Lost was that of Abraham, father of the faithful. James Sims has shown the parallel between the visit of the angels to Abraham at Mamre and Raphael's descent to Eden in Book v; John Parish has elaborated the resemblance between Abraham's plea for the Sodomites and Adam's dialogue with God in Book viii; and Barbara Lewalski has emphasized the spiritual vision of the man of faith in Books xi and xii: Abraham and his heirs view the promises “afar off,” just as Adam at this point sees far off the great symbolic Old Testament places. It is the purpose of this article to explore further the Abraham-Adam parallel in the last two books, showing in particular the relationship between Abraham's departure from Ur and Adam's from Paradise. From this relationship flow certain effects: the tone of the concluding episodes of Paradise Lost becomes clearer, their universal significance is emphasized, and the exile motif is harmonized with the concept of the journey of the epic hero. The virtues of Abraham are precisely those which Adam as Christian hero is called upon to practice, while both Abraham's setting forth to the land of Canaan and Adam's exile from Paradise are types of man's setting forth on his earthly pilgrimage.

The triplet, like some other literary forms, had an origin, a period of growth, a maturity, and then an end. The triplet was an offspring of the pentameter couplet, but developed in its own way at its own rate. When the couplet was loose, open, and unpolished, there was little need for further variety, and poets wrote few triplets. When the couplet became tight, closed, and highly polished, as it did with Pope, the triplet was considered a violation of the rules. It was, consequently, only in the short period just before the apex of the couplet that the triplet could flourish: the period of John Dryden.

Modern critics have stressed the element of paradox in Herbert's work. Herbert is homely, as has commonly been remarked, yet he is sophisticated. He appears spontaneous, yet his poems are scrupulously well-constructed. He is unsure of his union with God, yet he is sure. He doubts himself and he does not doubt. He seems to sing, and he seems to speak. Any new technical analysis of Herbert's verse should take these paradoxes, and the syntheses forged from them, into account. The present paper attempts to do so by isolating, in metrical terms, the apparently irreconcilable modes of “song” and “speech” which have been observed in Herbert by several critics, notably Joseph H. Summers; by discovering what conventions they derive from and how Herbert used and changed what he learned from others; and by showing how the prosodic causes serve as instruments of an overall poetic vision in The Temple. It will follow the division of theory, between the poet's song and his speech, although it should be remembered that Herbert himself made no such division. His most typical work contains both elements. Together they form his style.

Count mosca has received sharply differing interpretations from two distinguished French novelists of the nineteenth century. In 1840, one year after the publication of Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme, Balzac wrote: “M. Beyle a tant exalté le sublime caractère du premier ministre de Parme, qu'il est douteux que le Prince de Metternich soit aussi grand que Mosca. … Tout ce que Metternich a fait dans sa longue carrière, n'est pas plus extraordinaire que ce que vous voyez faire à Mosca. … L'étonnante et fine supériorité de Mosca n'est jamais en défaut, ni en action, ni en paroles.”

The life of Richard Nash, Esq. is deservedly Oliver Goldsmith's best-known biography. It deals—very largely by the method of anecdote—with a man whose personality and career were intrinsically fascinating, and it exhibits throughout not only Goldsmith's inimitable easy style but also an attitude toward its subject perfectly balanced between irony and compassion. Apart from praising the work in general terms, however, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the Life of Nash and have provided only a cursory account of its sources and of the circumstances surrounding its composition and publication. In this article, I offer more specific information about the biography's sources—what Goldsmith called the materials of history—as well as some new details concerning Nash's affairs during the last years of his life. I have found a substantial amount of this new information through an effort to discover the identity of a man who played a vital part in the Life, George Scott.

In his recent critical work on Swift, Mr. Edward Rosenheim, Jr., argues that satire is an attack upon “discernible historic particulars”; a true “satire against mankind,” he adds, necessarily lies beyond this definition and must be considered as a species of philosophic writing. Without questioning his definition of satire, which is intended as a critical tool rather than as historical description, I think it worth recalling that attacks on human nature or the human species as such were thought in Swift's day to be well within the satiric genre. More significantly, such satires on man fell into general disfavor in the first half of the eighteenth century; they appear to have been the first to suffer from the general reaction against satire which Stuart Tave and others have traced. The hostile reception encountered by the greatest example of the genre, Gulliver's Travels, embodied the same charges as had been levelled earlier in the century against lesser works. While other forms of satire were still flourishing and meeting with critical approval, satiric indictments of mankind as a whole were censured as libels on the “dignity of human nature.”

In the middle of Book XIV, the last book of The Prelude, Wordsworth indicates, rather belatedly, that the poem has two themes:

Imagination having been our theme,
So also hath that intellectual Love.

My purpose in this paper is to examine this secondary theme of The Prelude. It is a theme that, under the name of benevolence, has been treated fairly adequately without reference to The Prelude by George W. Meyer in Wordsworth's Formative Years (1943). But unless I am seriously mistaken, no one has recognized, first, the content Wordsworth gives to the term or, second, the place he gives to the theme in the structure of The Prelude.

The modern Language Association, under contract with the U.S. Office of Education, has organized and supervised the evaluation of National Defense Language Institutes in the summers of 1963 and 1964 and during the 1963–64 academic year. A total of 45 evaluators (21 in 1963, 28 in 1964, some of them serving in both years) visited 132 institutes (all of the 82 institutes in the summer of 1963, the 4 academic-year institutes in 1963–64, and 46 of the 80 institutes in the summer of 1964).

In recent years we have come to accept less and less begrudgingly the idea of Sainte-Beuve as a poet. Yet the discovery of this idea may not have produced all the fruit of which it is capable. We have recognized his poetic originality and influence, but still tend to think of him as above all a failed poet or as a poet, at best, of very minor excellence. One important kind of continuity between his poetry and his prose has been noted, but we are still prone to believe that he resorted to criticism as a second-best pursuit, a pis aller; and such a view, to some extent supported, it must be admitted, by Sainte-Beuve himself in his more self-disparaging moods, tends to mark his entire work with a certain stigma.

A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers contains a great many quotations, and these have been criticized as disturbing by those who find the work not much more than an interesting journal gone wrong. Even to those fond of the book it is clear that A Week has too many of them, and that occasionally so many are bunched together that the reader loses the sense of Thoreau's personality, which is always unfortunate. But the quotations with which A Week is studded, while certainly bothersome now and then, are usually pleasurable if one reads slowly, watching for the special powers and idiosyncrasies of the older styles which Thoreau loved. The contrast between his examples and the timbre of his own prose is satisfying in itself and contributes to the major concern of the whole work—the mind's proper fluidity, its rich diversity of attention when most in harmony with the spiritual laws governing insight and inspiration.

Les juifs sont fréquemment présents dans l‘œuvre d'Alfred de Vigny. Il ne semble pas, cependant, que le poète se soit expressément intéressé à eux. Ce serait plutôt à la suite d'influences plus ou moins précises et d'observations personnelles qu'il fut amené à représenter des personnages juifs dans ses œuvres. C'est ce qui explique sans doute le manque de consistance dans son attitude. Au début de sa carrière littéraire, Vigny fait preuve du mépris habituel à leur égard. Plus tard, notamment dans les ébauches de la Deuxième Consultation du Docteur Noir, il les peint de manière plus favorable. Certaines notes de Vigny sur les Juifs font même croire qu'il éprouva pour eux une certaine sympathie. Par ailleurs, certaines remarques éparses dans l‘œuvre montrent que Vigny, étant donné la fécondité de sa pensée religieuse, a réfléchi sur plusieurs points de l'histoire et de la philosophie du judaïsme.

The self-portrait of James Boswell which emerges from the conversations, letters, and editorial comments of The Life of Johnson has lineaments of authority as well as uncertainty. There were subjects on which Boswell spoke consistently and with assurance. Nothing so much gives the lie to his old reputation of grovelling servitude as his steadfast opposition to Johnson's pronouncements on public affairs. All the difference of their years and of their characters are revealed in the younger man's opinions, which, despite a disclaimer in 1779 of interest or ability in “political speculation,” are numerous and sound assured. It is fascinating to isolate Boswell's views, to ponder their apparent contradictions, and finally to discover a complexity of convention and rebellion, tradition and modernity parallel to other expressions of his personality.

I speak to you tonight as an ex-administrator attempting to remember some of the intellectual activities that came to his notice in earlier years at the Library of Congress and UNESCO, and which in the setting of the present time seem worthy of attention. It has seemed to me for a long time that mankind has been moving toward one-worldness in fact and to a lesser extent in spirit and in institutions. It has also seemed to me important to speed up the process of creating one world in spirit and of going the necessary distance to create institutions of a world-wide character to suppress the causes of war.

I propose that Hugh Brackenridge (1750–1816) wrote the anonymous “Cornwalliad” of 720 lines and some prose preliminaries that in 1779 appeared in his United States Magazine. To support this ascription I have a three-part argument: first, that a prose passage, in an unprinted manuscript play by Brackenridge, was put into verse for “The Cornwalliad”; second, that “The Cornwalliad” was edited for The United States Magazine as if it were by the editor and could not have been by anyone but the editor, who was Brackenridge; and third, that a life of its unnamed author sketched in a preliminary “Apology for the Cornwalliad” corresponds with a hitherto little-explored phase of Brackenridge's life. These textual, editorial, and biographical arguments seem to make it certain that Hugh Brackenridge wrote this excellent mock-heroic poem.