This article is an attempt to clear up the curious hodge-podge of fact and fiction in Voltaire's play Zaïre. From his facile use of famous names and historical events one receives the impression that the play is at least based on facts. But Voltaire tells us in a letter to M. La Roque (1732): “Je n'ai pris dans l'histoire que l'époque de saint Louis; tout le reste est entierèment d'invention.” Is his statement to be believed? The editors of Zaïre have done nothing to help solve this question.

The Romantic Period has generally been regarded as one of enthusiasm for the pre-Augustan poets as well as for the writers of Jacobean and Caroline prose. We recall the ardors of Charles Lamb for the Elizabethan dramatists, and of Lamb and Coleridge for Browne, Burton, and Taylor; we recall, too, the interest of Scott in the ballads, and of Keats in Spenser and Milton.

In a letter to Wedgewood from Göttingen in 1799, Coleridge said: Before I left England, I had read the book of which you speak [Malthus's first Essay on Population, published in 1798]. I must confess that it appeared to me exceedingly illogical. … My objections to the Essay on Population you will find in my sixth letter at large—but do not, my dear sir, suppose that because unconvinced by this essay, I am therefore convinced of the contrary. … Is the march of the human race progressive, or in cycles?

For a man contemporary with Addison, Swift, and Pope, men quite near to us through personal letters and biographies, Congreve remains peculiarly apart and obscure. To get at his personality, more attention should be given to his letters. These, unfortunately, have not been preserved in large numbers; and the disorder in which the extant letters have remained has misled every biographer and brought about misinterpretations. Arranged in proper order, the letters clear up obscure references and give insight into the character of the writer. They deserve more careful study than they have hitherto received from biographers who have attempted to gain, and have despaired of gaining, an intimate knowledge of our wittiest dramatist.

The “Ode to the West Wind” has received considerable special comment from a number of students of Shelley. H. B. Forman has indicated, in part, its emotional background; Professor H. C. Pancoast has discussed it in relation to the scene and climate in which it was written; W. E. Peck has pointed out parallels of its thought and imagery in Shelley's earlier work; and Professor B. P. Kurtz has recently shown in an admirable study the relation of its theme of life and death and regeneration to the poet's “pursuit of death” throughout his work. There is wanting, however, a detailed account of the sources, the development, and the significance of the poem's central symbols, the Wind and the Leaves, and of the intellectual and emotional disturbances, associated for Shelley with the symbols, which may have been the direct causes of his writing the “Ode.” This study attempts such an account.

Although most of Dryden's plays can be dated approximately, if not precisely, two have eluded efforts to fix even a good conjectural date: Marriage à la Mode and Amboyna. Both, it is certain, appeared after The Conquest of Granada. The first acting of Marriage à la Mode is usually placed in May or June, 1672. The basis for May rests upon the assumption, made first by Malone, that the following lines from the Prologue “seem to allude to the equipment of the fleet, which afterwards engaged the Dutch off Southwold Bay, May 28, 1672.”

There has been uncertainty about the authorship of L'Homme plus que Machine, a reply to la Mettrie's Homme-Machine, from the time of its anonymous publication in 1748. It has been most commonly considered an attempt at self-defense on the part of la Mettrie's publisher, Elie Luzac, who was prosecuted for the publication of L'Homme-Machine, and who, it has been supposed, states his personal disagreement with the materialism and atheism of the French philosopher in the Homme plus que Machine. On the other hand, some of la Mettrie's contemporaries and three modern scholars have looked upon this work as an ironic pretended attack upon himself by la Mettrie, wherein he actually pleads more in his favor than against himself. No conclusive evidence can be presented.

In The Monthly Mirror are some writings of Jonathan Swift which appear to have been overlooked by all of his commentators— a satirical essay, a letter to Mrs. Pendarves, and a soliloquy attributed to him. The most significant of these is the satirical essay, entitled Directions to Players and printed, it is stated, “from an unpublished MS. by Dean Swift, preserved by Mr. O'Nick.”

Practically no attention has hitherto been paid to the incidents of the publication of Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, perhaps on the assumption that once this publication was mentioned, everything pertinent had been said. Mrs. Stanhope, in her preface to the first edition, asserted that the letters were genuine, and that she had in her possession all of the originals. So much she told the public; how it was that she came to arrange for the publication of these letters and under what circumstances they were presented to the world were not told, and have been only imperfectly understood. References to the subject have been not only scattered and incomplete, but even at times inaccurate. Yet it is still possible to present most of the story.

It is generally agreed that had either Hyperion or The Fall of Hyperion: A Vision been completed, the result would have been a lofty utterance of Keats' best wisdom in fundamental matters. As to what these matters and this wisdom comprised there has been wide difference of opinion, particularly in respect to Hyperion.* In The Fall the poet, speaking in his own person, gives us some pretty clear hints; in Hyperion we must guess the meaning from the nature of the story and the characters. Hyperion, the longer of the two, is usually held to be the better poem; it is certainly the more cryptic. It has been variously explained as signifying: “the unity of all existence”; “a self-destructive progress toward good … that beauty and not force is the law of this change … light and song passing into union and perfection out of elemental crudeness”; as “the old dynasty of formless powers, driven into oblivion by new creators of form and order”; as “the epic of the Revolutionary Idea”; and as the apotheosis of “disciplined imagination” and “a state in mental stature where all facts, pleasant or otherwise, will appear in their proper perspective.”

The recent notes by Mr. Churchill on the Percy-Warton correspondence are as valuable as they are concise. However, some points raised by him stimulate further consideration. These are: (1) the projected edition of Buckingham's Works, (2) Percy's initial plans for the Reliques, and (3) his introductory relations with the Northumberland family.

History offers many examples of individuals who have occupied the center of the stage during their life-time, only to be forgotten by posterity; but in modern times few writers have risen so high, and then sunk so completely out of sight, as did the abbé Corneille de Pauw. From 1768, when his first work appeared, until the outbreak of the French Revolution, he stood in the very center of cultural discussions in Europe. Learned societies and academies devoted whole sessions to arguments over his theories; he provoked controversies which not only stirred up all Europe, but extended to China and America. His books passed through edition after edition, and were translated from the original French into English, Dutch, and German. Yet today few people have heard of him, and his name is in only the largest encyclopedias.

Since long before the middle of the nineteenth century, F. D. Maurice, Tennyson's friend and a leader of the Broad-Church movement in England, has been considered Coleridge's disciple. Maurice himself frequently admitted his indebtedness to Coleridge. Its exact nature however, has been left uninvestigated. False conceptions of it have arisen, such as the belief that Maurice felt the spell of Coleridge's talk and took the impress of his personality directly, or the belief that Coleridge's “moonshine,” as Carlyle called it, without ever assuming the form of definite ideas, somehow or other had an influence upon the disciple. The first notion is shown to be untrue by the simple fact that Maurice never met Coleridge or listened to his conversation—that he knew Coleridge almost exclusively through his published writings. The second is more difficult to combat, since to do so requires a careful study of the writings of both men. Certain groups of organically related ideas do exist, however, in a very definite form in the writings of both Coleridge and Maurice, and possess a vitality and a substantial character hardly to be associated with moonshine. Such a powerful group of ideas is that concerning Coleridge's distinction between the reason and the understanding.

What goes into a masterpiece is one thing. The form in which it emerges is another. What happens between, mechanics or miracle, is a third. This note is a summary statement, for a single passage in The Fall of Hyperion, A Vision, of the first of the three alone. It has developed through a series of surprises, as again and again some fact the bearing of which had been unnoticed has proved to be an element in a complex design—a design which has nevertheless achieved the effect of an effortless simplicity. It has to do, in a word, with an extraordinary convergence of impressions which, through their blendings, took form in an imaginative conception of rare beauty—a conception in which five themes interweave, almost as in a great symphonic movement: themes drawn, amazingly, from Greece, Judea, Egypt, the island of Staffa, and the Mount of Purgatory. That, I am well aware, is a statement which may not be lightly made, and warrant for it must be given.

The usual criticism of Tristram Shandy denies that there is in this great novel plan, form, or method. Sterne himself supplied the text which criticism has tirelessly amplified, “I begin writing the first sentence … trusting to God Almighty for the second.” A popular history of English literature, to take one of a great many possible examples, speaks of Tristram Shandy as having “an indefinite theme, worked out by a verve that has not the slightest concern for order, unity or logic. … The work is a series of mental and verbal pirouettings.” Governor Cross, almost alone among critics, has given the book its proper place in the history of the novel by elaborating what Sterne himself repeatedly said, that Tristram Shandy is Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in a novelized form.