The bibliographers of Gothic fiction have almost entirely overlooked the literature of the periodicals from 1770–1820, although they were one of the important channels of publication and afford many examples of the species. Montague Summers' so-called Gothic Bibliography, in most respects recklessly inclusive, lists only two romances from the Lady's Monthly Museum out of more than a dozen published there, and one from the Monthly Mirror, but otherwise ignores the numerous Gothic novels, novelettes, and short stories which figure in the magazines between The Romance of the Forest (1791) and Waverley (1814) -1 Jakob Brauchli lists 491 examples of English schauerromane published between 1764 and 1851—many of them known only by title— but takes no account whatsoever of periodical fiction.2 Yet the magazine literature of Gothicism is considerable, and in some respects distinctive; and much of it, although at present unknown, is more readily available in American libraries than the volumes issued by the Minerva Press. With research a hundred titles of Gothic novels and short stories could probably be added to Brauchli's 491, from the magazines alone. The great majority of these are unlisted anywhere.

In the Huntington Library of San Marino, California, recent research has come upon twenty unpublished letters of Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd. These letters were purchased from Charles Sessler, the Philadelphia bookseller, in August, 1925. They are presented here numbered according to their placement in the Library file (HM 49104929).

Among the jewel-like enigmas that are Mallarmé‘s sonnets, one that deserves, that even seems to demand, extensive commentary is the one which for convenience I call the “ptyx” sonnet, that little untitled masterpiece whose first verse runs: “Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx.” In and of itself this sonnet immediately suggests numerous problems. One's inclination to study it is increased by the fact that more material for study is available here than in the case of most of Mallarmé‘s poems; not only do we have an early version of the sonnet, but also, in the poet's correspondence, there are several at times cryptic references to it. All this calls for commentary.

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.

[415–419b: 415 ch add North Dakota; 417, 417a compl; 419a, 419b subjects modified, see below].

The Lyric, it has been generally thought, is of all poetic genres the most spontaneous and artless, which may explain why relatively little attention has been paid to its art. Unity, it is agreed, is essential; yet, aside from references to the unifying function of the refrain, attention has been centered almost exclusively upon unity of idea or prose sense. As to the part played by style, diction, prosody, imagery, and rhetorical devices in achieving unity and conveying what the writer had to express, little is said in discussions of this or, indeed, of other kinds of poetry. It may, therefore, be illuminating to examine a number of well-known lyrics to see if all are formless cris du cœur or if some reveal structure as well as emotion, and if repetition, parallelism, correspondences in meter or language, and other devices, prosodie or rhetorical, seem to be used for the sake of unifying the piece and of expressing its “meaning.” Shelley's songs are admirably suited to this purpose since they are numerous, varied, and familiar, and since they are generally regarded, by admirers and detractors alike, as approaching the beau ideal of the lyric: spontaneous, formless, and vague.

In his edition of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Ernest DeSelincourt published for the first time over thirty poems of Wordsworth's juvenilia.1 Among these he discovered three poems previously thought to be the work of Coleridge and long published under his name. In The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,2 these poems are entitled “Lewti, or the Circassian Love-Chaunt” (I, 253), “Inscription for a Seat by the Road Side” (I, 349), and “Alcaeus to Sappho” (I, 353). Since the publication of Wordsworth's juvenilia, I have found three more poems in the works of Coleridge which DeSelincourt failed to note as also originally belonging to Wordsworth: “To Lesbia” (I, 60), “The Death of the Starling” (I, 61), and “Morienti Superstes” (I, 62); besides these, a conjecture may be made as to the authorship of a fourth, “Moriens Superstiti” (I, 61), for it is paired with a poem clearly belonging to Wordsworth.

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”).

John Nichols, as printer of the Works of the English Poets, was frequently asked by Samuel Johnson to supply material while the biographical prefaces were being composed. Boswell (friend of Nichols and fellow member with him of Johnson's Essex-Head Club) recorded the fact that Nichols did supply Johnson with material for the Lives. Boswell introduced, with the following statement, a few of the thirty-one letters from Johnson to Nichols: “That he, however, had a good deal of trouble, and some anxiety in carrying on the work, we see from a series of letters to Mr. Nichols the printer, whose variety of literary inquiry and obliging disposition, rendered him very useful to Johnson.”

The standard authorities on the bibliography of Samuel Johnson1 fail to mention one minor but interesting piece of journalism that has been ascribed, with some probability, to Johnson. This is the “Observations” appended to “A Letter from a French Refugee in America to his Friend a Gentleman in England”, in The Literary Magazine, or Universal Review, of June, 1756.

[2678–2719: 2678 title changed; 2679, 2680 compl; 2683 ch add Florida; 2684 compl; 2685a no inf; 2686 for “STC” read “SC”; 2687 no inf; 2688 compl; 2690 discont, illness; 2691 no inf; 2692 abandoned for new topic; 2694 discont r.n.g.; 2704 for “Willis I.” read “I. Willis”; 2710 ch add E. Illinois SC, Charleston; 2716, 2716a no inf; 2717–2719 compl].

It seems strikingly modern on the one hand to seek elements of individualism and irrationalism in Lessing, and thus to view him as a precursor of the Storm and Stress movement, while at the same time pointing up how great a revolt from the rationalist Lessing this new generation constitutes.1 Actually, as Annemarie Sauerlander has pointed out to me, James Russell Lowell in 1867, writing a review of Stahr's work on Lessing, stated that Lessing “may be said to have begun the revolt from pseudo-classicism in poetry, and to have been thus unconsciously the founder of romanticism”, but he immediately added: “It may be doubted whether the immediate effect on literature of his own critical essays was so great as Herr Stahr supposes. Surely Gölz and The Robbers are nothing like what he would have called Shakespearean, and the whole Sturm und Drang tendency would have roused in him nothing but antipathy.”2 The standard biographies of Lessing, such as Danzel-Guhrauer, Erich Schmidt, and Oehlke, have tended to enlarge on the chasm separating Lessing from Storm and Stress, while some monographs and more general works3 have emphasized evolution, rather than revolution, as the dynamic force operative on German literature, at least throughout the eighteenth century.4

The current insistence upon a new poetic mythology to serve as a unifying reference frame for human experience and thought has recently provoked from Bertrand H. Bronson a brilliant defense of the eighteenth-century use of personified abstractions.1 Bronson properly recognizes in the eighteenth-century affection for personification a reflection of the emotional power lent to universals by the mathematicism that had created a sense of an ordered universe operating by simple and general laws. To the unity of this “view of the world so comprehensive and assured as to enable us to state common experience in general terms” he has opposed the fragmentary world of modern naturalism which requires expression by fragmentary concrete symbols. The neoclassicist conceived the norm to be the universal, which particulars struggle to fashion, and therefore he sought, in the highest forms of his art, to express himself in terms equally eternal and comprehensive as the laws of nature. Personification satisfied the desire for the grandeur of generality; “labored particularities” in themselves distract from the largeness of thought, for “great thoughts are always general.” Bronson's paper is salutary, for we have too long and too uncritically scorned what one modern critic has called “those allegorical capitals which the age affected.” We are indeed misguided in judging on the basis of our own responses, conditioned by our own civilization alone, that the personified abstraction was but a literary convention sterile of emotional force in the eighteenth century. And in relating personification to the emotional excitation the age received from the contemplation of a harmonious universe, Bronson has supplied us with the proper framework for a more nearly accurate reading of much eighteenth-century poetry.

Theobald, thus weak and ignorant, thus mean and faithless, thus petulant and ostentatious, by the good luck of having Pope for his enemy, has escaped, and escaped alone, with reputation, from this undertaking“ of editing Shakespeare. In these words Johnson touched on one of the more troublesome ironies of literary history, the fact that such highly gifted men as Pope and Warburton had failed to achieve Shakespearean texts that their contemporaries and scholarly posterity could praise. Pope's Shakespeare, printed but twice, had been buried by Theobald; and Warburton's Shakespeare, printed but once, had been interred by Edwards. The question for Johnson was whether his own forthcoming edition would suffer a similar fate.

The autograph MS. of El principe despenado was signed in Madrid November 27, 1602.1 Noteworthy features of the MS. are the great amount of marginal annotation to be found thereon, and the numerous passages which have been boxed off or otherwise marked for omission. Such indications almost certainly do not proceed from the pen of Lope, but are rather the rehearsal notations of some autor who wished to abbreviate the play, omit certain characters from the cast, or otherwise adapt it for presentation on the stage. In no case does the cancellation of a passage give evidence of being prompted by aesthetic motives. In all, some thirty-one passages have been bracketed, comprising 332 verses. It is not usual to find such extensive tampering in Lope's autograph comedias; there is an equal abundance, however, in the autograph of El cuerdo loco, which Lope wrote in the same year as the Principe despenado and which, as we shall see, very probably figured with it in the repertory of the Pedro de Valdés-Antonio de Granados troupe.2

[3464–3557: 3470, 3472 compl; 3473, 3474, 3475 no inf; 3478, 3479 compl; 3479a no inf; 3490, 3491, 3492, compl; 3494 suspended; 3497 discont r.n.g.; 3500 for “14th-century French prose” read “early French texts”; 3501 discont, different diss subject; 3503, 3504, 3505, 3506, 3508a compl; 3510 discont r.n.g.; 3511 discont, different diss subject; 3512 compl; 3514 title ch; 3517 discont r.n.g.; 3518 no inf; 3530a no inf; 3531 compl; 3532 discont, results anticipated; 3533 compl; 3542 for “Mr.” read “C”; 3546, 3552 compl].

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.