Fielding's veiled aspersions of Walpole as the “Great Man” of his Tom Thumb (24 April 1730) is accepted as his first political satire on the stage, and his allusion in The Author's Farce (30 March 1730) to Cibber as “Mr. Keyber,” a nickname connected with anti-Walpole satire, has been taken only as evidence that Fielding wrote Shamela, with its “Keyber” on the title page. I myself have stated that political satire in The Author's Farce went no further than the single reference to “Keyber.” But innocence and the authorities have apparently conspired to hide a number of other political allusions in The Author's Farce, in the 1730 original (there were two 1730 “editions” of this, neither reprinted, not readily accessible) as well as in the 1734 revision—threads of the anti-Walpole satire that Fielding worked into his stage burlesques with increasing frequency. Some of this satire may also appear, rather unexpectedly, in The Mock Doctor (23 June 1732) and it is certainly evident in Tumble-Down Dick (29 April 1736), a play from Fielding's high “political” period that has strangely been left out of political account.

Over forty years ago Oliver Elton wrote of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills”: “This poem is perfectly put together, and it is an intellectual pleasure to see its firm development, even apart from the rapid, impassioned, shimmering brilliancy of the imagery, which resolves itself into the emotions of the poet.” One need not assent to the unqualified absolute of this declaration to recognize the poem as one worthy of serious study, yet during the last half century of intensive Shelley scholarship and criticism there has appeared little to advance our understanding of “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” beyond Professor Elton's own perceptive, but necessarily brief appreciation. An examination of Shelleyana will suggest a number of reasons for this neglect by scholars of a poem that is often anthologized and frequently taught. First, Shelley criticism is a literature filled with polemicism, and “Lines written among the Euganean Hills” has never been controversial: critics and admirers of Shelley alike have conceded or declared, when they mentioned it at all, that it is a good poem. Second, its tetrameter couplets appear “uncharacteristic” of Shelley under the generalizations which govern most discussions of his poetry, thus making the poem “peripheral” to both attackers and defenders of Shelley's poetic achievement. Closely related to the problem of metrics are those of the poem's length and its date of composition: it is too long to be discussed with the lyrics, too short to qualify as a major effort, and written too early for intensive study with Shelley's late poetry. Finally, biographers have been less successful than usual in casting light on those passages—especially lines 45–65—that seem to require additional illumination before a critic can integrate the whole composition.

This topic was formulated by Win Stone and Don Walsh, and it shows it. There are at least three questions buried—not very deeply—inside it, and there are booby-traps buried inside each of those three questions.

First : Why should a foreign-language teacher teach grammar?

Second: If he should teach grammar, why English grammar?

Third: If he has to teach English grammar, why didn't his students' English teacher teach them English grammar? These three questions are interlocked, and we may admire the Stone-Walsh rhetoric which has homogenized them through a skilful use of noun-modifiers and verb-phrase structure. Nevertheless, let us at least begin by examining the three questions in order, and with some degree of separateness.

The Encyclopædia Britannica defines “song” as “the joint art of words and music, two arts under emotional pressure coalescing into a third. The relation and balance of the two arts is a problem that has to be resolved anew in every song that is composed.” This critical relationship between poem and musical setting, as observed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German song, is the subject of the following. Goethe, whose interest in the song form was great, and whose life spanned the transformation of eighteenth-century into nineteenth-century song, is used as a convenient focus to center attention on the critical relationships which were introduced into the song form by the course of its development at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The question in the title is thus rhetorical. I do not propose to answer it; indeed, there can be no answer more decisive than a thorough examination of the implications of Goethe's views and the esthetic problems which he saw or sensed in the form.

Nearly every book or article on Tennyson alludes to the poet's characteristic ambiguity, one neither of syntax nor of meaning but inherent in his very choice of subject and thus an essential aspect of his imagination. Few critics, however, have even tried to build a unified thesis from their isolated perceptions of, for instance, Tennyson's simultaneous concern with macrocosm and microcosm, the similarity and mutual attraction of opposites in his poetry, and, over all, his assumption of the dualistic nature of things. Most references to these phenomena are as brief, but rarely so significant, as Eliot's evaluation of the success and failure of In Memoriam, which calls attention to the poem's expression at once of the most obvious and the most sensitive: “Tennyson's surface, his technical accomplishment, is intimate with his depths: what we most quickly see about Tennyson is that which moves between the surface and the depths, that which is of slight importance.”

El Arabista EspañOL Emilio García Gomez, en su libro Silla del moro y nuevas escenas andaluzas (Madrid, 1948), recrea la visión que Estébanez Calderón tenía de Andalucía. Pero pasa por alto completamente la cuestión de la influencia que la atracción que Estébanez sentía por el período de la dominación árabe en España pudiera tener en tal visión. Y sin embargo creo sin duda que su afición a la cultura y la literatura árabes puso un sello en su producción literaria. Por otra parte, su afán de proselitismo hizo tantos adeptos a este campo como las enseñanzas de más reputados maestros de su generación.

Despite its sovereign status among English elegies and within English poetry in general, two strictures upon Lycidas continue in some degree to shadow the poem: the one would hold with Dr. Johnson that its pastoral apparatus is a flaw in terms both of art and of personal expression; the other would agree with G. Wilson Knight that the work lacks order or unity. Both strictures have become increasingly untenable in the light of one type of study which has helped to make reavailable the form and power of the pastoral elegy in itself, and of another type which has marked the structural and affective unity of Milton's poem. Yet some readers still may feel that Milton sets cool pastoral against impassioned personal outcry, and will consider the two modes of expression to be in direct conflict. Milton editors and critics therefore will continue to face the question of unity in Lycidas. Recently Douglas Bush and Merritt Y. Hughes, for example, delivered defenses of the poem in the course of registering adverse charges made against it.

Readers of Wordsworth are aware that the 1790's were years of excitement for the poet —his experiences in France during the Revolution, his love affair with Annette Vallon, his reunion with his sister Dorothy after long separation, and the heady months of talks on poetry with his new friend Coleridge—the only other first-rate poet of his generation. Equally plain is the fact that about 1805 a long decline in Wordsworth's career began: the revolutionary grew conservative, the poet often turned to mere versifying.

It is a pleasure to meet with the professional group that is involved in the most basic and important human cultural activity. Language was a human invention—perhaps the most important of all time. It is not only the principal means of communication within a linguistic or cultural group, but also the means by which each culture is transmitted from one generation to the next. As such it has been a major if not essential factor in the advancement of human civilization.

Very early in his career, Thackeray published his Catherine (1839-40) as part of Fraser's Magazine's campaign against fiction that glamorized criminals and sinners. In a note to Chapter i, he singled out for criticism Bulwer's Ernest Maltravers because it “opens with a seduction; but then it is performed by people of the strictest virtue on both sides; there is so much religion and philosophy in the heart of the seducer, so much tender innocence in the soul of the seduced, that—bless the little dears!—their very peccadilloes make one interested in them; and their naughtiness becomes quite sacred, so deliciously is it described.” In Fraser's, August 1832, Bulwer had been accused of parallel confusions: “having to paint an adulterer, you describe him as belonging to the class of country curates, among whom, perhaps, such a criminal is not met with once in a hundred years.”

The story of Tennyson's reaction to Arthur Hallam's death is so familiar that we need to remind ourselves how very little connected, factual knowledge we have of his life at that crucial time. Our vivid impressions of him, sunk for long months in dark grief, isolated and immobile at Somersby, derive, if the truth be told, from little more than In Memoriam as reinforced, until recently, only by two blanket statements and a few contemporary letters set in the loose and chronologically vague narrative of Hallam Tennyson's Memoir. Sir Charles Tennyson's lucid biography, of course, has now greatly integrated and sharpened the Memoir account, and expanded it with new material from the papers of the Tennyson d'Eyncourt family. But since the d'Eyncourts had little direct contact with their Somersby cousins during the period in question, and make no mention at all of Alfred, we are still left with less specific knowledge than we might wish. Fortunately, a welcome quirk of literary fate has preserved an unused contemporary source of information: the diary for the years 1833–35 of Tennyson's friend, the Rev. John Rashdall, M.A., now accessible in the Bodleian Library. In what follows I propose to use this diary together with other contemporary material, published and unpublished, to construct a fuller, more detailed account than has yet been available of Tennyson in the year of Hallam's death.

Criticism of the Horatian ode is in much the same state as it was twenty, or even fifty years ago, although recently the opinion has rightly been gaining ground that Marvell was less ambiguously Cromwellian than older and more sentimentally royalist readers liked to think. However, a belief in Marvell's political impartiality, or in the reluctance of his support for Cromwell, remains almost a sine qua non for anyone who discusses the poem, but I shall try to show that by 1650 Marvell had become completely Cromwellian, and that his theme was Cromwell's election as the constitutional dictator of England, in accordance with the popular concept of the dux bellorum which permitted dictators at the commencement of new empires. My second proposal is that the undeniable impartiality of Marvell's tone and stance derives not from a neutral political attitude, but from the careful rhetorical procedure which Marvell adopted in order to make his theme persuasive to a doubtful audience. The ode is a political or deliberative oration, written to the pattern of such speeches formulated by the classical orators. Deliberative speeches generally dealt with a “difficult” subject, the genus admirabile causae, and frequently began with an insinuatio—a device employed when the opinion of the audience was considered to be prejudiced against the case. But before beginning an examination of the poem and identifying the source of Marvell's brilliant “insinuation,” it would be well to outline very briefly the state of English loyalism in 1649-50, which lends credence to Marvell's position in the ode, and helps to explain how it was possible for a man of integrity to hold opinions so contrary to his earlier royalism.

In the last several years, in large part because of the leadership of the Modern Language Association, the American people have come to understand more clearly than ever before the great importance to our country, in terms of national security if for no other reason, and there are other reasons, of developing and maintaining a reservoir of persons skilled in the knowledge of modern foreign languages. Even a man of little political sensitivity could not fail, a few days ago, to have appreciated the immense impact of the few words spoken in Spanish by Mrs. Kennedy during the President's visit to Latin America.

“Le 2 avril 1862 le grand bourdon du romantisme annonçait à toute volée l'importante nouvelle du jour; l'apparition d'une merveille. Les thuriféraires étaient à leur poste, brûlant l'encens sur l'autel du maître. De toutes parts s‘élevaient des exclamations, des adorations accompagnées de génuflexions et d'homélies louangeuses, sympathiques.” C'est ainsi qu'un pamphlétaire violent décrit la publicité tapageuse qui accompagne la publication des deux premiers volumes des Misérables, celui des romans de Victor Hugo le plus important par l‘étendue—dix volumes—par sa signification et par la réaction qu'il provoque dans la presse française, réaction rarement égalée dans l'histoire de la littérature. Cette publicité qui joue un rôle considérable dans le succès commercial de l'ouvrage, qui va avoir de l'influence sur l'attitude des critiques et donnera des armes supplémentaires à ses adversaires, fut utilisée au maximum par Victor Hugo, passé maître en son usage.

Without its verbal irony, Tom Jones would be quite a different book: massive and well made but lacking the high polish and the effect of urbane control which do much to preserve it as a major classic. Its realism, its satire, and even its much-praised plot keep their unified brilliance through being governed by an ironic style that forms as important a contribution to the English novel as any Fielding made.

The scarlet letter has been interpreted as a story of sins and sinners for so long that this perspective has hardened into a convention. In Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl the sin of adultery and its consequences are seen; to Dimmesdale is added the further, less sympathetic sin of hypocrisy; and beyond the pale stands Chillingworth in his isolating sin of pride and self-consuming revenge. Once this standard point of view is assumed, it can be supported by what is incontrovertibly in the text, but if the angle of attention is shifted so that the novel is seen as a love story, that is, as a tragedy of the grand passion rather than as a tale of sinful passion, then certain features in our picture of the novel, obscure before, will leap into prominence and some of the previously more emphatic features will change their value in relation to the whole composition. Hawthorne's masterpiece may remain for us a haunted book, but it will be haunted by a mystery which we can identify as the mystery of erotic passion itself. It will be seen, in this perspective, that passion is the fixed reality throughout the novel and that it is “sin” which is the shifting, ambiguous term, as it is refracted in the many-sided ironies of the plot and of the narrative commentary. Further, from this point of view it becomes clear that the passion of the lovers is entering its most interesting phase when the story opens instead of being over and done with, except for its consequences, as is tacitly assumed in the conventional approach.

Despite reservations we may have about Emerson's theory of Compensation, it was fundamental to his philosophy. Nor was its truth or falsity settled by Stephen Whicher's assertion that “the notion of an automatic moral compensation ... is without question the most unacceptable of Emerson's truths, and a major cause of his present decline of reputation.” As Emerson himself said, “the great questions affecting our spiritual nature are not one of them decided. . . . The system of Compensations in moral and material nature, and a hundred other questions of primary concernment to the state of man, are all open to discussion.”