The wide diffusion through Europe of our modern locution the sick man of the East is due to circumstances largely factitious. At no time has the epithet been conspicuously just, as those meddling too intimately in Turkish affairs have found to their sorrow. And we shall see herewith that at the beginning of its vogue, a half century ago, it was by no means novel. As a matter of fact, the locution gained its foothold in journalism from a striking diplomatic incident; and it has derived its vitality from that vague hostility, partly religious, partly humanitarian, and largely ill-informed, with which the commercial interests of the Christian Occident have watched Turkish affairs in Armenia and the Asiatic colonies. The expression began to have wide currency in 1854. It seems that early in the previous year the British chargé d'affaires in St. Petersburg had a conversation with the Emperor Nicholas regarding Turkish conditions. This talk was ostensibly en gentilhomme, as the phrase went, and should not properly have been reported: in diplomacy, every conversation with a sovereign is in confidence. It is quite possible, however, that the Emperor actually intended thus informally to publish his attitude toward the Porte, without entering into binding declarations or agreements. At any rate, from the correspondence of Sir George Seymour with his home office the matter crept into the public press, much in the following tenor: Nicholas, referring to the bad condition of Turkey, said: “Tenez, nous avons sur les bras un homme malade, un homme gravement malade; ce sera, je vous le dis franchement, un grand malheur, si, un de ces jours, il devait nous échapper, surtout avant que toutes les dispositions nécessaires fussent prises.” Seymour replied: “Votre Majesté est si gracieuse qu'elle me permettra de lui faire encore une observation. Votre Majesté daignera m'excuser si je lui fais observer que c'est à l'homme généreux et fort de ménager l'homme malade et faible.” The Emperor was so pleased with this metaphor that in another conversation some days later he returned to the subject in similar terms: “I am less anxious to know what shall be done with the sick man, than to arrange with England what shall not be done.” To Seymour's objection that there was “no reason to think he was dying,” Nicholas insisted: “The sick man is dying.” This sinister revelation of Russia's attitude, coming at a crisis of public interest in the East, and combined with the undiplomatic language in which it was expressed—partly too with the unconventional manner in which Seymour failed to respect the Emperor's confidence,—assured the incident and the locution wide publicity. The expression, with various modifications of form and connotation, has since been revived at every important moment in Ottoman history.

The sources of the allegorical religious trilogy of the Cistercian monk and prior, Guillaume de Deguileville, have not been thoroughly investigated until comparatively recent years. In 1896, Tobler, reporting on Stürzinger's edition of the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine, stated that Deguileville's characteristics as a poet must be compared to those of Jean de Meun and Daute, and that Deguileville's powers of description did not approach those of Dante. Gröber gives it as his opinion that Deguileville's trilogy was composed without any knowledge of the Divina Commedia, though there are analogies between the two. He cites St. Bernard, Aristotle, the Book of Daniel, the Apocalypse, Dionysius Areopagita, and ms. illustrations, as sources of certain features of Ame. J. E. Hultman, in an excellent study of the poet's life and works, brings to light the sources of a large part of the three poems. His is the first serious attempt to discover the literary antecedents of Deguileville, and is a thorough, though inevitably not an exhaustive, treatment of the subject. Farinelli points out additional analogies between Dante and Deguileville, at the same time denying the possibility of any direct influence.

The vexed problem of Spenser's missing works, incapable as it inevitably is of absolutely certain solution, has nevertheless been treated, in a recent article by Mr. Philo M. Buck, Jr., with results that are interesting and on the whole satisfactory, though marked, as it seems at least to the present writer, by certain faults of method. Mr. Buck believes, as do various critics, that the greater number of the so-called lost works are to be found in Spenser's extant writings. He contends further that the poet, as a measure of political prudence, voluntarily suppressed them in 1580, only to draw them forth about 1591, when he was wrathful at royal neglect, and eager to level their satire at his enemy, Burghley; and most of them, Mr. Buck argues, were published in the Complaints (1591) and in the Faerie Queene. In our consideration of the article, after the inaccuracy of method has been noted, and certain minor phases of the argument have been questioned, it will remain for us to emphasize the probability of the main contention, and the wider significance it has for Spenser's method of composition, especially as regards the Faerie Queene.

In the Gemma Ecclesiastica of Giraldus Cambrensis there is an allusion to two songs which were evidently current among minstrels of the twelfth century, though they are unknown to us at the present time. The passage is found in the Second Book, where the author is attacking the practice of simony then common among the clergy. Of priests who read the mass twice or oftener upon the same day for the sake of donations additional to the one which it was customary for them to receive upon these occasions, he says:

Some fifteen years ago the prevailing theory as to the origin of mediæval plays concerning the Passion was authoritatively expressed in these words:

Matthew Arnold's essay on the Literary Influence of Academies (1865) contains this characteristic passage:—

“‘In France,’ says M. Sainte-Beuve, ‘the first consideration for us is not whether we are amused and pleased by a work of art or mind, nor is it whether we are touched by it. What we seek above all to learn is, whether we were right in being amused with it, and in applauding it, and in being moved by it.’ Those are very remarkable words, and they are, I believe, in the main quite true. A Frenchman has, to a considerable degree, what one may call a conscience in intellectual matters; he has an active belief that there is a right and a wrong in them, that he is bound to honour and obey the right, that he is disgraced by cleaving to the wrong. All the world has, or professes to have, this conscience in moral matters. The word conscience has become almost confined, in popular use, to the moral sphere, because this lively susceptibility of feeling is, in the moral sphere, so far more common than in the intellectual sphere; the livelier, in the moral sphere, this susceptibility is, the greater becomes a man's readiness to admit a high standard of action, an ideal authoritatively correcting his everyday moral habits; here, such willing admission of authority is due to sensitiveness of conscience. And a like deference to a standard higher than one's own habitual standard in intellectual matters, a like respectful recognition of a superior ideal, is caused, in the intellectual sphere, by sensitiveness of intelligence. Those whose intelligence is quickest, openest, most sensitive, are readiest with this deference; those whose intelligence is less delicate and sensitive are less disposed to it.”

Professor Herford divides the Volksbücher of Fortunatas into the Frankfurt and the Augsburg groups. The Augsburg editions, he points out, have ungermanized names and slightly more copious incident. He says further: “All the known editions of the Volksbuch contain substantially the same story. From the first German edition, published at Augsburg in 1509, and its numerous German successors, to the Dutch, English, and Danish versions of the seventeenth century, the story everywhere unfolds itself in the same elaborate disorder, varying only in quantity of descriptive detail, or at most, in the omission or inclusion of some trifling episode.” With this conclusion Harms agrees; and I have found no reason to dispute this classification, and can only emphasize the trifling nature of the differences of the two groups and the extremely close agreement of texts within the same group. I make this statement after examining all the editions of the Volksbuch available in the Royal Library at Berlin, such additional ones as were obtainable through the aid of the Auskunftsbureau der deutschen Bibliotheken (which has the coöperation of three hundred German libraries), the British Museum, and the following libraries at Paris: the Library of the Sorbonne, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, and the Bibliothèque de St. Geneviève. I found, however, one version in prose narrative form which presents a very free and clumsy adaptation of the conventional material of the Volksbuch, namely, Fortunatus mit seinem Seckel und Wunschhütlein, eine alte Geschichte für neue Zeiten, Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1787 (British Museum). The variations from the type found here do not correspond to those in Uhland's work. We must seek some other free adaptation of the conventional form, if we would find a source for Uhland's changes.

The Alexandrian followers of Aristarchus, buzzing in corners and busy with monosyllables, have left the world that they worried with their wranglings over and and , the swords that were drawn over inchoate verbs have been rust for centuries. But the bookworms of Aristarchus, the troops of Callimachus, the pack of Zenodotus return at times to earth. In order to hear this pack in full cry, we have only to recall the various emendations in Greek texts necessitated fifty years ago by the fallacious Dawes Canon that is never used with the first aorist subjunctive in the active or middle voice.

The Cambridge History of English Literature is the latest augmenter of the confusion that surrounds the mysterious mediæval poet, Huchown of the Awle Ryale. If this volume did not bid fair to become a work of authority for some years to come, there would be perhaps no need of a study concerning Huchown. Unfortunately, however, misstatements are already being made, based upon its authority, and there is therefore a real need of giving the whole matter a thorough overhauling. It is difficult to realize upon what slight grounds the confident assumptions have been made, which credit Huchown with writing so vast an amount of Middle English alliterative verse.

The most critical year in the life of Spenser was that extending from the summer of 1579, when he was preparing for the publication of the Shepheards Calender, to the summer of 1580, when he went to Ireland as the secretary of Lord Grey. The epistle to Harvey, prefixed to the Calender, was dated “from my lodging at London thys 10. of Aprili, 1579”; but the book was not published until some time in the following winter. Besides this, his first ambitious work, Spenser had various other literary undertakings in hand, including a first draft of the great epic. By the tenth of April, 1580, he was anxious to have Harvey's judgment on the Faerie Queene, and on the twelfth of August he landed in Ireland.