“le familier, non le bas …” L. S. Mercier. Du Théâtre.
“ … le familier devient populaire …” Marmontel à l'Académie, 1785.

Faut-il s’étonner si aucun manuel des lettres françaises ne place dans son jour authentique l'intervalle qui sépare, de la mort de Voltaire et de celle de Rousseau, la réelle époque révolutionnaire? Tantôt le lecteur est laissé sous l'impression que, ces deux antagonistes ayant disparu, Diderot n'a guère qu’à les suppléer de son mieux pour faire le pont entre les mouvements des lettres et ceux de l'histoire, tandisque Beaumarchais s'agite en aventurier politique autant qu'en écrivain. Tantôt, le Romantisme ayant à toute force à succéder au “siècle des lumières,” les prodromes des prochaînes nouveautés étant mis au compte de L. S. Mercier et de B. de Saint-Pierre, n'ont vraiment plus qu’à paraître de soudains protagonistes tels que Chateaubriand et Mme de Staël, pour opérer une de ces volte-faces qui sont, en réalité, l'un des problèmes par excellence de tout exposé se préoccupant de continuité. Ainsi qu'il est naturel quand “les arbres nous cachent la forêt,” les contemporains ont peut-être moins à nous dire à ce sujet que les historiens rétrospectifs: ni les Mémoires d'outre-tombe, ni les innombrables relations, plus ou moins fidèles, de l'Ancien Régime agonisant ne mettent, à mon sens, l'accent principal sur ce qui paraît bien avoir été la caractéristique maîtresse de ces douze quinze années—et maintenant que nous disposons d'un néologisme savoureux pour les désigner, pourquoi hésiter à dire que c'est une variété de “populisme” qui fut la dominante d'une pleine décade de littérature française?

When Dryden read the manuscript of William Congreve's Old Bachelor in 1692, he pronounced it the best “first play” that he had ever seen. Dryden's appreciation of Congreve's first play has been seconded by later critics. Dr. Jonson, for instance, found the comedy “the work of very powerful and fertile faculties; the dialogue ... quick and sparkling, the incidents such as seize the attention, and the wit so exuberant that it ‘o'er-informs its tenement.‘” Macaulay pronounced it “inferior indeed” to Congreve's “other comedies, but, in its line, inferior to them alone.” The dialogue, continued Macaulay, “resplendent with wit and eloquence ... preserves a certain colloquial air, a certain indescribable ease, of which Wycherley had given no example and which Sheridan in vain attempted to imitate.”

One sentence in Wordsworth's long letter to Dorothy describing his journey through France and Switzerland in 1790 might very well be used as a datum line from which to chart later utterances of the poet, either in prose or poetry, on God and nature. Wordsworth says, “Among the more awful scenes of the Alps I had not a thought of man or a single created being; my whole soul was turned to him who produced the terrible majesty before me.” When we add to this a sentence from a letter to Mathews written from Keswick late in 1794, “Cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions,” we can measure more or less accurately the distance Wordsworth had covered between 1790 and 1798, when cataracts and mountains had become “the soul of all his moral being” and He who had produced the terrible majesty a “motion and a spirit” that “rolls through all things.” Both sentences serve a salutary purpose in focusing attention on those formative elements in Wordsworth's early training which we tend under the influence of descriptions in The Prelude and its apostrophes to the “Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe” either to forget or to push into the background. With their outlines sharpened by a proper perspective they support the contention that Wordsworth's later orthodoxy is less a retreat from the naturalism of “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude than it is a return to an earlier position, which, while all its implications at the time may not have been realized, was more in line with the later Wordsworth than with the pantheist of 1798–1802.

These words interrupted a search of the newspaper files for an item about Mary Shelley. Although that search proved futile, the bit of unexpected news about her famous mother was adequate reward for the effort. For the Reverend Joshua Waterhouse, the singular Rector of Stukeley—or more accurately Little Stukeley—was an entirely new character in the drama of Mary Wollstonecraft's life, unmentioned by and apparently unknown to any of her biographers. His identity and his history were soon made clear by other issues of the London newspapers, by the Huntingdon Gazette, and by two little books occasioned by his sudden and sordid death. And knowledge of his existence and of his character throws light on certain passages in Mary Wollstonecraft's writings.

Literary studies seem frequently to convey the impression that the conte philosophique, as such, became practically a closed book after Voltaire, and that it is to be taken for granted as an eighteenth-century literary form. True, the conte had grown into prominence during a revolutionary era, when caustic impertinence of style had served to enhance its force. True also, sentiment was growing apace with the latter years of the eighteenth century, and this very quality might necessarily tend to preclude further development of such a formula. However, with full cognizance of this fact that sentiment was gaining favor, and that it would of itself tend to disintegrate a literary form essentially devoid of sympathy, one may still venture to present evidence that the conte was a living form long after the French Revolution, and in fact that it would appear to have continued a rather vigorous existence even into the first years of the nineteenth. A point made by M. Mornet seems pertinent. With reference to Voltairian and Rousseauistic influences which progressed simultaneously throughout an entire period, M. Mornet aptly asserts:

Innumerable essays are being written on the uncertain future of the humanities, and on the obscure fate of a liberal education in the post-war world. The good intentions of the authors are clear, although their arguments are mingled with much idealism and not a few pious hopes. Those of us who deal with modern languages and their literatures gladly applaud whenever the importance of our field is vigorously upheld in public. We are sufficiently convinced of our educational significance to be willing to hang together in a common defense of our existence, and there is no need of repeating the commonplace burden of our song, that we are worth salvaging for the world after the war. But mere idealistic arguments leave us without a planned working program of effective intervention in that future, although the urgency of improvement in language teaching is clear to us all.

One of the earliest discoveries of the pioneer students of “pre-romanticism” was Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance. Phelps and Beers, who discussed only the Letters and the Moral and Political Dialogues, considered Hurd to have been in whole-hearted revolt against neo-classical ideas. Later scholars, taking into account his earlier writings, found both in these works and the Letters themselves certain opinions which seemed conventionally neo-classic; he therefore came to be represented either as a classicist converted to romanticism or as a writer who always wavered between the two positions. In general, his criticism was considered to have been mixed and fluctuating. He was thought to have had no consistent position, but to be important insofar as he anticipated romantic views.

For a century and more Heinrich Heine has had an international vogue unsurpassed by that of any other German poet, unless Goethe. This well-known fact has been established beyond doubt in a series of studies on Heine in America, Heine in France, Heine in Holland, Heine in Rumania, Heine in Scandinavia. Strangely enough, however, Heine's influence in two countries that perhaps felt most strongly the impress of his literary personality has hitherto not been fully explored by scholars. The one country is his own native land, where he was constantly felt as a living, though not necessarily beneficial, force and where his work gave rise to unceasing controversies. The other realm is England.

Morgan Odoherty, the mythical Irishman who contributed to Blackwood's Magazine in its salad days, is usually—and correctly—acknowledged to have been the creation of Captain Thomas Hamilton. Yet he is almost always identified with Dr. William Maginn, the sprightly contributor from Cork who reprinted several Blackwood Odoherty articles as his own and later used the pseudonym in articles for Fraser's Magazine. Maginn has, accordingly, been praised and damned for many an article in which he had no part. The letters which he wrote to William Blackwood prove that he was only one of many who contributed Odoherty-signed articles. And although as years passed he wrote a larger and larger share of them, he never completely preempted the pseudonym.

Writers on the English theatre have noted an interesting paradox in the history of William Congreve's The Mourning Bride. Congreve is remembered today almost exclusively for his series of brilliant comedies, but it was in this, his only tragedy, that he achieved the greatest theatrical triumph of his career, and for the same play he has also been most severely criticized. “Strange as it may seem to us,” wrote Bonamy Dobrée, “the work that most swelled his fame with his contemporaries was his tragedy.” “Congreve's ‘Mourning Bride’ is a melodrama, judged by our standards at present,” asserted Ashley Thorndike, “but for many years it was considered one of the greatest tragedies of the language.” And Crane Taylor, writing of the period following the production of the play at Lincoln's Inn Fields, stated that Congreve “was now the foremost writer of tragedy as well as comedy and, while we are apt to think of him only as a comic dramatist, it is well to remember that he enjoyed the distinction of a premier place in both forms of drama to the end of his life.” Montague Summers summed the matter up: “The Mourning Bride long enjoyed a period of universal eulogy, which may, perhaps, be judged a little extravagant: it was then as generally decried.”

Although it has long been recognized that there is a certain political-historical content to Prometheus Unbound, there has, so far, been no attempt to make a consistent interpretation of it in terms of this content. It is the object of this paper to attempt to remedy this defect. In so doing I shall present only interpretations which can be supported by reference to Shelley's other works, in many of which the same basic ideas are present though, fortunately, minus their symbolic garb.

In no other field of writing save poetry did Johnson spend so much of his career as in biography—from the Life of Sarpi in 1738 to the Lives of the Poets in 1781. And in few of his undertakings was he so successful. Most of his biographical writing was done to order, and it frequently suffers from haste, but from first to last it shows his characteristic excellences, his eagerness and facility in generalization, his piercing analysis of character.

Much has been written about the influence of the early reviewers on Tennyson. Professor Lounsbury, who has made the only real printed effort at a scholarly analysis of the question, believed the influence to be very slight. I shall attempt here to collect and sift the evidence afresh and to determine as clearly as possible the part which the reviewers played in Tennyson's ten-years' silence after the publication of his first two independent volumes (1830, 1833), in his revisions and suppressions of poems in them, and in his choice of subjects and expression of ideas in the new poems of 1842.

For the student of acting and actors, the Eighteenth Century is a rich period. Within a century the careers of such players as Betterton, Quin, Macklin, Garrick, and Kemble ran their courses; these were actors of varying techniques, yet they had in common their century's earnest desire to imitate “nature” and they all subscribed to the same basic set of acting conventions. The century is rich too in theorists and critics: Gildon, John and Aaron Hill, Churchill, Lloyd, Hiffernan.