Accessions of primary source materials concerning Juan Luis Vives (1493-1540) continue to be made, increasing our need for a thorough restudy of his life and thought. Since Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín's authoritative biography was published in 1903, besides the obvious advances in supplementary scholarship, more than sixty letters by Vives himself, many letters addressed to him, one treatise which may have been his (which has yet to be analyzed and published), as well as the records of the Inquisitorial trials of members of his family, have been added to the evidence known to be extant.

The letter with which this article is concerned has been published in this century but has not explicitly been incorporated into any studies of Vives. Professor Kristeller recently described the manuscript used in the Paquier edition (P) and brought it to my attention. The letter is here republished, in closer fidelity to the manuscript, and with an expanded critical apparatus which suggests a new interpretation of its meaning.

In 1960 the noted Spanish bibliographer Don José Simón Díaz reprinted a number of Mira de Amescua's uncollected poems under the title ‘Textos dispersos’ (Revista de Literatura, XVIII, 169-180). Not included in that group is Mira's little-known homage to the Prince of Wales on the occasion of the latter's visit to Madrid in 1623. Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, in his still fundamental Mira de Amescua y su teatro: Estudio biográfico y crítico (Madrid, 1931), was able to describe this work only as follows: ‘En el Índice de la Biblioteca que fue del señor Marqués de Jerez de los Caballeros constan unas Octavas al Príncipe de Gales, por el Doctor Mira de Amescua. Quizá se trate de las compuestas por él con Alarcón y otros poetas’ (p. 32, n. 1).

The inclusion of ‘A Letter Written by Fulke Greville to His Cousin Greville Varney Residing in France’ in the first collected edition of Greville's works in 1633 generated controversy from the beginning. Even before the book could be distributed, John Varney (Greville Varney's brother) wrote to Sir John Coke, who evidently supervised publication of the 1633 folio, and bitterly protested the publication of the letter. His objections rested on his belief that the letter wrongly implied the Varneys’ dependency upon their affluent kinsman, Fulke Greville. And John Varney hotly charged that the late Lord Brooke had somehow contrived by means of this letter, left among his papers, to clear himself posthumously of accusations that he had once used the Varneys harshly. Finally, Varney claimed to Coke that this letter was never written to his brother at all. The real recipient, he declared, was John Harris, a cousin to the Varneys who was then living in France.

In one of the recent volumes in the English Lute-Songs series, Ian Spink has assembled from manuscript sources fifteen songs by Alfonso Ferrabosco. The first is a setting of an anonymous poem, ‘All you forsaken lovers come,’ for a solo voice with bass, to which Spink has added inner parts. Spink's source is the ‘John Bull’ manuscript, MS. 52 D, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (c. 1620); another version—from which Spink takes two readings—is in British Museum MS. Additional 10337, the ‘Elizabeth Rogers Virginal Book,’ dated c. 1657. A third version of this song, but with a different and much more interesting set of words, Benjonson's “The Houre-glasse,’ is in a pair of manuscript part-books now in the Cathedral Library at Carlisle. These partbooks were compiled around 1637 by Thomas Smith, later bishop of Carlisle, and contain several songs not known elsewhere, such as the cycle of eleven songs about ‘John and Joan’ by Richard Nicholson. They also contain two Latin anthems by Ferrabosco (pp. 74, 75).