For more than two hundred years, the Buckley-Carte edition (London, 1733) of Jacques-Auguste de Thou's History of His Times has been the standard one for this great Latin chronicle of the latter half of the sixteenth century. In six massive folio volumes, it presents the most complete and accurate text generally available. A seventh volume offers an imposing array of pièces justificatives: letters by and to de Thou and his friends, discussing the publication, emendation, and censoring of the History as well as its reception at the courts of Europe and in the ‘republic of letters.’ Many of these documents were reproduced in the three most widely used French translations of the History. In his recent bibliographical study, Samuel Kinser demonstrates at great length the superiority of the London text.

The list of examples appended by Daniel to his translation of Paolo Giovio's Imprese has proved rather a puzzle to his commentators. Joan Rees, author of the standard monograph on Daniel, gives what seems to be the generally accepted view on the subject: ‘Daniel at this time was himself a good Italian scholar…. Perhaps Florio helped Daniel to collect material for the original part of his work since all the examples in his own [i.e., Daniel's] collection of devices are Italian and it is not easy to find the sources. It is unlikely that Daniel had gathered them himself on the spot…'; and she adds in a footnote: ‘Giovio's book had been translated into French in 1561 but there is no evidence that Daniel based his translation on the French version rather than the Italian original.’

In his biography of Andrew Marvell, Pierre Legouis observed that in 'The Gallery’ Marvell effected a considerable change in the wellknown theme of the image engraved on the lover's heart. ‘That a lover's heart contains his mistress's picture had already been said, among others, by Donne and Carew; but Marvell renovates the hackneyed metaphor by enlarging it. His imagination reveals itself spacious without strain.' Although Legouis pays tribute to the visual quality of Marvell's imagination, he, like other critics, has hardly explored the question to what extent ‘The Gallery’ is indebted for inspiration to pictorial tradition. 'The Gallery’ is particularly significant in this respect, for it is the most explicit illustration in Marvell's poetry of Horace's phrase ut pictura poesis,interpreted for many centuries as an affirmation of the parallelism between the two arts, and of the saying attributed by Plutarch to Simonides: 'painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.’

One interesting facet of Tamburlaine, Part I is Marlowe's dramatic characterization of Bajazet. The Great Turk's defeat and humiliation by Tamburlaine are standard features of Marlowe's acknowledged sources: his captivity in an iron cage, his being fed like a dog from Tamburlaine's table scraps, his use as Tamburlaine's footstool, and his final desperate suicide by braining against the bars of his cage. But Marlowe's debasement of Bajazet is more radical and all-encompassing. From his first appearance (III.i), the Ottoman emperor is portrayed as pompous, tyrannical, and prone to flattery. His confrontation with Tamburlaine (III.iii) is farcical rather than heroic. In short, Marlowe's Bajazet totally lacks the dignity and bravery accorded the Bajazet of his historical authorities.