A very attractive little volume containing a brief introduction and selections from the poems and prose writings of the great Elizabethan to whom Spenser gave the title of "the shepherd of the ocean." Tennyson's ballad of "The Revenge" accompanies the reprint of Ralegh's account of the battle, and selections from Ralegh's letters and from the report of the trial give insight into the forceful personality of the man and a sense of the dramatic in his life. The book will call deserved attention to the literary gifts of a man who is commonly thought of as a man of action alone.

Kaun, E. Konventionelles in den Elizabethanischen Sonetten mit Berücksichtigung der französischen und italienischen Quellen. Greifswald Dissertation.

Lazarus, G. Technik und Stil von Hero und Leander. Bonn Dissertation.

Long, Edgar. Drayton's 'Eighth Nymphal.' Studies in Philology, XIII. 180.

Reed, E. G. Two Seventeenth Century Hunting Songs. Modern Philology, XIV. 135.

Rollins, H. E. Notes on Thòmas Deloney. Modern Language Notes, XXXII. 121.

Sellers, H. Samuel Daniel: Additions to the Text. Modern Language Review, XI. 28.

Whipple, T. K. Isocrates and Euphuism. Modern Language Review, XI. 15 and 129.

Wallace, Malcolm William. The Life of Sir Philip Sidney. pp. 428. Cambridge University Press (Putnam).

A thorough and scholarly presentation of the facts of Sidney's life, admirably documented, and containing much valuable material about persons and policies in England during the period. The accounts of Sidney's boyhood, of education in his time, and of some of the elaborate entertainments given in honor of the queen are valuable; the discussion of Sidney as a writer lacks distinction, and in general the book fails either to give vividness to the stirring events and personalities of the time or to Sidney's own complex personality. But it is packed with information and is indispensable not only to one who wishes to know Sidney's biography but also to students of Elizabethan history.

V. MILTON

Bailey, Margaret L. Milton and Jakob Boehme. A Study of German Mysticism in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford University Press.

Baldwin, E. C. A Note on Paradise Lost IX. Modern Language Notes, XXXII. 119.

Barstow, Marjorie, Milton's Use of the Forms of Epic Address. Modern Language Notes, XXXI. 120.

Darnall, F. M. Milton's 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso.' Modern Language Notes, XXXI. 56.

Daehler, A. H. Adam's Motive. Modern Language Notes, XXXI. 187.

Hale, W. T. 'Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England.' Edited with introduction, notes and glossary. Yale Studies in English, LIV.

Thaler, Alwin. Milton's 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso.' Modern Language Notes, XXXI. 437.

Thaler, Alwin. Milton and Thomson. Modern Language Notes, XXXI. 439.

Thompson, E. N. S. John Milton. Topical Bibliography. Yale University Press.

Though making no pretensions to completeness this bibliography of some one hundred pages will prove invaluable to the serious student of Milton. The titles cover a wide range of topics, including not only Milton's life and works, but such related subjects as Puritanism, seventeenth century education, classical literary theory, etc. The arrangement is clear and convenient, and few important books or articles are omitted. The volume is uniform with Professor Thompson's "Essays on Milton," a useful introductory guide to some of the chief aspects and problems of Milton scholarship.

V. GENERAL WORKS

Greenlaw, Edwin. An Outline of the Literature of the English Renaissance. Boston. Sanborn & Co.

Contains introduction, statement of problems, and chronological outlines, with selected bibliography.

Jourdan, G. V. The Movement toward Catholic Reform in the Six

teenth Century. New York. Dutton.

Klein, Arthur J. Intolerance in the Reign of Elizabeth. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Co.

Scott, Mary Augusta. Elizabethan Translations from the Italian. Vassar Semi-Centennial Series. pp. lxxxi, 558. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company.

The preface gives an account of Professor Scott's work in this field extending over a quarter of a century; the index of titles covers nearly five hundred items; there is also an introductory essay on the Italian Renaissance in England. The body of the work is an exhaustive bibliography of translations classi

fied as romances in prose, poetry, plays, metrical romances, religion and theology, science and the arts, grammars and dictionaries, collections of proverbs, voyages and discovery, history and politics, manners and morals, and Italian and Latin publications in England. Accompanying the items are many explanatory and bibliographical notes that add greatly to the value of this most useful book.

Shakespeare's England. An Account of the Life and Manners of his Age. Two volumes, pp. 546, 610, with many illustrations. Oxford University Press.

A mine of information on all subjects connected with the life of the period, made vivid through profuse illustrations and through numerous extracts from contemporary accounts of life and manners, while the whole is given point as well as illustration by constant reference to Shakespeare's plays. Indeed, the two thick volumes, packed with information on every conceivable subject, may be regarded almost as a commentary on Shakespeare, testifying not only to the richness and color of Elizabethan life but also to the infinite concentration of that life in the writings of one man. Some idea of the great number of topics treated in the two volumes may be had from the indexes: one on passages cited from Shakespeare's works, twelve triple column pages in small type; another of fifteen triple column pages on proper names, and a third, containing nine pages, on subjects and technical terms. The volumes contain thirty monographs by specialists who write on such subjects as the court, the army and navy, travel, education and scholarship, science, the fine arts, the life of the town, sports and pastimes, authors, actors, the playhouse, the language, and even on such out of the way subjects as coinage and handwriting. Each chapter is supplied with an exhaustive bibliography of contemporary sources.

A reasonable method of testing the assumptions we have made in regard to institutions of a time gone by is to look at institutions of our own day as they might appear to men living many generations after us, viewed from a body of evidence as arbitrarily handed down to them by time as time has bequeathed us evidence bearing upon the life of a past day. Using this looking-backwardto-the-present method of testing the probable correctness of the generally accepted reconstruction of the institution of the English language a thousand years ago, furnishes interesting speculation, when we try to project into the future the present attitude of the philological mind, and to see how it would, from a distant date, interpret the facts of the English language of the nineteenth century, if it were provided with evidence bearing upon the state of our language in that century equal in quantity and quality to that which we have inherited from early England.

For this purpose, let us imagine that to the philologists of the thirty-first century there have been preserved of specimens of the English language in the nineteenth century only (1) about twentyfour thousand lines of the poetry of Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson (Tennyson's dialect poetry has been lost); and (2) about a million words of prose from Macaulay's History of England, Pater's Marius the Epicurean, and Newman's Sermons on Subjects of the Day. From this evidence alone students of the English language in the thirty-first century have gained all their knowledge of nineteenth century English. An intervening dark

1 Read at the meeting of the Central Division of the Modern Language Association of America, Chicago, December 28, 1916.