"the musical rather than the plastic, the organic rather than the aesthetic," a hard saying for an undergraduate. P. 321, 1617 is not so good a date as 1620-1621 for Pyrame. P. 330, Don Quichot is a spelling found in the seventeenth century as well as in Rostand. P. 355, Mahelot's Mémoire shows that the scenery of the Hôtel de Bourgogne was hardly "rudimentary.”

Professor Spiers describes the historical background of the characters. He knows very well that a poet is not to be taken to task for historical inaccuracies, but that it is important for a student to be told what was furnished by tradition so that he can appreciate the changes made by the poet. He does not show, however, as Brun has done, the full extent to which the romantic, idealistic Cyrano differs from his historical namesake, whose childhood is not known to have been without love, who evidenced no inclination to sacrifice himself for a rival, and who was not above seeking a patron.

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In his judgment of Rostand he brings out clearly the poet's wit, cleverness, versatility, mastery of technique. He admits his lack of intellectual endowment, but does not point out his lack of sincerity, his abuse of cleverness, his préciosité, his panache. It may be that Rostand did not share the theatrical conventions that lingered on in the dramas of Sardou, Augier and Dumas fils," but he had theatrical tricks of his own that are quite as obvious and quite as artificial. Still, the undergraduate does not notice these defects any more than an American critic who has recently declared Cyrano to be the greatest play since Shakespeare. Professor Spiers does not make this mistake and, if he seems too partial to Rostand, it must be remembered that a certain reverence is owing to the aesthetics of undergraduates in a book that is intended primarily for them.

H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER.

Le château d'Amour de Robert Grosseteste évêque de Lincoln, par J. MURRAY. Paris: Champion, 1918. 8vo. Pp. 183.

Miss Murray has done an excellent piece of work in her edition and study of the one work in French verse attributed to the great, English bishop of the thirteenth century, Robert Grosseteste. The

first section is devoted to a sketch of the life and works of the author (15-21), in which Miss Murray shows she has made good use of the well-chosen books of which she gives a list in the preceding bibliography. Perhaps enough emphasis has not been given to the scholarly interests of this humanist of the thirteenth century, and to his wide and liberal tendencies, as is evidenced by the appearance of the manuscripts and translations of Hebrew books found in the monastic libraries which came within the sphere of his administration.

The very mediocre edition of the poem, due to M. Cooke, published for the Caxton Society in 1852, was based on two manuscripts; Miss Murray in the preparation of her edition has collated eleven manuscripts of the thirteenth, and fourteenth century, which contain the poem under various titles, and variant forms, to which she calls attention in detail (22-32). Of these manuscripts she has made a careful classification, of which the results, so far as the original text is concerned, are rather disconcerting, on account of the variation of readings, which have been multiplied, not only by the individual scribal peculiarities, but also by the fluctuating condition of the Anglo-French dialect as spoken and written in England in this period (32-40). Of this dialect Miss Murray has made a careful investigation with the use of the most recent work on the subject, from the metrical, phonetic, and syntactical points of view, and her results from this investigation show that the composition of the work may be assigned to the neighborhood of 1230, a date consonant with what is known of the life and works of the author (41-64). In the discussion of the sources she shows that the treatment of the Scriptures which appears in Grosseteste's theological tractates, is likewise found in the poem, as is also the emphasis given to allegorical interpretation, which is the raison d'être of this spiritual allegory. If she has arrived at the same conclusions as other scholars as to Grosseteste's poem being the first French poem to contain the theme of the Four Daughters of God (79), she has neither here, nor in the section on its translations and influence, assigned to it its position among other medieval works, which have undertaken to unite this episode in a single work, devoted to the story of the redemption of man, such as it is found in the poem of the St. Graal, the Meditationes vitae Christi, and in various passion plays (Cf. E. Roy, Le Mystère de la Passion en France du XIIe au XVIe siècle,

1903, *9). And she has curiously failed to note what would seem to be the inspiration of both the title of the poem and its main theme. Dr. Neilson, twenty years ago in his well-informed dissertation on The Origins and Sources of the Courts of Love (1899, p. 136), which should have been in Miss Murray's bibliography, pointed out how close was the resemblance of the allegorical castle in Grosseteste's spiritual allegory to the mansion of Venus in secular allegories of an earlier, or of the same period, and how Grosseteste's interpretation had a suggestion of another type of allegory. The familiarity of the conception is further evidenced by its appearance in works of art of the same and a later period (Neilson, op. cit., 137-8; R. S. Loomis, "The Allegorical Siege in the Art of the Middle Ages," Journal of the Archaeol. Institute of America, XXIII [1919]: 255-269; A. Rubió y Lluch, Documents per l'historia de la Cultura catalana mieg-eval, 1 [1908] 171, 193). Le Château d'Amour is only another instance, so common from the dawn of literature, of the adoption of a secular genre of literature for ecclesiastical purposes.

Neither in the section devoted to the manuscripts, nor in that devoted to the influence of the poem, has Miss Murray noted the mention of the work under various titles, in catalogues of medieval libraries. In the late fourteenth century library at Peterborough, for instance, it is noted as "Tractatus de Origine Mundi secundum Rob. Grostest, Gallice" and, again, as "Tractatus Qui in Lingua Romana secundum Robertum Grostest Episcopum Lincoln, De principio creationis mundi, de medio & fine" (S. Gunton, The History of the Church of Peterburgh [1687], 224, 218). Of these the first gives a title not found elsewhere, while the second includes the beginning of the Latin Prologue due to Grosseteste, himself (ed. 22, 23, 87), as is the case in an entry in the catalogue of St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, written late in the fifteenth century: "tractatus Magistri Roberti grossi Capitis de principio mundi medio et fine in gallico" (M. R. James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover [1903], 218), while in the same catalogue (372) one finds no less than three copies listel under the title of "Tractatus domini Lincoln in gallico." We likewise find in an inventory of books which belonged to Charles V and Charles VI of France one entitled "Vie de Jhesus Crist rymée que fist saint Robert" (L. Delisle, Recherches sur la

Librairie de Charles V [1907], II, *77), as in the rubric of Ms. L (26). If no one of a number of such entries can be identified with any one of the manuscripts on which this edition is based, these entries at least show the popularity of the work under various titles.

The editor has presented a readable text, with the supplement of a long list of variants, which can still be used to advantage, in suggesting more probable readings than those adopted. What advantage for instance has the suggested reading based on the reading "Iny" in one manuscript:

En li conuisse sanz folage (24),

over that found in all the other manuscripts which read:

Le conuisse sanz folage?

And how would the emended text be translated? In Old French, "soi conoistre en " is a not unknown construction, but is "li" to be taken as the tonic form of the third personal pronoun in the plural? Is "O ez, seignurs" (43) a mere misprint for the AngloNorman " oez"? The sudden change from the singular to the plural form in the line:

Meis tu primes le enfreinsistes "

is certainly worthy of comment, supported as it is by the majority of manuscripts, as a striking example, and in a most emphatic way of a phenomenon of which cases abound not only in Old French, but also in a number of Germanic languages, including English (Cf. F. Liebrecht, Glossaire du Chevalier au Cygne [1859], 440, Gött. gel. Anz. [1866], 1038; [1870], 1232, [1871], 1922; Academy, 111, 202).

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The short glossary (181-2) is perhaps not as complete as it should be, while giving some unnecessary explanations. Does projectile," with which quarel is glossed, give any clue to its very common meaning: "the bolt of a cross-bow"? Neither in the glossary nor in the notes has attention been called to the identical Anglo-Norman form for two words, "poür" (1526) "fear" for O. F. paour, Lat. pavor, and " poür" (1620), "stench," Lat. putor, Prov. pudor, O. F. puor. In the second place, in the poem the pains of hell are enumerated of which:

E la tierce si iert poür,

an equation with the fetor if in a different order, of the Vision of

St. Paul, which the editor has occasion to cite, 179; (Cf. P. Meyer, Rom., XXIV, 366; cf. 360, n. 1).

In her notes Miss Murray adds much to the elucidation of the text by the citations she gives of scholastic and legal texts. But is the extra-Scriptural information that Adam was created in the valley of Hebron (75-6) so well known that it was not worth citing some medieval texts? (Cf. A. Bovenschen, Die Quellen f. d. Reisebeschreibung des Johann von Mandeville [1888], 37), and is the proper name "Architriclin" (1247) as well known to the average reader as to a medieval reader, or auditor, so that a note on its origin in the word in the Vulgate "architriclinus" (John, II, 8-9), for the master of the feast, is not necessary? (Cf. F. Michel, Tristan, 11, 310; Villon, Grant Testament, 1243, E. Langlois, Table des Noms propres . . . dans les Chansons de Geste [1904], 45, Mandeville's Travels, edited from MS. Cotton Titus C. XVI in the British Museum, ed. P. Hamelius (Publ. E. E. T. 153) [1919], 153. The passage is not found in Halliwell's text, p. 111, and so its source has not been noted by Bovenschen, op. cit., 57).

Cornell University.

GEORGE L. HAMILTON.

CORRESPONDENCE

A POSTLIMINEAR COROLLARIUM FOR CORYATE

Having recently been led by Mr. Maurice Hewlett's A Fool of Quality to read Tom Coryate's Crudities for the first time, I am moved by my surprise, not to say indignation, to attempt a Rettung. Mr. Hewlett's entertaining skit portrays Coryate as a buffoon and a butt, who must have sat for Shakespeare's fools. And the Cambridge History of English Literature, if it does not confirm, would do little to correct this impression. Mr. Hewlett quotes what is almost the only absurd, but is unfortunately the first, sentence in Coryate's book, with the comment, "Shakespere can never have missed such a man as that." To prove that Coryate was "a euphuist of the first water" and a fool Mr. Hewlett and others instance his title-pages, which are no more affected than those of Chapman, Purchas, or Raleigh, and three or four into tionally extravagant sentences, some of them from private letters They do not tell the reader that almost the whole of Coryate's