[By H. J. C. GRIERSON AND ARTHUR MELVILLE CLARK]

SPENSER and his circle figure less prominently in the publications of 1921 than of 1920, but the historical allusions in-and behind his allegorical poetry continue to stimulate the activity. of American scholars. Miss A. R. Snell (Modern Language Notes,: xxxvi, 182-3) returns to the much debated allegory of Muiopotmos, and gives further reasons for identifying Clarion with Spenser himself in opposition to suggestions that he is Raleigh. Attempts to solve the riddle of this poem must fail if their authors ignore the important and elaborate genealogy of the Spider.

The Virtue of Temperance in the Faerie Queene (Studies in Philology, July 1921) is an attempt by Mr. Frederick Morgan Padelford to show by a detailed analysis how closely Spenser in his Second Book keeps to the Aristotelian doctrine. There is nothing really new in it, except perhaps the ingenious discoveries of parallels to the Ethics: it performs for the Legend of Temperance very much what Ruskin did for the Legend of Holiness in an appendix to The Stones of Venice.

Messrs. R. G. Whigam and O. F. Emerson (Sonnet Structure in Sidney's 'Astrophel and Stella': Studies in Philology, July 1921), believing that 'too little attention has been paid to the varied and interesting forms used by Sidney', have amply made up for this neglect by counting the syllables and tabulating the rhyme schemes, &c. of the sonnets in the Astrophel sequence and in Sidney's miscellaneous poetry.

Mrs. Stopes's article (Modern Language Review, July 1921) on Thomas Edwards, the obscure author of the two Ovidian paraphrases, Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus, is a most ingenious attempt to produce a biographical sketch from the merest hints and chance phrases. Yet one does feel that she almost establishes the fact that Thomas was the younger brother of the author of Palamon and Arcite, and a gentleman at court in the nineties of the sixteenth century: there is nothing in the evidence presented to compel our acquiescence, but it is sufficiently plausible to provoke, as Mrs. Stopes hopes, others whose notes may cover the same ground, to add their findings to her own. One can hardly accept, however, the suggestion that the Aetion of Colin Clout's come home again is Edwards: his verse is rather shambling and his rhymes too rude to deserve even from Spenser, whom Thomas Edwards seems to have regarded as his master, such generous admiration. On the other hand, Mrs. Stopes has a good case in identifying the "Edwards' who wrote two poems in a Bodleian MS. with Thomas. One is left with the impression that more should be known of this man, rather, however, on account of his allusions to Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Daniel, and others, than because of his poetic qualities.

Milton has been the subject of much critical investigation by English, American, and Continental scholars during 1921. The interest in his thought and character, in the light thrown on his poems by a study of De Doctrina Christiana (so long neglected from this point of view), and the prose pamphlets, has grown steadily of late years. The present writer contributed a short study of Milton's relation to orthodox Protestant theology to Hastings' Dictionary of Theology (vol. viii, 1915) and M. Denis Saurat's much more exhaustive work was treated in Volume I of The Year's Work. He has supplemented this by an article in the Revue Germanique (1921) on Les Sources anglaises de la Pensée de Milton and a pamphlet on Milton et le Zohar (1921-2). In the first he shows the close affinity between Milton's thought regarding the materiality of the soul and its participation in the death of the body-to be recreated at the Resurrection-with the thoughts and arguments of the book Man's Mortality, to which Masson drew attention. This work expresses the views of a group of

advanced thinkers, referred to in Edwards' Gangraena, the names of three of whom are known. Dr. Saurat conjectures that Milton knew the first edition 1643-4, was in sympathy with the authors, and probably influenced the changes in expression and still more in tone-which becomes more religious, if no more orthodox-of the edition of 1655, and is responsible for the increase in the number of citations from the Fathers. In the pamphlet Dr. Saurat goes on to show that much of Milton's thought may be traced to a study of the Zohar, the doctrines of the Cabbala. A writer in Englische Studien, January 1920, dealt with the indebtedness of Blake to the same source for some of his mythology. Milton, Saurat points out, has neglected the mythology; for him the Zohar was 'une mine d'idées philosophiques'. The discovery has qualified Saurat's regard for 'l'originalité de Milton comme penseur' but increased the importance of Milton as in his time 'le représentant de l'esprit moderne', and his interest as a channel for ideas which reached Blake. But Blake died two years after the discovery of the De Doctrina.

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The fresh interest in the thought and character of Milton is not confined to France. The Swedish scholar S. B. Liljegren's Studies in Milton, which has come to hand only since this survey was begun, and Mutschmann's Der andere Milton, have developed (the latter in apparently rather truculent style), in opposition to what is taken to be the English view of Milton as a Christian and Puritan poet, the thesis that he is, rather, an extreme representative of the same Renaissance type as Raleigh and Marlowe, egotistic, unscrupulous, and ultimately a Stoic rather than a Christian, his acceptance of the supernatural elements in his creed having become purely conventional or poetic. Liljegren's is a remarkable book. It is written in English, but the sentencestructure is often more German than English, especially in the more philosophical paragraphs. The most important, and largest, portion of the book deals with the trustworthiness of Milton's statements about himself, and consists in a carefully documented proof of the extreme improbability of Milton's having actually visited Galileo in Italy, so that his statement in the Areopagitica that he found and visited the famous Galileo grown old' would be an exaggeration due to a desire to magnify his own importance. 1 Lund: Gleerup, 1918. 2 Bonn: Schroeder, 1920.

Liljegren also holds that the balance of the evidence is in favour of the contention (to which Johnson refers in his Life) that Milton and Dugard the printer interpolated into the Εἰκὼν Βασιλική the Pamela prayer from Sidney's Arcadia, the use of which Milton then flung at the dead King in such petulant and truculent terms. To the present writer the latter case seems still not quite proved; and he would demur to the inference from it, even if true, regarding Milton's character as a whole and its reflection in his work. Man is too complex an animal to be read from one or two actions, and Liljegren insufficiently stresses what is probably the chief factor -politics, especially revolutionary politics. The purest idealists have found themselves before long, unscrupulous Macchiavellians in revolutionary conditions. Faction seldom leaves a man honest, however it find him.' Some statements of Milton are in Liljegren's general argument unduly forced. If Milton contends that justice, as an active virtue, stands higher than the contemplative virtue truth, it is hardly fair to argue that Milton means that truth may be sacrificed to justice. Mutschmann, who underlines Liljegren's contentions and paints Milton as a non-moral egotist of the kind glorified by Nietzsche, argues that Milton served virtue only as a means to fame-Liljegren perhaps approaches this too—and gives as proof the lines:

Love virtue; she alone is free,
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime.

So that Plato, whom Milton is following, when he speaks of the ascent of the soul by dialectic to the Idea of the Good is thinking of the pursuit of fame!

Liljegren and Mutschmann have been criticized; the former sympathetically but decisively by Walter Fischer in Englische Studien, May 1918. Liljegren's reply, and a note on his conception of Satan by Fischer, appear in the same periodical (September 1920 and January 1921). Mutschmann has been more trenchantly dealt with by Rudolf Metz (September 1920); and a discussion between these two critics runs through Vol. 55, 1921. The common assumption of all these critics that English criticism is governed by the Puritan tradition is, in view of the work of Landor, Garnett, Saintsbury, Raleigh, &c., absurd. The present

writer in the Hastings' Dictionary article concluded that 'Milton's was not an anima naturaliter Christiana. His was rather the soul of an ancient Stoic.' This seems to be Liljegren's view as he restates it in Bemerkungen zur Biographie Milton's in Englische Studien, September 1920. The question remains whether such a temperament was not combined with Christian faith in Milton. Liljegren thinks not. The present writer finds it hard to reconcile this view with the fact that Milton made the Christian doctrine of sin and redemption the subject of his three great poems.

An interesting article, and not irrelevant to this consideration, is Mr. C. A. Moore's The Conclusion of Paradise Lost (Publ. of the Mod. Lang. Ass. of America, xxxvi, March 1921). In reply to a previous article by Mr. John Erskine, Mr. Moore contends that the spirit of resignation, of sorrow balanced by hope, in which Paradise Lost ends, is in harmony with the orthodox Christian tradition, which saw in sin and death evils indeed, but evils which made possible a higher good than human nature had otherwise attained, that Milton here is in close harmony with Du Bartas and Giles Fletcher. It is clear that the ground is being prepared on many sides for a careful restudy of Milton. Other American articles of interest are: Detached Similes in Milton Epics (Modern Lang. Notes, xxxvi, p. 34) which stresses the large part played by nature as against books in these ; a note by Mr. Edward Chancey Baldwin on the 'Golden compasses' of Book vii, 225 as due to a misunderstanding of the A. V. of Prov. viii. 17 He set a compass upon the face of the deep', and on the 'Babylonian Woe' of the Piedmont sonnet and the fifty-first chapter of Jeremiah; with other notes in the same periodical: an article Further Interpretations of Milton in which Mr. John A. Hines, continuing a former paper, suggests some, on the face of them, not very convincing interpretations of passages in Milton. The Fair Infant of Milton's early poem, he declares, following a statement of some old editions recorded by Newton, was a boy, despite the reference to the Boreas-Orithyia's story, and the closing lines:

Then thou the mother of so sweet a child
Her false imagin❜d loss cease to lament.

It is the 'anima' which is the subject of the poem and accounts for the feminine pronoun and allusions, while some of the last