streets and squares-the last-named form of amusement being in such disfavor with the church and with the university authorities that candidates were obliged to swear that they would permit no chorea about their houses nor suffer anything improper at their inception2. The account of Paris student life which has been thus put together from the sermons is not of course a rounded picture. There is much truth in Mark Pattison's aphorism that "history cannot be written from manuscripts", and in presenting the material contained in a single class of sources many aspects of university life must necessarily be neglected. To the preachers the university and its members are primarily a theme for moralizing, and they emphasize what best points their moral3. It is not their business to tell of the orderly working of university institutions, the eager enthusiasm for learning, the wholesome routine of academic life; they give only what suits their purpose, and we must be thankful for that. Furthermore, much of what the sermons contain on university matters is interesting as showing the state of mind of their authors rather than as yielding specific information, and allowance must of course be made for the official position of some of the preachers as well as for the pulpit equation in general. What the preachers set out to say is usually of less historical importance than what they tell us unintentionally and incidentally. Still, when all deductions have been made, there remains a substantial residuum of fact which adds materially to our knowledge of academic conditions in the thirteenth century and to our sympathetic understanding of the human background of a great medieval university. CHARLES H. HASKINS. 1 See the stories of demons afflicting the dancers, in Étienne de Bourbon, 161, 226, 232, 397 ff.; and Hauréau, IV. 161. * Chartularium, I., Nos. 202, 501. 3 Cf. the observations of Langlois in Lavisse, Histoire de France, III. 2. 354. ENGLISH POETRY AND ENGLISH HISTORY My subject is not English poetry or the history of English poetry, but the connection of English poetry with English history. What is poetry? Besides reason, of which the highest manifestation is science, man has sentiment, distinct from reason though bound to keep terms with it on pain of becoming nonsense, as it not very seldom does. Sentiment seems to imply a craving for something beyond our present state. Its supreme expression is verse, music of the mind connected with the music of the voice and ear. There is sentiment without verse, as in writers of fiction and orators; as there is verse without sentiment, in didactic poetry, for example, which Lucretius redeems from prose and sweetens, as he says himself, to the taste by the interspersion of sentimental passages. Sentiment finds its fittest expression in verse. The expression in its origin is natural and spontaneous. Then poetry becomes an art looking out for subjects to express, and sometimes looking rather far afield. So painting and sculpture, in their origin spontaneous imitation, become arts looking for conceptions to embody. We are here tracing the indications of English sentiment and character at successive epochs of the national history finding their expression in poetry. Chaucer is the first English poet. He was preceded at least only by some faint awakenings of poetic life. It was in Anglo-Saxon that the Englishman before the Conquest chanted his song of battle with the Dane. It was in French that the troubadour or the trouvère relieved the dulness, when there was no fighting or hunting, in the lonely Norman hold. French was the language of the Plantagenets, even of Edward I, that truly English king. At last the English language rose from its serfdom shattered, adulterated, deprived of its inflections, its cognates, and its power of forming compound words, unsuited for philosophy or science, the terms for which it has to borrow from the Greek, but rich, apt for general literature, for eloquence, for song. Chaucer is the most joyous of poets. His strain is glad as that of the skylark which soars from the dewy mead to pour forth its joyance in the fresh morning air. He is at the same time thoroughly redolent of his age. In the Knight of the "Prologue" and in the tale of " Palamon and Arcite " we have that fantastic outburst of a posthumous and artificial chivalry of which Froissart is the chronicler, which gave birth to the Order of the Garter and a number of similar fraternities with fanciful names and rules, and after playing strange and too often sanguinary pranks, as in the wicked wars with France, found its immortal satirist in the author of Don Quixote. In the sporting Monk, the sensual and knavish Friar, the corrupt Sompnour, the Pardoner with his pig's bones shown for relics, we have the Catholic church of the middle ages with its once ascetic priesthood and orders, its spiritual character lost, sunk in worldliness, sensuality, and covetousness, calling aloud for Wycliffe. At the same time in the beautiful portrait of the Good Parson we have a picture of genuine religion and an earnest of reform. Here Chaucer holds out a hand to Piers Ploughman, the poet-preacher of reform, social and religious, if poet he can be called who is the roughest of metrical pamphleteers. Chaucer's Good Parson is a figure in itself and in its connection with the history of opinion not unlike Rousseau's "Vicaire Savoyard". Close at hand is Wycliffe, and behind Wycliffe come John Ball and the terrible insurrection of the serfs. Chaucer's debt to Boccaccio and the Italian Renaissance is manifest; yet he is English and a perfect mirror of the England of his time. There was at the same time an exuberance of national life which gave birth to ballad poetry. The English ballads as a class are no doubt inferior to the Scotch. Yet there is at least one English ballad of surpassing beauty. How can any collection of English poetry be thought complete without the ballad of "The Nut-Brown Maid?" There follows an age unpropitious to poetry and all gentle arts. The glorious filibustering of Edward III and afterward of Henry V in France brings its punishment in a general prevalence at home. of the spirit of violence, cruelty, and rapine. This, combined with aristocratic ambition and faction, plunges the country into the Wars of the Roses. At last the Tudor despotism brings calm after its kind. Helm and hauberk are changed by the court nobility for the weeds of peace, and toward the close of the reign of Henry VIII we have the twin poets Wyatt and Surrey; Surrey, the last of the tyrant's victims, produces poetry which makes him worthy to rank as a harbinger of the Elizabethan era. The times of the Protectorate and of the Marian Reaction were dark and troublous, uncongenial to poetry. But clear enough is the connection between the springtide of national life in the Elizabethan era, and the outburst of intellectual activity, of poetry generally and especially of the drama. The worst of the storms were over. The government was firm; the religious question had been settled after a fashion; the energies which had been ill-spent in civil war or marauding on France were turned to maritime adventure of the most romantic kind, or if to war, to a war of national defense combined with championship of European freedom. There was everything to excite and stimulate without any feeling of insecurity. The next great poem after Chaucer is Spenser's "Faërie Queene", and it is intimately connected with English history. It presents in allegory the struggle of Protestantism, headed by England, with Catholicism, and embodies that new Protestant chivalry which arose in place of the chivalry of the middle ages, of which Sir Philip Sydney was the model knight, and of which perhaps we see the lingering trace in Fairfax, the general of the Commonwealth, a kinsman of the Fairfax who translated Tasso. The leading characters of the struggle, Elizabeth, the Pope, Mary Queen of Scots, and Philip of Spain, under thin disguises, are all there. Artegal, the Knight of Justice, and Spenser's model of righteousness in its conflict with evil, is the Puritan Lord Grey of Wilton, the stern, ruthless Lord Deputy of Ireland, whose policy was extermination. Spenser was Lord Grey's secretary and no doubt accompanied him to the scene of his merciless government. There Spenser would come into contact with Catholicism in its lowest and coarsest as well as in its most intensely hostile form. Afterward a grantee of an estate in land conquered from the Irish insurgents, he was brought into personal conflict with the Blatant Beast. He was intimate with Raleigh and other militant and buccaneering heroes of the Protestantism of the day. In "The Shepherd's Calendar" he shows by his avowal of sympathy with old Archbishop Grindal, under the faint disguise of "Old Allgrind ", who was in disgrace for countenancing the Puritans, that he belonged to the Puritan section of the divided Anglican church. Fulsome and mendacious flattery of the woman who has been allowed to give her name to this glorious age is an unpleasant feature of Spenser's work, as it is of the other works and was of the court society of that time. It is perhaps pardonable, if in any case, in that of a poet who would not be taken or expect to be taken at his word. In the drama we expect to find rather gratification of the general love of action and excitement, and of curiosity about the doings of the great, prevalent among the people, than anything more distinctly connected with the events and politics of the day. Shakespeare himself is too thoroughly dramatic to reflect the controversies of his time. Like all those about him he is Royalist, conforms to court sentiment, and pays his homage to the Virgin Queen. Probably he pays it also to her learned successor under the name of Prospero in "The Tempest". Raleigh treats the Great Charter as a democratic aggression on the rights of royalty. Shakespeare in "King John" does not allude to the Great Charter or to anything connected with it. In "Coriolanus" and in "Troilus and Cressida" there is strong antidemocratic sentiment, dramatic no doubt, but also with a personal ring. It is notable that Shakespeare nowhere alludes to the great struggle with Spain. But here again he is probably in unison with the court, which though forced into the conflict, was not heartily anti-Spanish and certainly not anti-despotic. In religion Shakespeare was a Conformist. He quizzes Nonconformists, both Papist and Puritan; but probably he did no more than conform. When he touches on the mystery of existence and on the other world, as in the soliloquy in "Hamlet" and in "Measure for Measure", it is hardly in a tone of orthodox belief. In the flower-market at Rome, not very far from the shrine of Ignatius Loyola, now stands the statue of Giordano Bruno, with an inscription saying that on the spot where Bruno was burned this statue was erected to him by the age which he foresaw. Bruno visited England in Shakespeare's time, and was there the center of an intellectual circle which sat with closed doors. Was Shakespeare perchance one of that circle? Though not political in any party sense, Shakespeare is full of the national and patriotic spirit evoked by the circumstances of his time. He shows this in the battle scene of "Henry V". He shows it in the speech of the Bastard of Falconbridge in "King John ", which is at the same time a complete confutation of the theory that Shakespeare was a Catholic, for no dramatic motive could have sufficed to call forth or excuse such an affront to his own church. case. No person of sense, it may be presumed, doubts that Shakespeare wrote his own plays. Greene and Ben Jonson and Charles I and Milton thought he did. But, say the Baconians, how came a yeoman's son, brought up among bumpkins, and educated at a country grammar-school, to acquire that imperial knowledge of human nature in all its varieties and ranks? This is the one strong point in their But Shakespeare, in London, got into an intellectual set. Several of his brother playwrights were university men. The subject of the " Sonnets" was evidently not vulgar. But much may be explained by sheer genius. Among poets, two are preeminent; one lived in the meridian light and amidst the abounding culture of the Elizabethan era; the other in the very dawn of civilization, as some think before the invention of writing, sang, a wandering minstrel, in rude Æolian or Ionian halls, and the influence of Homer on the t |