Gawain, Arthur's great nephew, can be traced to as remote an antiquity as any other Arthurian knight. He appears in the earliest stages of Arthurian tradition, which long preceded any written records. He was known on the continent as early as the eleventh century. Moreover, he was celebrated, both on the continent and in England, as the nonpareil or Arthur' a knights. He is connected with Arthur from earliest times, and in the oldest romantic stories of Arthur he is shown as the King's constant companion and favourite. Thus, the romantic chroniclers - Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace and Layamon – assign him the position nearest the King. Knights of later fame, such as Lancelot and Tristram, are yet unknown.

The title "maker," which Dunbar was to apply again to Chaucer in his ‘Lament for the Makaris’, later drew from Sir Philip Sidney the epithets “high and incomparable.” The very name “poet," he writes, "commeth of this word ‘Poiein’, which is to make: wherein I know not, whether by lucke or wisedome, wee Englishmen have mette with the Greekes in calling him a maker.” Chaucer’s right to this title in the fullest sense of Sidney’s description has long been regarded as indisputable. But to make the term "rethor” virtually synonymous with "makar," as Dunbar seems to do, is to pass a critical judgment which even in recent times would not pass unchallenged. It is the aim of the present study, however, to show that the great Scottish Chaucerian was by no means using words loosely.

In 1843 Macaulay, with one of those mistakes that so cheer the student of that infallible dogmatist, proclaimed that one unpardonable fault, the fault of tediousness, pervades the whole of the ‘Faerie Queene’. We become sick of cardinal virtues and deadly sins, and long for the society of plain men and women. Of the persons who read the first canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the first book, and not one in a hundred perseveres to the end of the poem. Very few and very wary are those who are in at the death of the Blatant Beast.

The aim of this study is to examine Galsworthy's portrait of Soames Forsyte through the course of six novels, to interpret the changes in that portrait, and to determine whether Soames really developed, as leading critics suggest, from a villainous to a heroic character. Galsworthy wrote his best novel, The Man of Property, in an uncharacteristically rebellous mood because of the circumstances of his courtship of Ada. As he grew older and more tolerant, as he and his wife were accepted into the society against which they had rebelled, and as his position in literature became firmly established, he looked at Soames with increasing insight and compassion.

Charles Percy Snow is a remarkably interesting, versatile and contraversial figure in contemporary English life. For those who are by nature combative Snow--a former physicist of brilliance, as well as a stern reviewer of fiction, popular novelist and active politician--has provided some of life's more tolerable moments. Snow has outraged critics with his opinions on the modern novel. He has outraged literary historians and assorted critics with his opinions on the Industrial Revolution, the polarization of the literary and scientitic cultures, and the desirable course of present day education. He continues to delight and outrage critics with his novels. [...]

George Eliot considered the function of her work to be "the rousing of nobler emotions, which make mankind desire the social r1ght." Throughout her novels, there is one recurring figure, the mentor, who, regardless of his social role, illustrates how vital this concern is. [...]

Outside the slatted shutters of the bedroom window, the afternoon sun was very bright. Beth thought she could tell its exact brightness from the broken glow that filtered in. The snow would be white today - - so white it would reflect color, just as blackness did when she closed her eyes tightly and stared into the dark. [...]

A youthful nun is robbed of her new set of gold and ivory false teeth; a muscular physiologist peddles furiously on a stationary bicycle, ostensibly to make an experiment on the process of perspiration; a dissipated murderer listens with absorption to Beethoven's A-Minor Quartet before he brings about his own death; a dog, hurled from an airplane, "explodes" on a rooftop and causes a violent quarrel; an elderly earl goes on a diet of carp's gut and converts himself into something resembling an ape; a deceased uncle refuses to dissolve into the "Light," and consequently becomes a candidate for reincarnation; a handsome young priest is burned alive on a charge of consorting with Satan to bewitch a convent; an adolescent girl's interest in Swinburne contributes to a fatal car accident. [...]

The Spanish Tragedy, in its original form, was written by Thomas Kyd (1558-94), probably during the period 1585-7. A dramatic adaptation of a tale of human passion--the revenge of Hieronimo, Marshall of Spain, on the murderers of his only son--The Spanish Tragedy soon became one of the most popular of Elizabethan plays. It achieved this distinction, as Dr. Boas points out, not because Kyd was a great poet, thinker, or moralist, but because he was a born dramatist with a talent for impressive rhetoric, for exploiting the full technical resources of the Elizabethan stage, and for adapting the Senecan tradition to suit the sympathies of contemporary taste.

In our time Charles Kingsley is considered hardly more than a demode novelist and an author of children's books. He himself believed that only his poetry and, perhaps, ‘Hypatia’ would survive, but time has decided differently. His poems are now largely forgotten and his social novels retain an attraction or interest mainly for the student of sociology. But ‘Westward Ho!’ and ‘Hypatia’ are as fresh and lively to-day as they were almost a hundred years ago, although they are now considered books for children rather than novels for the mature reader.