arrant coward, buffoon, and self-important coxcomb; the stupidity of his "Conferent", Justizrat Bostelmann, or the smirking, self-complacent acquiescence of the Actuarius Unterwasser, or the overplus of cleverness of the attorney for the defense, Assessor Perleberg, who was "eine Welt zu gelehrt und scharfsinnig für mich (Georg), armen Teufel! Mit seinem Erstens und Zweitens hätte er eine Jury von Engeln gegen die Unschuld selbst einnehmen müssen, geschweige denn ein Collegium von Richtern, die durch ihn auf den Gedanken kamen, dass ein Mensch, der mit einem so ungeheueren Aufwand von Scharfsinn und Gelehrsamkeit verteidigt werden musste, notwendig ein grosser Verbrecher war". And this man "ist später eine grosse Fackel und Leuchte der Jurisprudenz geworden."

A comparison of the two works shows the employment of similar devices of characterization, for example that of attaching certain marked physical peculiarities of speech, appearance, or manner to the unique characters of the book. Dr. Snellius in Hammer und Amboss is seldom introduced without reference to his high pitched voice, resembling the crowing of a cock, which he ever tries to pitch lower to convince himself that he is really a human being; the rare old Süssmilch with his favorite phrase "Man hat nicht sieben Sinne wie ein Bär", "Sollte man nicht gleich zu einem Bären mit sieben Sinnen werden", or his "Da soll man doch einen Zahnstocher für ein Scheunentor ansehen". The attention of the reader is called again and again when Claus is present to his double row of the whitest of teeth; and poor, old, good-hearted Hans has his belief in the panaceic properties of the wine bottle held up before our minds with the emphasis of repetition.

Another element in Dicken's technique in David Copperfield is the conjuring up before his mind of a picture of a certain scene, event or person as it was in the past. Spielhagen develops this device and uses it in a more artistic and effective manner. One passage will suffice as an example of those of a more reflective nature, merely. "Von den Abendwolken fiel noch ein schwaches rosiges Licht in mein Gemach; in diesem rosigen

Lichte sehe ich den Mann immer, wenn ich an ihn denke..... Und wenn ich die Augen schlösse, so würde er vor mir stehen, wie er an jenem Abend vor mir stand, umflossen von dem rosigen Licht, und nicht minder deutlich würde ich seine Stimme. hören'

This device, however, is made to assume its real value in such passages as the following: "Meine Abneigung gegen sie war von altem Datum und nur zu begründet!.....Die kleine Hermine freilich, hatte sie wohl noch so kornblumblaue Augen wie an jenem Morgen auf dem Deck des 'Pinguin'? und die sentenzenreiche Gouvernante, trug sie noch ihre gelben Locken? Es war ein lustiger, sonniger Tag gewesen, als ich die beiden. zum letztenmale gesehen......"Während Christel so ihrem tiefen Kummer Worte gab, deckte sie zierlich und gewandt den Tisch und ich...... dachte vergangener Zeiten, dachte jenes Abends, wo ich den Wilden in Pinnow's Schmiede zum ersten Mal getroffen und wie Christel den Tisch gedeckt und uns bedient und wie sie mich hernach gebeten hatte, nicht mit dem Wilden zu gehen. Wenn ich damals ihrem Rat gefolgt wäre!""

By means of such retrospects at different stages in the story, our minds are not permitted to release the impressions of the earlier incidents and the whole narrative affords a totality of impression that is hardly possible to attain in any other way.

We might close with a particularly striking and interesting parallel between two shipwreck scenes depicted by Spielhagen and Dickens. The first is found toward the end of the nineteenth and in the twentieth chapter of Spielhagen's Noblesse Oblige; the second in chapter fifty-five of David Copperfield. The underlying purpose of the scene, its place in the economy of the novel is much the same in both books. A chivalrous, noble-minded lover, Hipolyte in the one case, Ham in the other, loses his life in a vain attempt to rescue the man (Billow in the first passage, Steerforth in the second) who has robbed him. of all he held dearest in the world, of his beloved.

Hammer und Amboss I, 280-281.

Op. cit. I, 396.

7 II, 37; cf. also I, 231-232; 237; 417; 422; 423.

The setting of the two pictures is similar. A terrible storm. has arisen, the wind sweeps through the town, roaring down the chimneys, banging the doors, and rattling the windows, hurling tiles from the roofs and shaking the houses to their very foundations. David in the one story has come to an inn in Yarmouth, where he has put up; Minna, Billow's wife and Hipolyte's sweetheart, has in the other just taken quarters in the inn at Warnesoe on the Baltic. Both try in vain to get some rest; their inward agitation matches that of the storm without and makes repose an impossibility. In both stories the excited groups of people are depicted as they stand gazing out to sea, and in each narrativ a ship is sighted in distress. Each ship has four men clinging to the remaining mast and finally only one, this one the man of all men that Hipolyte or Ham had reason to hate and despise. It is evident that neither ship can hold out much longer. An attempt is made to hold both rescuers back, David trying it in the one case, Minna in the other; but to no avail. David sees the bold swimmer, Ham, "rising with the hills and falling with the valleys and lost beneath the foam"; while Minna watches the little boat with its rescuing party "tossing on the breakers comb, sinking into an abyss of water, swept up again and then plunging down", until both draw near the ships. They are close alongside and the heroic struggles seem destined to be crowned with success, when a huge wave comes towering, rolling in and crushes down upon the ships and the rescuers, engulfing all in its cruel embrace. When it passes onward to the shore, only a few fragments of debris dancing on the waves give any sign of the fated ship that was.

Both heroes perish in the attempt, the one, Ham, in David Copperfield, is hauled in dead to the very feet of his friend David; the other, Hipolyte in Noblesse Oblige, is brought ashore, mortally wounded, in the boat of the pilot crew, only to expire in the arms of his sweetheart Minna."

8 In the above sketch I have traced the essential resemblances in the two passages. There are, as might be expected, many divergencies, incident on a difference of general plot as well as of locality.

Although the scene in Noblesse Oblige gives us a vivid and impressive picture of a storm and the horrors of a wreck at sea, it exhibits as a whole more pose, is more melodramatic than the picture in Dickens. In the latter passage the details are more fully and more skilfully handled. The scene is powerfully drawn and moves our sympathy deeply. We must bear in mind, however, that Noblesse Oblige, one of Spielhagens inferior novels, should not be compared artistically with Dickens' best work. M. M. SKINNER.

Stanford University.

THE TIMON PLAYS.

The story of Timon of Athens is handled twice in classical literature: Plutarch introduces it parenthetically into his Life of Marcus Antonius, and Lucian tells it more fully in his inimitable dialogue, Timon or Misanthropos. Plutarch's story was translated into English by Paynter, in The Palace of Pleasure (1566), and by North, in The Lives (1579). Lucian's story, although it had not appeared in English, existed in Latin, French, and Italian translations.

There are extant three Elizabethan plays founded on the Timon story. The first is a moral interlude by Beaumont and Fletcher, The Triumph of Time; the second, an anonymous manuscript play, Timon; the third, Shakespear's Timon of Athens. There is no evidence of any other Elizabethan dramatization of the story. It has been pointed out that references to Timon were very frequent in English literature of the sixteenth century, and from this it has been inferred that an early play on the subject may have existed. Such a conclusion, however, is

not warranted by any positive evidence.

1. THE TRIUMPH OF TIME.

Fleay remarks: "Founded on Lucian's Timon or Misanthropos, in my judgment, although Dyce follows Langbaine in ascribing it to the author's own invention." The slightest investigation shows that The Triumph of Time is little more than Lucian's dialogue thrown into the form of a morality. The following outline of the play would serve with little change for an outline of Lucian's Misanthropos:

1 References to Timon and his nature were not uncommon in classical writing: cf. Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 1.808; Birds, 1.1548; Phrynicus, Monotropos; Callimachus, Epigrams; Pliny, Natural History, VII, 19; also Stobæus, Pausanias, Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, etc.

'Also included by Sir Richard Barckley in his A Discourse of the Felicity of Man (1598).

Biog. Chron. Eng. Drama, i, p. 180.