Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/490

 486 Bailey related to the word enthusiasm itself. But first a word about Chapters II and III before we take up this point. Chapter II deals with what is undoubtedly the most ancient of all English learned societies, the Assembly of the Antiquaries, founded by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1572. Although there is "no positive evidence of the existence of literary interest in this society," there is "no evidence which denies the possibility of such interests" (p. 7), and Dr. Steeves makes out an excellent case for his contention from inferences to be drawn from the known activities of the members of the society. To note only a few out of many: Archbishop Parker, "a mighty collector of books," extended vitally necessary aid to the scholarly labors of his friends who collected and published Mss.; Sir Robert Cotton, a still mightier collector, formed the remarkable library which for two centuries has been in the possession of the English nation and which made him practically indispensable to historians and literary students, the library which is probably even today the most notable collection of original materials for national and literary history collected by a single individual; John Stowe was an annalist and one of the first publishers of Chaucer; Francis Thynne was for his day a really great Chaucer scholar; and William Camden, who found time amidst incessant and varied activities to compile an Anglo-Saxon dictonary. Chapter III, on the seventeenth century, gives a record oS projects, usually unsuccessful in point of duration, eminently successful as laboratory practice. Instead of the projected Academy Royal of King James, 1616, which might have become the predecessor in time and type of the Academic Francaise of 1635 and a sister society to the Fruchtbringende Gesell- schaft of 1617, there finally developed the Royal Society, 1660, which is an institution devoted to experimental science. Thus, through many plans and even actual organizations of every aim, for purposes pedagogic, political, scientific, theological, literary, or mainly social, the continuous tradition of society activities in England was assured. Let us now return to our consideration of the reasons for the Royal Society and the general lack of interest in purely literary societies. The impulse toward the founding of literary societies and academies as well as the models for them spread over Europe from Italy. Indefinite as the immediate purposes of the Italian academies may seem to be, there is little question that the "smouldering embers of the great Neoplatonic ideas were here fanned to flames." 1 The ideal of these societies was in fact not 1 C. F. E. Spurgeon: Chapter on Law in Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. IX.