This is a study of Towneley Cycle with special referehce to its social character. The Towneley Cycle passion group is of six plays: The Conspiray, The Buffeting, The Scourging, The Crucifixion, The Talents, and The Resurrection, all of which possess a note of social justice pervading them as well as their religious entity. The social element can be detected in the plays with Pontius Pilatus as an outstanding character. Of Pontius Pilatus there have been two interpretations, viz. Good Pilatus, and Evil Pilatus. This Roman Governor is considered evil in the Towneley passion group. The author of the plays, by characterising Pilatus as the evil antagonist, presents his sense of social justice which is wanted by the people, together with his religious faith which is intrinsically, social. The present writer takes up the Judas of Gamala's Revolt in the days of the Roman occupation in ancient Judaea and the Peasants' Revolt in Middle Age England to show how the social situations are similar to each other. By expounding and giving a whole picture of all the passion plays of Towneley Cycle, studying the characterisation of Pontius Pilatus, and giving a brief glimpse of the social conditions of Old Judaea and Middle Age England, the present writer tries and concludes that the Towneley passion group is a kind of social satire, which is one of the traditions of English drama such as John Galsworthy inherits in his dramatic works.

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In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare reveals a very considerable indebtedness to Plautus's Miles Gloriosus. In Plautus's play we often come across dialectic expressions, ii. 2. 199, ii. 4. 369, 402, ii. 5. 416-7, 431, iv. 1. 964, iv. 2. 1014 for example, which may be reduced to a formula: A is B and not. One notable instance is found in ii. 6, where Sceledrus, though he sees Philocomasium in her lover's arms, cannot believe that she is Philocomasium and murmurs, "she is and yet she isn't Philocomasium." Similar expressions frequently occur in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, too, i. 2. 79, 98, 99 for example. But the most remarkable one is in v. 2., where Troilus sees his Cressida, in her father's tent, flirting Diomedes but he cannot believe his eyes and says to himself, This is, and is not Cressid." A further influence of Plautus's play can be recognized in. Troilus and Cressida. In iv. 2. of the former, Palaestrio, in co-operation with the maid of the gentleman next door, hoaxes Pyrgopolynices, a baggart soldier into believing that he is the most handsome man in the world and the wife of the gentleman next door has lost her heart to him, and induce him to steal into the gentleman's house only to be caught and flogged as an adulterer. A similar situation occurs in iii. 3. of Shakespeare's play. Agamemnon, Nestor, Ulysses and others unite their efforts in cajoling Ajax, a version of Pyrgopolynes in some respects, into accepting Hector's challenge in combat, by flattering him that he is far nobler and stronger than Achilles. In this scene Shakespeare was indebted to the above mentioned scene from Plautus for the situation and the way the asides are used. Moreover, the sceptical attitude underlying the dialectic expressions mentioned above, permeates the whole of Shakespeare's play and supports its structure. The various conflicting forces are never resolved to the end. This seems to be Shakespeare's indebtedness to Plautus, too.

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It is generally said that some peculiar and yet fundamental characteristics of English literature in the early seventeenth-century arise from the simultaneous embracing of different planes of knowledge and experience or the habit of immediate and almost unconscious transition from one to another. Such characteristics will be seen in most of Andrew Marvell's poetical works. While we must fix it firmly in our memory that he was a Puritan, we must, at the same time trace in his works even the perishing, Caroline mood and mannerism, not to speak of the influence of Ben Jonson and John Donne. So it is intended in this essay to clarify that -Marvell was rather a man of the century than an exclusive Puritan. It is also intended to emphasize that in his fine pieces we can observe 'the detachment of his judgement' and the sanity of his mind-a certain classical sense of equilibrium; this quality, though some have the opinion that it was due only to the influence of Jonson, seems to have been "based chiefly upon his reading of the classics during his time at Cambridge and thereafter. His works may be regarded as 'the Metaphysical poetry' or as something that the Puritan movement begot, but when we examine them, bearing in mind the above-mentioned fact, we cannot help recognizing that the finest ones are more than that: we admit he, imitated the form, rhythm, diction of his contemporary poets, but he gradually coloured them with his original tone, which was fostered in his personality, and at the same time, was formed by reading Horace, Lucan, and Bonaventura, etc. Marvell's deep interest in the classics had influence on his serious personality, and built up the foundation of his considered viewpoints on life and history. His attitude towards nature and religion in his poetry also, with various and even contradictory aspects in appearance, indicates substantially his seriousness for life and the world in which he lived. The inseparable connection between his life and poetry, with the influence of the classics as the pivot, seems to form his unique attitude as a poet, who was not completely affected by the tendency of that period nor fell into the religious sectionalism.

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"The ultimate end of criticism," Coleridge remarks, "is much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass judgement "on what has been written by others," Coleridge, however, did not, turn to the actual works of art, the analysis of which might have led, eventually to the formation of such principles, but on the contrary delved into the inner faculties which pertained the act of literary creation. In the first place he supposes two different ways of the operation of our cognitive power. The one strives to ,establish the relation of LAW; whereas the other is after the relation of THEORY. The former depending upon Reason shows itself in the act of subjective contemplation while the latter resorting to Understanding results in objective, observation. Creative process in art Coleridge maintains is no other than the linking of these two. In other words it should combine subjective contemplation and objective observation. This mediatory and reconciling power is given the name of Imagination. A work of art, as the product of imagination should neither be the simple copy of nature nor a mere abstraction but be rationalized dream or idealized reality. The critic's business is therefore to seek in works of art the imitation of natura naturans and not the copy of natura naturata that is to see a work of art as forma formans, and not as forma formata. This emphasis upon active, shaping spirit in art-namely, this adoption or organicism-is the distinct trait of Coleridge's critical tenets and in this way, he remains the most romantic of Romantic critics.

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1. In his novel, Liza of Lambeth, Maugham did his best to be objective, and succeeded in keeping himself entirely out of his work. It is through the influence of the French writer that he succeeded in doing, so at so early an age. 2. There is something in common between Le Roman, Maupassant's essay on the novel, and Maughan's preface to Altogether. Both agree that a writer must be privileged to select materials according to his plan and even to distort facts to his advantage. Most of their stories are too well constructed, dramatic and have surprise endings. 3. Both avoided psychological description, limiting themselves to placing before our eyes personages and events. Maughams, though he was not blind to the defects of the method of Maupassant, preferred to express character by action, not by description. 4. Maupassant was the lineal descendant of the French conteurs of old, and he was in his element when he wrote a series of light tales free from the grave influence of Flaubert. These are .characterised by the writer's good humour, lightness of touch, vivacity, wit and grace. Maugham, in some of his stories, seems to have tried to Write-in this manner but without success. 5. Maupassant considered L'Inutile Beaute the best of his work and Maugham selects Red as his best story. Here again the former's cynicism and the latter's sentimentality show that are in their respective traditions. 6. Despite the pessimism and misanthropy underlying much of the work, Maupassant's stories give us the impression that he produced them quite easily and naturally, Probably, as Ceard said in him, literature was a matter wholly of instinct not of reflection. With Maugham the process of creation is rather a long one, from the birth of an idea to its maturity, and he seems to have constructed his story by a distinctly intellectual process. It is interesting that these two writers, differing so widely in their accomplishments and experiences from each other, came to hold nearly the same view that life is insignificant and that men are base, and wrote stories that have many similarities between them.

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The novels of Rosamond Lehmann, which are the products of delicate sensibility and the stream of consciousness technique, are, especially in such recent works as The Ballad and the Source (1944) and The Echoing Grove (1953), strongly marked by a return to traditionalism because of story-telling aspect. In this respect, Miss Lehmann, though in a way a close disciple of Virginia Woolf, shows the characteristics of the generation after that of Mrs. Woolf and James Joyce, the generation to which belong Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen. The essay proposes to investigate into the way in which she combines the stream of consciousness technique with the skill of a story-teller. It may be easily assumed that Miss Lehmann, who studied at Girton College, Cambridge in the early twenties, and who dedicates her first novel to George Rylands, has been acquainted with Mrs. Woolf's work from the very beginning of her career; and though Dusty Answer (1927), her first extremely successful work, is written in the traditional way, her second novel, A Note in Music (1930) closely follows Mrs. Woolf's technique, and in Ralph Seddon's thoughts expresses exactly the same views as Mrs. Woolf. However, Miss Lehmann could do without that painful groping of a pioneer, and from the very beginning attains that "combination of the external and the internal" which Mrs. Woolf has developed in her last two works. In prose style, too, Miss Lehmann's, which, as is well illustrated in the last paragraph of Invitation to the Waltt (1932), her third work, seems generally to contain more verbs of action and is quicker in tempo, is more suitable for the unfolding of a plot, and the fourth novel, The Weather in the Streets (1936), in spite of the fact that, like The Invitation to the Waltz, the central interest lies in the minute depiction of the heroine's sensations, with its conscious effort to make a careful plot, points to the author's further development, the. emphasis on the story-telling in The Ballad and the Source and The Echoing Grove. The essay is concluded with an investigation into the skilful unity of a fascinating story and the artistic rendering of individual psychology-the "sensation of living"-in the last two works.

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The technique of the English novel has developed wonderfully as man's thoughts and feelings have been enlarged and deepened with time, but when one contemplates its structure or skeleton, one finds there are three types or traditions (and the mixed type besides them) that have not much changed. I classify them as the pilgrimage, group and struggle types. The pilgrimage-type is a narrative of the wanderings of a hero or a heroine in the external or internal world. It has no definite plot, the story consisting of events or emotions succeeding, more or less rhythmically, in a single though devious line. The group-type has no definite plot either. It is a panoramic picture, a kind of more or less static "composition" (with a particular tone to it) made up of several or many characters, among whom there is no prominent hero, and who, as a group, represent a certain kind of life, society or mental climate. The struggle-type of novel is a dramatic representation with a typical plot that develops from the deadly opposition of two parties with an issue or the third party between them as their object, of struggle. In this essay, I consider the pilgrimage-type, comparing it with the other types, with reference to the general characteristics of its form anc4 effects and the supposed motives of its creation, which are inducible from the studies. of each of the following subspecies of the type: (1) travel of a rogue among various kinds of the world (reportage of exploration of society and human existence); (2) wanderings of a cur or a bitch urged by his or her animal passion (study of human nature, or character); (3) wanderings of consciousness (enquiry into the secret of human mind and the universe); (4) humorous travel (enjoyment of humorous aspects of a travel); (5) wanderings full of strange and thrilling adventures (pure romance, sometimes tinged with a mythical element); (6) sentimental journey (expression of lyricism implicit in, or symbolized by, wanderings); (7) pilgraimage after truth (search for the ultimate reality); (8) soul's pilgrimage (trial and error for the attainment of an ideal); (9) these kinds of wanderings mixed.

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