CLAUDE MOORE FUESS, the author of this dissertation, was born at Waterville, New York, January 12, 1885, and prepared for college at the Waterville High School, graduating in 1901. He took the full course of four years at Amherst College, graduating with the degree of B. A. in 1905. During 1905–1907, he was in residence at Columbia University, where he took courses in English and Comparative Literature under Professors G. R. Carpenter, W. A. Neilson, W. P. Trent, J. B. Fletcher, J. E. Spingarn, Brander Matthews, J. W. Cunliffe, G. P. Krapp, and W. W. Lawrence. He received the degree of M. A. from Columbia in 1906, and in 1906–7 was University Fellow in English and Editor of the _English Graduate Record_. In 1907–8, he was Head of the Department of English in George School, George School, Pa., and from 1908–10 was Instructor in English at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., studying abroad at Oxford during the summer of 1910. After a third year of residence at Columbia in 1910–11, he returned to Phillips Academy, where he is at present Instructor in English. Transcriber’s Notes Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed. Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced. Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of the pages that referenced them, have been collected, sequentially renumbered, and placed just before the Index. Footnote 378 (referenced on page 204) was missing from the original book.