a society whose moral teacher was Machiavelli, and
whose patterns of splendour were the courts of Florence
and Ferrara, and to learn the trick of verse that
in the hands of Petrarch and his followers had fashioned
the sonnet and other new lyric forms. This could
not be without its influence on the manners of the
nation, and the scholars who had been the first to
show the way were the first to deplore the pell-mell
assimilation of Italian manners and vices, which was
the unintended result of the inroad on insularity
which had already begun. They saw the danger
ahead, and they laboured to meet it as it came.
Ascham in his
Schoolmaster railed against the
translation of Italian books, and the corrupt manners
of living and false ideas which they seemed to him
to breed. The Italianate Englishman became the
chief part of the stock-in-trade of the satirists
and moralists of the day. Stubbs, a Puritan chronicler,
whose book
The Anatomy of Abuses is a valuable
aid to the study of Tudor social history, and Harrison,
whose description of England prefaces Holinshed’s
Chronicles, both deal in detail with the Italian menace,
and condemn in good set terms the costliness in dress
and the looseness in morals which they laid to its
charge. Indeed, the effect on England was profound,
and it lasted for more than two generations.
The romantic traveller, Coryat, writing well within
the seventeenth century in praise of the luxuries of
Italy (among which he numbers forks for table use),
is as enthusiastic as the authors who began the imitation
of Italian metres in Tottel’s
Miscellany,
and Donne and Hall in their satires written under
James wield the rod of censure as sternly as had Ascham
a good half century before. No doubt there was
something in the danger they dreaded, but the evil
was not unmixed with good, for insularity will always
be an enemy of good literature. The Elizabethans
learned much more than their plots from Italian models,
and the worst effects dreaded by the patriots never
reached our shores. Italian vice stopped short
of real life; poisoning and hired ruffianism flourished
only on the stage.
(3)
The influence of the spirit of discovery and adventure,
though it is less quickly marked, more pervasive,
and less easy to define, is perhaps more universal
than that of the classics or of the Italian fashions
which came in their train. It runs right through
the literature of Elizabeth’s age and after
it, affecting, each in their special way, all the
dramatists, authors who were also adventurers like
Raleigh, scholars like Milton, and philosophers like
Hobbes and Locke. It reappears in the Romantic
revival with Coleridge, whose “Ancient Mariner”
owes much to reminiscences of his favourite reading—Purchas,
his Pilgrimes, and other old books of voyages.
The matter of this too-little noticed strain in English
literature would suffice to fill a whole book; only
a few of the main lines of its influence can be noted
here.