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.