The great age of our literature—­the age of Elizabeth—­was essentially one of Italian influence.  In Italy the Renaissance had reached its height:  England, feeling the new life which had been infused into arts and letters, turned instinctively to Italy, and adopted her canons of taste.  ‘Euphues’ has a distinct connection with the Italian discourses of polite culture.  Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ is a copy of what Boccaccio had attempted in his classical romances, and Sanazzaro in his pastorals.[18] Spenser approached the subject of the ‘Faery Queen’ with his head full of Ariosto and the romantic poets of Italy.  His sonnets are Italian; his odes embody the Platonic philosophy of the Italians.[19] The extent of Spenser’s deference to the Italians in matters of poetic art may be gathered from this passage in the dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh of the ‘Faery Queen:’ 

I have followed all the antique poets historical:  first Homer, who in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his Odysseis; then Virgil, whose like intention was to do in the person of AEneas; after him Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando; and lately Tasso dissevered them again, and formed both parts in two persons, namely, that part which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or virtues of a private man, coloured in his Rinaldo, the other named Politico in his Goffredo.

From this it is clear that, to the mind of Spenser, both Ariosto and Tasso were authorities of hardly less gravity than Homer and Virgil.  Raleigh, in the splendid sonnet with which he responds to this dedication, enhances the fame of Spenser by affecting to believe that the great Italian, Petrarch, will be jealous of him in the grave.  To such an extent were the thoughts of the English poets occupied with their Italian masters in the art of song.

It was at this time, again, that English literature was enriched by translations of Ariosto and Tasso—­the one from the pen of Sir John Harrington, the other from that of Fairfax.  Both were produced in the metre of the original—­the octave stanza, which, however, did not at that period take root in England.  At the same period the works of many of the Italian novelists, especially Bandello and Cinthio and Boccaccio, were translated into English; Painter’s ’Palace of Pleasure’ being a treasure-house of Italian works of fiction.  Thomas Hoby translated Castiglione’s ‘Courtier’ in 1561.  As a proof of the extent to which Italian books were read in England at the end of the sixteenth century, we may take a stray sentence from a letter of Harvey, in which he disparages the works of Robert Greene:—­’Even Guicciardine’s silver histories and Ariosto’s golden cantos grow out of request:  and the Countess of Pembroke’s “Arcadia” is not green enough for queasy stomachs; but they must have seen Greene’s “Arcadia,” and I believe most eagerly longed for Greene’s “Faery Queen."’