Still more may be gathered on the same topic from the indignant protest uttered by Roger Ascham in his ‘Schoolmaster’ (pp. 78-91, date 1570) against the prevalence of Italian customs, the habit of Italian travel, and the reading of Italian books translated into English.  Selections of Italian stories rendered into English were extremely popular; and Greene’s tales, which had such vogue that Nash says of them, ’glad was that printer that might be so blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit,’ were all modelled on the Italian.  The education of a young man of good family was not thought complete unless he had spent some time in Italy, studied its literature, admired its arts, and caught at least some tincture of its manners.  Our rude ancestors brought back with them from these journeys many Southern vices, together with the culture they had gone to seek.  The contrast between the plain dealing of the North and the refined Machiavellism of the South, between Protestant earnestness in religion and Popish scepticism, between the homely virtues of England and the courtly libertinism of Venice or Florence, blunted the moral sense, while it stimulated the intellectual activity of the English travellers, and too often communicated a fatal shock to their principles. Inglese Italianato e un diavolo incarnato passed into a proverb:  we find it on the lips of Parker, of Howell, of Sidney, of Greene, and of Ascham; while Italy itself was styled by severe moralists the court of Circe.  In James Howell’s ’Instructions for forreine travell’ we find this pregnant sentence:  ’And being now in Italy, that great limbique of working braines, he must be very circumspect in his carriage, for she is able to turne a Saint into a devill, and deprave the best natures, if one will abandon himselfe, and become a prey to dissolut courses and wantonesse.’  Italy, in truth, had already become corrupt, and the fruit of her contact with the nations of the North was seen in the lives of such scholars as Robert Greene, who confessed that he returned from his travels instructed ‘in all the villanies under the sun.’  Many of the scandals of the Court of James might be ascribed to this aping of Southern manners.

Yet, together with the evil of depraved morality, the advantage of improved culture was imported from Italy into England; and the constitution of the English genius was young and healthy enough to purge off the mischief, while it assimilated what was beneficial.  This is very manifest in the history of our drama, which, taking it altogether, is at the same time the purest and the most varied that exists in literature; while it may be affirmed without exaggeration that one of the main impulses to free dramatic composition in England was communicated by the attraction everything Italian possessed for the English fancy.  It was in the drama that the English displayed the richness and the splendour of the Renaissance, which had blazed so gorgeously and at times so balefully below the