The Elizabethan period of our literature was, in fact, the period during which we derived most from the Italian nation.

The study of the Italian language went hand in hand with the study of Greek and Latin, so that the three together contributed to form the English taste.  Between us and the ancient world stood the genius of Italy as an interpreter.  Nor was this connection broken until far on into the reign of Charles II.  What Milton owed to Italy is clear not only from his Italian sonnets, but also from the frequent mention of Dante and Petrarch in his prose works, from his allusions to Boiardo and Ariosto in the ‘Paradise Lost,’ and from the hints which he probably derived from Pulci, Tasso and Andreini.  It would, indeed, be easy throughout his works to trace a continuous vein of Italian influence in detail.  But, more than this, Milton’s poetical taste in general seems to have been formed and ripened by familiarity with the harmonies of the Italian language.  In his Tractate on Education addressed to Mr. Hartlib, he recommends that boys should be instructed in the Italian pronunciation of vowel sounds, in order to give sonorousness and dignity to elocution.  This slight indication supplies us with a key to the method of melodious structure employed by Milton in his blank verse.  Those who have carefully studied the harmonies of the ‘Paradise Lost,’ know how all-important are the assonances of the vowel sounds of o and a in its most musical passages.  It is just this attention to the liquid and sonorous recurrences of open vowels that we should expect from a poet who proposed to assimilate his diction to that of the Italians.

After the age of Milton the connection between Italy and England is interrupted.  In the seventeenth century Italy herself had sunk into comparative stupor, and her literature was trivial.  France not only swayed the political destinies of Europe, but also took the lead in intellectual culture.  Consequently, our poets turned from Italy to France, and the French spirit pervaded English literature throughout the period of the Restoration and the reigns of William and Queen Anne.  Yet during this prolonged reaction against the earlier movement of English literature, as manifested in Elizabethanism, the influence of Italy was not wholly extinct.  Dryden’s ‘Tales from Boccaccio’ are no insignificant contribution to our poetry, and his ’Palamon and Arcite,’ through Chaucer, returns to the same source.  But when, at the beginning of this century, the Elizabethan tradition was revived, then the Italian influence reappeared more vigorous than ever.  The metre of ‘Don Juan,’ first practised by Frere and then adopted by Lord Byron, is Pulci’s octave stanza; the manner is that of Berni, Folengo, and the Abbe Casti, fused and heightened by the brilliance of Byron’s genius into a new form.  The subject of Shelley’s strongest work of art is Beatrice Cenci.  Rogers’s poem is styled ‘Italy.’  Byron’s dramas are