In the next place, we owe to the Italians the subject-matter of many of our most famous dramas and our most delightful tales in verse.  But the English treatment of these histories and fables has been uniformly independent and original.  Comparing Shakspere’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with Bandello’s tale, Webster’s ‘Duchess of Malfy’ with the version given from the Italian in Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure,’ and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale with the ‘Teseide’ of Boccaccio, we perceive at once that the English poets have used their Italian models merely as outlines to be filled in with freedom, as the canvas to be embroidered with a tapestry of vivid groups.  Nothing is more manifest than the superiority of the English genius over the Italian in all dramatic qualities of intense passion, profound analysis, and living portrayal of character in action.  The mere rough detail of Shakspere’s ‘Othello’ is to be found in Cinthio’s Collection of Novelle; but let an unprejudiced reader peruse the original, and he will be no more deeply affected by it than by any touching story of treachery, jealousy, and hapless innocence.  The wily subtleties of Iago, the soldierly frankness of Cassio, the turbulent and volcanic passions of Othello, the charm of Desdemona, and the whole tissue of vivid incidents which make ‘Othello’ one of the most tremendous extant tragedies of characters in combat, are Shakspere’s, and only Shakspere’s.  This instance, indeed, enables us exactly to indicate what the English owed to Italy and what was essentially their own.  From that Southern land of Circe about which they dreamed, and which now and then they visited, came to their imaginations a spirit-stirring breath of inspiration.  It was to them the country of marvels, of mysterious crimes, of luxurious gardens and splendid skies, where love was more passionate and life more picturesque, and hate more bloody and treachery more black, than in our Northern climes.  Italy was a spacious grove of wizardry, which mighty poets, on the quest of fanciful adventure, trod with fascinated senses and quickened pulses.  But the strong brain which converted what they heard and read and saw of that charmed land into the stuff of golden romance or sable tragedy, was their own.

English literature has been defined a literature of genius.

Our greatest work in art has been achieved not so much by inspiration, subordinate to sentiments of exquisite good taste or guided by observance of classical models, as by audacious sallies of pure inventive power.  This is true as a judgment of that constellation which we call our drama, of the meteor Byron, of Milton and Dryden, who are the Jupiter and Mars of our poetic system, and of the stars which stud our literary firmament under the names of Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Chatterton, Scott, Coleridge, Clough, Blake, Browning, Swinburne, Tennyson.  There are only a very few of the English poets, Pope and Gray, for example, in whom the free instincts of genius are kept systematically in check