by the laws of the reflective understanding.  Now Italian literature is in this respect all unlike our own.  It began, indeed, with Dante, as a literature pre-eminently of genius; but the spirit of scholarship assumed the sway as early as the days of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and after them Italian has been consistently a literature of taste.  By this I mean that even the greatest Italian poets have sought to render their style correct, have endeavoured to subordinate their inspiration to what they considered the rules of sound criticism, and have paid serious attention to their manner as independent of the matter they wished to express.  The passion for antiquity, so early developed in Italy, delivered the later Italian poets bound hand and foot into the hands of Horace.  Poliziano was content to reproduce the classic authors in a mosaic work of exquisite translations.  Tasso was essentially a man of talent, producing work of chastened beauty by diligent attention to the rule and method of his art.  Even Ariosto submitted the liberty of his swift spirit to canons of prescribed elegance.  While our English poets have conceived and executed without regard for the opinion of the learned and without obedience to the usages of language—­Shakspere, for example, producing tragedies which set Aristotle at defiance, and Milton engrafting Latinisms on the native idiom—­the Italian poets thought and wrote with the fear of Academies before their eyes, and studied before all things to maintain the purity of the Tuscan tongue.  The consequence is that the Italian and English literatures are eminent for very different excellences.  All that is forcible in the dramatic presentation of life and character and action, all that is audacious in imagination and capricious in fancy, whatever strength style can gain from the sallies of original and untrammelled eloquence, whatever beauty is derived from spontaneity and native grace, belong in abundant richness to the English.  On the other hand, the Italian poets present us with masterpieces of correct and studied diction, with carefully elaborated machinery, and with a style maintained at a uniform level of dignified correctness.  The weakness of the English proceeds from inequality and extravagance; it is the weakness of self-confident vigour, intolerant of rule, rejoicing in its own exuberant resources.  The weakness of the Italian is due to timidity and moderation; it is the weakness that springs not so much from a lack of native strength as from the over-anxious expenditure of strength upon the attainment of finish, polish, and correctness.  Hence the two nations have everything to learn from one another.  Modern Italian poets may seek by contact with Shakspere and Milton to gain a freedom from the trammels imposed upon them by the slavish followers of Petrarch; while the attentive perusal of Tasso should be recommended to all English people who have no ready access to the masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature.