Four times has a great English poet taken up his abode in “the paradise of exiles,” and remained there until deeply imbued with the spirit of the land.  The Italian residence of Byron and Shelley, of Landor and Browning, has infused into English literature a new element which has mingled with its inmost essence.  Milton’s brief visit could not be of equal moment.  Italian letters had already done their utmost for him; and he did not stay long enough to master the secret of Italian life.  A real enthusiasm for Italy’s classical associations is indicated by his original purpose of extending his travels to Greece, an enterprise at that period requiring no little disdain of hardship and peril.  But it would have been an anachronism if he could have contemplated the comprehensive and scientific scheme of self-culture by Italian influences of every kind which, a hundred and fifty years later, was conceived and executed by Goethe.  At the time of Milton’s visit Italian letters and arts sloped midway in their descent from the Renaissance to the hideous but humorous rococo so graphically described by Vernon Lee.  Free thought had perished along with free institutions in the preceding century, and as a consequence, though the physical sciences still numbered successful cultivators, originality of mind was all but extinct.  Things, nevertheless, wore a gayer aspect than of late.  The very completeness of the triumph of secular and spiritual despotism had made them less suspicious, surly, and austere.  Spanish power was visibly decaying.  The long line of zelanti Popes had come to an end; and it was thought that if the bosom of the actual incumbent could be scrutinized, no little complacency in Swedish victories over the Faith’s defenders would be found.  An atmosphere of toleration was diffusing itself, bigotry was imperceptibly getting old-fashioned, the most illustrious victim of the Inquisition was to be well-nigh the last.  If the noble and the serious could not be permitted, there was no ban upon the amiable and the frivolous:  never had the land been so full of petty rhymesters, antiquarian triflers, and gregarious literati, banded to play at authorship in academies, like the seven Swabians leagued to kill the hare.  For the rest, the Italy of Milton’s day, its superstition and its scepticism, and the sophistry that strove to make the two as one; its monks and its bravoes; its processions and its pantomimes; its cult of the Passion and its cult of Paganism; the opulence of its past and the impotence of its present; will be found depicted by sympathetic genius in the second volume of “John Inglesant.”