You will urge that he wakened Poetry not in England alone but all over Europe, in Dante before our Chaucer, in the trouveres and minnesingers as well as in our ballad-writers.  To that I might easily retort, ’So much the better for Europe, and the more of it the merrier, to win their way into the great comity.’  But here I put in my second assertion, that we English have had above all nations lying wide of the Mediterranean, the instinct to refresh and renew ourselves at Mediterranean wells; that again and again our writers—­our poets especially—­have sought them as the hart panteth after the water-brooks.  If you accept this assertion, and if you believe as well that our literature, surpassing Rome’s, may vie with that of Athens—­if you believe that a literature which includes Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley—­the Authorised Version of Holy Writ, with Browne, Bunyan, Swift, Addison, Johnson, Arnold, Newman—­has entered the circle to take its seat with the first—­ why then, heartily believing this with you, I leave you to find some better explanation than mine if you can.

But what I content myself with asserting here you can scarcely deny.  Chaucer’s initial and enormous debt to Dante and Boccaccio stands in as little dispute as Dunbar’s to Chaucer.  On that favourite poet of mine, Sir Thomas Wyat, I descanted in a former lecture.  He is one of your glories here, having entered St. John’s College at the age of twelve (which must have been precocious even for those days.) Anthony Wood asserts that after finishing his course here, he proceeded to Cardinal Wolsey’s new College at Oxford; but, as Christchurch was not founded until 1524, and Wyat, still precocious, had married a wife two years before that, the statement (to quote Dr Courthope) ’seems no better founded than many others advanced by that patriotic but not very scrupulous author.’  It is more to the point that he went travelling, and brought home from France, Italy, afterwards Spain—­always from Latin altars—­the flame of lyrical poetry to England; the flame of the Petrarchists, caught from the Troubadours, clarified (so to speak) by the salt of humane letters.  On what our Elizabethan literature owes to the Classical revival hundreds of volumes have been written and hundreds more will be written; I will but remind you of what Spencer talked about with Gabriel Harvey, what Daniel disputed with Campion; that Marlowe tried to re-incarnate Machiavelli, that Jonson was a sworn Latinist and the ’tribe of Ben’ a classical tribe; while, as for Shakespeare, go and reckon the proportion of Italian and Roman names in his dramatis personae.  Of Donne’s debt to France, Italy, Rome, Greece, you may read much in Professor Grierson’s great edition, and I daresay Professor Grierson would be the first to allow that all has not yet been computed.  You know how Milton prepared himself to be a poet.  Have you realised that, in those somewhat strangely constructed