In the year 1818-19 the Shelleys had no friends at all in Italy, except Lord Byron at Venice, and Mr. and Mrs. John Gisborne at Leghorn.  Mrs. Gisborne had been a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin.  She was a woman of much cultivation, devoid of prejudice, and, though less enthusiastic than Shelley liked, quite capable of appreciating the inestimable privilege of his acquaintance.  Her husband, to use a now almost obsolete phrase, was a scholar and a gentleman.  He shared his wife’s enlightened opinions, and remained staunch through good and ill report to his new friends.  At Rome and Naples they knew absolutely no one.  Shelley’s time was therefore passed in study and composition.  In the previous summer he had translated the “Symposium” of Plato, and begun an essay on the Ethics of the Greeks, which remains unluckily a fragment.  Together with Mary he read much Italian literature, and his observations on the chief Italian poets form a valuable contribution to their criticism.  While he admired the splendour and invention of Ariosto, he could not tolerate his moral tone.  Tasso struck him as cold and artificial, in spite of his “delicate moral sensibility.”  Boccaccio he preferred to both; and his remarks on this prose-poet are extremely characteristic.  “How much do I admire Boccaccio!  What descriptions of nature are those in his little introductions to every new day!  It is the morning of life stripped of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us.  Boccaccio seems to me to have possessed a deep sense of the fair ideal of human life, considered in its social relations.  His more serious theories of love agree especially with mine.  He often expresses things lightly too, which have serious meanings of a very beautiful kind.  He is a moral casuist, the opposite of the Christian, stoical, ready-made, and worldly system of morals.  Do you remember one little remark, or rather maxim of his, which might do some good to the common, narrow-minded conceptions of love,—­’Bocca baciata non perde ventura; anzi rinnouva, come fa la luna’?” Dante and Petrarch remained the objects of his lasting admiration, though the cruel Christianity of the “Inferno” seemed to him an ineradicable blot upon the greatest of Italian poems.  Of Petrarch’s “tender and solemn enthusiasm,” he speaks with the sympathy of one who understood the inner mysteries of idealizing love.

It will be gathered from the foregoing quotations that Shelley, notwithstanding is profound study of style and his exquisite perception of beauty in form and rhythm, required more than merely artistic excellences in poetry.  He judged poems by their content and spirit; and while he plainly expressed his abhorrence of the didactic manner, he held that art must be moralized in order to be truly great.  The distinction he drew between Theocritus and the earlier Greek singers in the “Defence of Poetry”, his severe strictures on “The Two Noble Kinsmen” in a letter to Mary (August 20, 1818) and his phrase about Ariosto, “who is entertaining and graceful, and sometimes a poet,” illustrate the application of critical canons wholly at variance with the “art for art” doctrine.