Jessica and Portia and Juliet. The English knew and were
haunted by the crimes of Italy: the terrible and brilliant, the
mysterious and shadowy crimes of lust and of blood which, in their most
gigantic union and monstrous enthronement on the throne of the vicar of
Christ, had in the first terrified glimpse awakened the tragic impulse
in the soldiers of Charles VIII.

We can imagine the innumerable English travellers who went to Italy
greedy for life and knowledge or merely obeying a fashion of the
day--travellers forced into far closer contact with the natives than the
men of the time of Walpole and of Beckford, who were met by
French-speaking hosts and lacqueys and officials--travellers also
thirsting to imbibe the very spirit of the country as the travellers of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries never thirsted; we can imagine
these Englishmen possessed by the morbid passion for the stories of
abominable and unpunished crime--crime of the learned, the refined, the
splendid parts of society--with which the Italy of the deeply corrupted
sixteenth century was permeated. We can imagine how the prosaic
merchants' clerks from London; the perfumed dandies, trying on Italian
clothes, rehearsing Italian steps and collecting Italian oaths, the
Faulcon-bridges of Shakespeare and Mr. Gingleboys of Beaumont and
Fletcher, sent to Italy to be able gracefully to

Kiss the hand and cry, "sweet lady!"
Say they had been at Rome and seen the relics,
Drunk your Verdea wine, and rid at Naples--

how all these privileged creatures ferreted about for monstrous crimes
with which to horrify their stay-at-home countrymen; how the rich young
lords, returning home with mincing steps and high-pitched lisp,
surrounded by a train of parti-coloured, dialect-jabbering Venetian
clowns, deft and sinister Neapolitan fencing masters, silver-voiced
singing boys decoyed from some church, and cynical humanists escaped
from the faggot or the gallows, were expected to bring home, together
with the newest pastoral dramas, lewd novels, Platonic philosophy and
madrigals set in complicated counterpoint; stories of hideous
wickedness, of the murders and rapes and poisonings committed by the
dukes and duchesses, the nobles and senators, in whose palaces they had
so lately supped and danced. The crimes of Italy fascinated Englishmen
of genius with a fascination even more potent than that which they
exercised over the vulgar imagination