the
Italian plates of Girolamo Porro, of Padua, and had been used before in
Italy.[40] Their circulation in England is none the less remarkable,
and the influence such a publication may have had in the diffusing of
Italian tastes in this country cannot be exaggerated. For those who had
not been able to leave their native land, it was the best revelation yet
placed before the public of the art of the Renaissance. That it was an
important undertaking and a rather risky one, the translator, John
Harington, was well aware; for he prefaced his book not only with his
dedication to the Queen, a sort of thing to which Ascham had had great
objection,[41] but by a "briefe apologie of poetrie," especially of that
of Ariosto. It must be confessed that his arguments are far from
convincing, and it would have been much better to have left the thing
alone than to have defended the moral purposes of his author by such
observations as these: "It may be and is by some objected that, although
he writes christianly in some places, yet in some other, he is too
lascivious.... Alas if this be a fault pardon him this one fault; though
I doubt too many of you, gentle readers, wil be to exorable in this
point, yea me thinks I see some of you searching already for those
places of the booke and you are halfe offended that I have not made some
directions that you might finde out and reade them immediately. But I
beseech you ... to read them as my author ment them, to breed
detestation and not delectation," &c. And he then appends to his book a
table, by means of which the gentle readers will have no trouble in
finding the objectionable passages enumerated in the "Apologie" itself.

At the same time as translations proper, many imitations were published,
especially imitations of those shorter prose stories which were so
numerous on the continent, and which had never been properly
acclimatized in England during the Middle Ages. Their introduction into
this country had a great influence on the further development of the
novel; their success showed that there was a public for such literature;
hence the writing of original tales of this sort in English. Among
collections of foreign tales translated or imitated may be quoted
Paynter's "Palace of Pleasure," 1566,[42] containing histories from
Boccaccio, Bandello, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Straparole, the Spaniard
Guevara, the Queen of Navarre, "and other italian and french authours."
One of them is the his