arious success as Cromwell
ruled or Charles reigned; it can scarcely be said to have ever been
entirely dropped, and the very same arguments used by Ascham against the
Italian books of his time are daily resorted to against the French books
of our own age.

Be this as it may, the Italian novels had the better of it in
Elizabethan times; they were found not only "in every shop," but in
every house; translations of them were the daily reading of Shakespeare,
and as they had an immense influence not only in emancipating the genius
of the dramatists of the period, but, what was of equal importance, in
preparing an audience for them, we may be permitted to look at them with
a more indulgent eye than the pre-Shakespearean moralists.

A curious list of books, belonging during this same period (1575) to a
man of the lower middle class, an average member of a Shakespearean
audience, has been preserved for us. It is to be found in a very quaint
account of the Kenilworth festivities, sent by Robert Laneham, a London
mercer, to a brother mercer of the same city. Laneham states how an
acquaintance of his, Captain Cox, a mason by trade, had in his
possession, not only "Kyng Arthurz book, Huon of Burdeaus, The foour
suns of Aymon, Bevis of Hampton," and many of those popular romances,
illustrated with woodcuts of which a few specimens are to be seen above,
but also, mason as he was, the very same Italian book, the "Lucres and
Eurialus," of which we have just given an account.[48]

With the diffusion of these small handy volumes of tales of all kinds,
from all countries, a quite modern sort of literature, a literature for
travellers, was being set on foot. Manuscript books did not easily lend
themselves to be carried about; but it was otherwise with the printed
pamphlets. Authors began to recommend their productions as convenient
travelling companions, very much in the same manner as the publishers
recommend them now as suitable to be taken to the Alps or to the
seaside. Paynter, for example, who circulated in England from the year
1566 his collection of tales translated or imitated from Boccaccio and
Bandello, Apuleius and Xenophon, the Queen of Navarre, and Bonaventure
Desperriers, Belleforest and Froissart, Guevara and many others, assures
his reader that: "Pleasaunt they be for that they recreate, and refreshe
weried mindes defatigated either with painefull travaile or with
continuall care, occasioning them to shunne and to avoid