fe was
on the whole quite blameless with anecdotes of a most blameworthy style.
Unlike the lady in the French novel who liked to play at innocent games
with persons who were not innocent, Margaret seems to have liked to talk
and write of things not innocent while remaining unspotted herself. Her
case is not a solitary one.

The whole literature of the _Novella_ has the attraction of graceful
naughtiness in which vice, as Burke put it, loses half its evil by
losing all its grossness. At all times, and for all time probably,
similar tales, more broad than long, will form favourite talk or reading
of adolescent males. They are, so to speak, pimples of the soul which
synchronise with similar excrescences of the skin. Some men have the art
of never growing old in this respect, but I cannot say I envy them their
eternal youth. However, we are not much concerned with tales of this
class on the present occasion. Very few of the _novelle_ selected by
Painter for translation depend for their attraction on mere naughtiness.
In matters of sex the sublime and the ridiculous are more than usually
close neighbours. It is the tragic side of such relations that attracted
Painter, and it was this fact that gave his book its importance for the
history of English literature, both in its connection with Italian
letters and in its own internal development.

The relations of Italy and England in matters literary are due to the
revivers of the New Learning. Italy was, and still is, the repository of
all the chief MSS. of the Greek and Latin classics. Thither, therefore,
went all the young Englishmen, whom the influence of Erasmus had bitten
with a desire for the New Learning which was the Old Learning born anew.
But in Italy itself, the New Learning had even by the early years of the
sixteenth century produced its natural result of giving birth to a
national literature (Ariosto, Trissino). Thus in their search for the
New Learning, Englishmen of culture who went to Italy came back with a
tincture of what may be called the Newest Learning, the revival of
Italian Literature.

Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey "The Dioscuri of the Dawn" as
they have been called, are the representatives of this new movement in
English thought and literature, which came close on the heels of the New
Learning represented by Colet, More, Henry VIII. himself and Roger
Ascham. The adherents of the New Learning did not look with too
favourable eyes on the favou