TO ITALIAN LITERATURE_

To an Englishman one of the chief interests of the study of Italian
literature is derived from the fact that, between England and Italy,
an almost uninterrupted current of intellectual intercourse has been
maintained throughout the last five centuries. The English have never,
indeed, at any time been slavish imitators of the Italians; but Italy
has formed the dreamland of the English fancy, inspiring poets with
their most delightful thoughts, supplying them with subjects, and
implanting in their minds that sentiment of Southern beauty which,
engrafted on our more passionately imaginative Northern nature, has
borne rich fruit in the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakspere,
Milton, and the poets of this century.

It is not strange that Italy should thus in matters of culture have
been the guide and mistress of England. Italy, of all the European
nations, was the first to produce high art and literature in the dawn
of modern civilisation. Italy was the first to display refinement in
domestic life, polish of manners, civilities of intercourse. In Italy
the commerce of courts first developed a society of men and women,
educated by the same traditions of humanistic culture. In Italy the
principles of government were first discussed and reduced to theory.
In Italy the zeal for the classics took its origin; and scholarship,
to which we owe our mental training, was at first the possession of
none almost but Italians. It therefore followed that during the age of
the Renaissance any man of taste or genius, who desired to share the
newly discovered privileges of learning, had to seek Italy. Every one
who wished to be initiated into the secrets of science or philosophy,
had to converse with Italians in person or through books. Every one
who was eager to polish his native language, and to render it the
proper vehicle of poetic thought, had to consult the masterpieces of
Italian literature. To Italians the courtier, the diplomatist, the
artist, the student of statecraft and of military tactics, the
political theorist, the merchant, the man of laws, the man of arms,
and the churchman turned for precedents and precepts. The nations of
the North, still torpid and somnolent in their semi-barbarism, needed
the magnetic touch of Italy before they could awake to intellectual
life. Nor was this all. Long before the thirst for culture possessed
the English mind, Italy had appropriated and assimilated all that