land of Circe about which they dreamed, and which
now and then they visited, came to their imaginations a
spirit-stirring breath of inspiration. It was to them the country of
marvels, of mysterious crimes, of luxurious gardens and splendid
skies, where love was more passionate and life more picturesque, and
hate more bloody and treachery more black, than in our Northern
climes. Italy was a spacious grove of wizardry, which mighty poets, on
the quest of fanciful adventure, trod with fascinated senses and
quickened pulses. But the strong brain which converted what they heard
and read and saw of that charmed land into the stuff of golden romance
or sable tragedy, was their own.

English literature has been defined a literature of genius.

Our greatest work in art has been achieved not so much by inspiration,
subordinate to sentiments of exquisite good taste or guided by
observance of classical models, as by audacious sallies of pure
inventive power. This is true as a judgment of that constellation
which we call our drama, of the meteor Byron, of Milton and Dryden,
who are the Jupiter and Mars of our poetic system, and of the stars
which stud our literary firmament under the names of Shelley, Keats,
Wordsworth, Chatterton, Scott, Coleridge, Clough, Blake, Browning,
Swinburne, Tennyson. There are only a very few of the English poets,
Pope and Gray, for example, in whom the free instincts of genius are
kept systematically in check by the laws of the reflective
understanding. Now Italian literature is in this respect all unlike
our own. It began, indeed, with Dante, as a literature pre-eminently
of genius; but the spirit of scholarship assumed the sway as early as
the days of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and after them Italian has been
consistently a literature of taste. By this I mean that even the
greatest Italian poets have sought to render their style correct, have
endeavoured to subordinate their inspiration to what they considered
the rules of sound criticism, and have paid serious attention to their
manner as independent of the matter they wished to express. The
passion for antiquity, so early developed in Italy, delivered the
later Italian poets bound hand and foot into the hands of Horace.
Poliziano was content to reproduce the classic authors in a mosaic
work of exquisite translations. Tasso was essentially a man of talent,
producing work of chastened beauty by diligent attention to the rule
and method of his art. Even