and Rabelais (neither of whom was neglected, though neither exercised much
formal influence), the earlier French writers of the sixteenth century had
nothing to teach England. On the other hand, Germany was utterly unable to
supply anything in the way of instruction in literary form; and it was
instruction in literary form which was needed to set the beanstalk of
English literature growing even unto the heavens. Despite the immense
advantage which the English adoption of German innovations in religion gave
the country of Luther, that country's backwardness made imitation
impossible. Luther himself had not elaborated anything like a German style;
he had simply cleared the vernacular of some of its grossest
stumbling-blocks and started a good plain fashion of sentence. That was not
what England wanted or was likely to want, but a far higher literary
instruction, which Germany could not give her and (for the matter of that)
has never been in a position to give her. The models which she sought had
to be sought elsewhere, in Athens, in old Rome, in modern Tuscany.

But it would probably be unwise not to make allowance for a less
commonplace and more "metaphysical" explanation. It was precisely because
French and German had certain affinities with English, while Italian and
Spanish, not to mention the classical tongues, were strange and exotic,
that the influence of the latter group was preferred. The craving for
something not familiar, for something new and strange, is well known enough
in the individual; and nations are, after all, only aggregates of
individuals. It was exactly because the models of the south were so utterly
divided from the isolated Briton in style and character that he took so
kindly to them, and that their study inspired him so well. There were not,
indeed, wanting signs of what mischief might have been done if English
sense had been less robust and the English genius of a less stubborn
idiosyncrasy. Euphuism, the occasional practice of the Senecan drama, the
preposterous and almost incredible experiments in classical metre of men
not merely like Drant and Harvey, but like Sidney and Spenser, were
sufficiently striking symptoms of the ferment which was going on in the
literary constitution of the country. But they were only harmless
heat-rashes, not malignant distempers, and the spirit of England won
through them, with no loss of general health, probably with the result of
the healthy excretion of many pec