and remains a cultivated exotic. The less promising soil of
Anglo-Saxon idiom waited for the foreign influences, ancient and modern, of
the Renaissance to act upon it, and then it produced a crop which has
dwarfed all the produce of the modern world, and has nearly, if not quite,
equalled in perfection, while it has much exceeded in bulk and length of
flowering time, the produce of Greece.

The rush of foreign influences on the England of Elizabeth's time,
stimulated alike by the printing press, by religious movements, by the
revival of ancient learning, and by the habits of travel and commerce, has
not been equalled in force and volume by anything else in history. But the
different influences of different languages and countries worked with very
different force. To the easier and more generally known of the classical
tongues must be assigned by far the largest place. This was only natural at
a time when to the inherited and not yet decayed use of colloquial and
familiar Latin as the vehicle of business, of literature, and of almost
everything that required the committal of written words to paper, was added
the scholarly study of its classical period from the strictly humanist
point of view. If we could assign marks in the competition, Latin would
have to receive nearly as many as all its rivals put together; but Greek
would certainly not be second, though it affected, especially in the
channel of the Platonic dialogues, many of the highest and most gifted
souls. In the latter part of the present period there were probably
scholars in England who, whether their merely philological attainments
might or might not pass muster now, were far better read in the actual
literature of the Greek classics than the very philologists who now disdain
them. Not a few of the chief matters in Greek literature--the epical
grandeur of Homer, the tragic principles of the three poets, and so
forth--made themselves, at first or second hand, deeply felt. But on the
whole Greek did not occupy the second place. That place was occupied by
Italian. It was Italy which had touched the spring that let loose the
poetry of Surrey and Wyatt; Italy was the chief resort of travelled
Englishmen in the susceptible time of youth; Italy provided in Petrarch
(Dante was much less read) and Boccaccio, in Ariosto and Tasso, an
inexhaustible supply of models, both in prose and verse. Spain was only
less influential because Spanish literature was in a much less fin