the spirit. The one poet was the Puritan Platonist of the English Renaissance inheriting the traditions of medieval allegory; the other was the child of sixteenth century Italy, the contemporary of Machiavelli and Aretino. The one was anxious to present the perfect gentleman "in virtuous and gentle discipline," concerned alone with his moral qualities; the other wished merely to amuse, serious only in his artistic conscience. Art was thus the common bond uniting them; it drew Spenser toward Italy, and made his greatness as a poet shine in the austerity and purity of his spirit, presented with the beauty of his art.

Art was the great lesson Italy had to teach England. Energy, freshness, imagination, purity and sweetness belonged alike to the English of the sixteenth century. They were deficient, however, in form and measure, and the artistic qualities of style. It was precisely in these qualities that the Italians were supreme. In Italy the development of two centuries had brought with it a technical perfection in art; hardly would one literary form be exhausted before another would spring up. When the lyric had nothing further to offer, the romantic epic and pastoral took its place, each in turn finding its perfect expression. The constant presence, moreover, of classical models strengthened the artistic conscience of Italian poetry, while the lack of all other restraints in life served to concentrate on art the same qualities which in northern Europe found their outlet in moral conduct. It was only in Plato

nism that the spirit of Spenser can be said to have been affected by Italy. The intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge was then Platonic, which meant not only the influence of the master, but even more of the fifteenth-century neo-Platonists whose aims had been directed toward reconciling the doctrines of Plato with Christianity. Spenser himself was perfectly familiar with Italian Platonism, and repeated its current thoughts in his hymns on heavenly love and beauty.

The Platonic writings of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola had been known in England since the time of Colet. Later, Sir John Cheke, who had lived at Padua, and Roger Ascham both taught Platonism at Cambridge. Other Italian books on philosophical subjects were translated into English.' The influence of Italian philosophy was likewise felt when Giordano Bruno, whose doctrines of love were neo-Platonic, came to England, where he lived for two years, lecturing at Oxford on the immortality of the soul and holding there a public disputation. Bruno, while disgusted by the ignorance and conceit of the doctors of the university with whom he disputed,2 was more than pleased at his reception by the cultivated circle of which Sidney and Fulke Greville were the chief luminaries. In their pres

1 Circes of John Baptiste Gello, Florentine, translated out of Italian into English by Henry Iden, 1557. The Fearful Fancies of the Florentine Cooper written in Tuscan by John Baptiste Gelli, one of the free study of Florence, translated into English by W. Barker, Pensoso d' Altrui, London, 1568.

2 La Cena dei Ceneri, ed. Wagner, p. 179.

ence he expounded the new Copernican philosophy, while he dedicated two of his books to Sidney.1

IV

Italy, where the influence of rediscovered classic form arrested, for a century, the course of native litera- ture, led the way in reviving the writing of Latin verse. Petrarch, whose Latin Africa gave an example, found worthy successors in Vida, Fracastoro and Sannazaro. Several of the Italian classical poets, it will be remembered, came to England. Peter Carmeliano of Brescia wrote a poetical epistle on the birth of Prince Arthur ; Johannes Opicius, who was probably an Italian, composed royal panegyrics in the classical style and Giovanni Gigli, Bishop of Worcester, wrote a Latin epithalamium on an English subject. Later, Ammonio and Adrian de Castello were both to be celebrated for their classical verse. Marcellus Palingenius, however, was the Italian whose works proved most popular beyond the Alps. His Zodiac of Life, translated by Barnabe Googe, went through half a dozen English editions. Its supposed Protestantism and violent denunciation of the loose living of the clergy made it

1 G. Bruno's most important Italian works were also printed in London: Spaccio De La Bestia Trionfante . . . Parigi (London), 1584; Giordano Bruno Nolano, Del gl' Heroici Furori Al molto Illustre et eccellente Cavalliero, Signor Phillippo Sidneo, Parigi (London?), 1585.

2 The First Six Books of Marcellus Palingenius, translated by Barnabe Googe, 1561.

rank almost as a classic in England and other Protestant countries.1

Sir Thomas More, George Buchanan and Alexander Barclay were conspicuous among those who distin- ^ guished themselves by their Latin poetry, More by his epigrams, and Buchanan by his classical tragedies, though he excelled no less in other forms of verse. The fashion for writing Latin verse, however, was in no sense an original movement, but merely continued what had long since begun in Italy. It seemed in many cases as if antiquity interpreted by Italians was more congenial to the English than the ancient works themselves. This perhaps accounted for the extraordinary vogue enjoyed by the eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus,2 which in Shakespeare's boyhood were even read in the grammar schools. Alexander Barclay, in his own eclogues, imitated openly both Mantuanus and Æneas Sylvius, calling the former "the best of that sort, since poets first began."

The literary forms of antiquity, after remaining sterile for many centuries, came intò use once more with the Renaissance. The influence of classical models was to breathe new life into poetry. The pastoral was only one of the many forms which, first imitated in Italy, were later to flourish in other European

1 Warton, English Poetry, IV, 282.

2 The Eclogues of the Poet B. Mantuan, translated by George Turbervile, 1567.

8 Lee, op. cit., p. 13. Vide also Love's Labour's Lost, IV, 2, 100. 4 Alexander Barclay, prologue to the Eclogues, 1570.

traces of Ariosto, Sannazaro and Tasso as well as Petrarch, he called by the Italian name of Amoretti. Conceits which had been adapted or imitated can be found even in Shakespeare's sonnets, for he assimilated the thoughts and words of the Elizabethan Petrarchists with as little compunction as the plays and novels of his contemporaries;1 his views of ideal beauty as independent of time, of the power of love as superior to its accidents, his very boasting that he would confer immortality on the person he addressed, were merely repetitions of what had become the commonplaces of European poetry.2

The expressions of the English Petrarchists were all variations of a single principle. The differences between them were only of degree, some more than others attaining the ingenuity and polish sought for. All alike reveal a common fund of ideas and conditions, out of which their poetry developed. Sometimes indeed the Italianization proceeded a little farther than at others; thus Italian mottoes begin and end the Zepheria, which also contained verses addressed Alli veri figliuoli delle Muse; in certain of the "Canzons" in this collection there was even a curious combination of the pastoral of Sannazaro and the Petrarchan sonnet; the English imitators of Petrarch, however, often differed from their master in trying to wind up their sonnets with a couplet in epigram.

1 S. Lee, Shakespeare, p. 109 et seq.

2 Ibid., p. 114.

p. cxiii et seq.

Vide also G. Wyndham, Poems of Shakspeare, 3 Canzon II.