devoted himself with unswerving purpose, was to restore in England the supremacy of Rome; and though he failed in this, he yet stands out in bold relief as one of the commanding figures of the age, and as the highest type of learned churchman. He gave a personal example (for the alleged scandals of his private life have been proved untrue) that it was possible to live in Italy and be unaffected by its vices. He himself had refused from Henry the Eighth the highest inducements to approve of his divorce; he had been steadfast through thick and thin to what he believed to be right, and though he saw gleams of triumph when Mary came to the throne, his own death fortunately prevented him from realizing that his life's work had been in vain. As one of the great links between Italy and England, his influence, however, was considerable. To each country he held up the mirror of the other's virtues. And while Englishmen saw in his presence the authority and grandeur of Rome, to Italians he reflected the piety and austerity of England.

There is little use in going through the catalogue of churchmen who contributed to familiarizing the one land with the other. Italians, just as before, came to England; Giberti, Bishop of Verona, who posed as the special protector of England; Ghinucci, Bishop of Worcester and of Salisbury; and Cardinal Campeggio, who had first been sent to England to urge Henry the Eighth to unite with the other princes of Christendom in a campaign against the Turk, and returned

as judge to listen to the divorce suit of Henry against Catherine of Aragon. In Italy, on the other hand, lived such men as Sir Edward Carne, sent to Rome as excusator of Henry the Eighth, who had been cited to appear there in person. Carne remained there until his death, the Pope ostensibly keeping him as hostage and refusing to allow him to depart, although he gave him the government of the English hospital at Rome. The detention, it is now known, was entirely voluntary on his part, and the Pope's seeming refusal was merely that Carne's property in England should not be confiscated.

It will be seen, from the few facts mentioned, how great were the possibilities of an interchange of ideas between the two countries. Interchange, however, is a misnomer. It cannot be said that the ideas and culture of England had the slightest influence in Italy. The Italians were only shocked at the audacity of the monarch who dared break loose from that most national of institutions, the Papacy. How deep was their interest in England was apparent when the news arrived of Mary's accession to the throne, and it was supposed that England would again become Catholic. There were rejoicings all over Italy, and in Florence alone a solemn mass was held, followed by a procession and display of fireworks, to celebrate England's return to papal obedience.1

1 Settimanni, Diario Fiorentino, II, Pt. I, 737, Archives Florence.

In England, during the reign of Elizabeth, the Papacy was looked upon by Protestants as the arch enemy. It was true that every influence, every action, every attempt, to win back what had been lost to the Catholic Church, radiated from Rome. It was there that English Catholics found a new home and sanctuary where they could be safe and secure from insults and injury. Between Catholics in England and English Catholics in Italy there was a constant intercourse, a going and coming, a series of movements and ties, all the closer for being below the surface; and when gradually the hope for the reconversion of England disappeared, numbers of Englishmen forsook their native land and passed the remainder of their lives in the country of their adoption.

The most prominent among English Catholics of this later time was Cardinal Allen, who, in 1575, had been summoned to Rome by Gregory the Thirteenth, to give advice regarding a college for Englishmen which the Pope proposed to found. A few years later the old English hospital, with all its revenues, was annexed to it. The seminary, as a result of internal dissensions and the jealousy between the English and Welsh students, was placed, in 1579, in charge of the English province of the Society of Jesus,' and under the protection of a cardinal. It was presided over by a

1 H. Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, VI, 541. Vide Cardinal Sega, Relazione del Collegio Inglese, 1596, Fondo Ottoboni, 2473 ff., 185–226, Vatican Library, Rome (cited also by Foley op. cit.).

atmosphere with which he invested his dramas aided to bring out their beauty, while the novelle on which he based his plots set free his imagination.

The Italian influence in English literature was thus twofold. On the one hand, it taught the value and beauty of artistic form in poetry, and introduced new poetic models; on the other, it gave, so to speak, the raw material from which the Elizabethan dramatists drew the subject-matter of their inspiration. At the same time it offered a model for the novel and the epic, and the critical criteria for the judgment of literature. The first two influences were romantic ; the influence of the Italian humanists, on the other hand, was classical. While this influence was paramount in criticism, it yet failed to attain any results in poetry and the drama, the desultory attempts made to introduce it in England proving sterile. The romantic influences, however, did not fetter the originality of English poetry; the models of Petrarch and Ariosto breathed new life into it, while the tales of Boccaccio and his followers stirred the imagination of Elizabethan dramatists.

APPENDIX A

ENGLISH CATHOLICS IN ROME

PERHAPS the most permanent and binding chain, which from the earliest times familiarized Italy with England, was the constant stream of pilgrims journeying to and from Rome. These pilgrimages had already begun long before the Conquest and had continued through the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century one John Shepherd, a London merchant, established a hospital in Rome for English pilgrims and travellers. So early as 727, King Ina had founded a hospice for Saxon pilgrims beyond the Tiber. The English records of these early days are either lacking or scanty. Some information can be obtained, however, from a partial register of the pilgrims written in the first years of the sixteenth century.1 The guests then received were of two kinds, -noblemen (nobiles) so called, who paid for their board, and poor people (pauperes) who were lodged free. The names and occupations of the guests were in each case given; thus John Vaughan, priest, John Williams, knight, Thomas Halsey, student at Bologna, show the general nature of the lodgers. Most of them were designated either as scholars or priests; but others lodged there as well, even the ambassadors sent by Henry the Seventh 1 Liber Primus Instrumentorum, English College, Rome.