And
as long as all this dross and ore and filth brought from the ruins of
Italy was thus mingling in the heat of English genius, while it was yet
but imperfectly fused, while already its purest and best compounded
portion was being poured in Shakespeare's mould, and when already there
remained only a seething residue; as long as there remained aught of the
glowing fire and the molten mass, some of it all, of the pure metal
bubbling up, of the scum frothing round, nay, of the very used-up dregs,
was ever and anon being ladled out--gold, dross, filth, all
indiscriminately--and cast into shapes severe, graceful, or uncouth. And
this somewhat, thus pilfered from what was to make, or was making, or
had made, the works of Shakespeare; this base and noble, still unfused
or already exhausted alloy, became the strange heterogeneous works of
the Elizabethan dramatists: of Webster, of Ford, of Tourneur, of Ben
Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of their minor brethren; from the
splendid ore of Marlowe, only half molten and half freed from dross,
down to the shining metal, smooth and silvery as only tinsel can be, of
Massinger.

In all the works of our Elizabethans, we see not only the assimilated
intellectual wealth of Italy, but we see the deep impression, the
indelible picture in the memory, of Italy itself; the positive,
unallegorical, essentially secular mode of thought; the unascetic,
aesthetic, eminently human mode of feeling; the artistic desire of clear
and harmonious form; the innumerable tendencies and habits which sever
the Elizabethans so completely from the Middle Ages, and bring them so
near at once to ourselves and to the ancients, making them at once
antique and modern, in opposition to mediaeval; these essential
characters and the vast bulk of absolute scientific fact and formula, of
philosophic opinion, of artistic shape, of humanistic learning, are only
one-half of the debt of our sixteenth century to the Italy of the
Renaissance. The delicate form of the Italian sonnet, as copied by
Sidney from Bembo and Molza and Costanzo, contained within it the exotic
and exquisite ideal passion of the "Vita Nuova" and Petrarch. With the
bright, undulating stanza Spenser received from Ariosto and Tasso the
richly coloured spirit of the Italian descriptive epic. With the
splendid involutions of Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's prose Bacon
learned their cool and disimpassioned philosophy. From the reading of
Politian and