being now in
Italy, that great limbique of working braines, he must be very
circumspect in his carriage, for she is able to turne a Saint into a
devill, and deprave the best natures, if one will abandon himselfe,
and become a prey to dissolut courses and wantonesse.' Italy, in
truth, had already become corrupt, and the fruit of her contact with
the nations of the North was seen in the lives of such scholars as
Robert Greene, who confessed that he returned from his travels
instructed 'in all the villanies under the sun.' Many of the scandals
of the Court of James might be ascribed to this aping of Southern
manners.

Yet, together with the evil of depraved morality, the advantage of
improved culture was imported from Italy into England; and the
constitution of the English genius was young and healthy enough to
purge off the mischief, while it assimilated what was beneficial. This
is very manifest in the history of our drama, which, taking it
altogether, is at the same time the purest and the most varied that
exists in literature; while it may be affirmed without exaggeration
that one of the main impulses to free dramatic composition in England
was communicated by the attraction everything Italian possessed for
the English fancy. It was in the drama that the English displayed the
richness and the splendour of the Renaissance, which had blazed so
gorgeously and at times so balefully below the Alps. The Italy of the
Renaissance fascinated our dramatists with a strange wild glamour--the
contrast of external pageant and internal tragedy, the alternations of
radiance and gloom, the terrible examples of bloodshed, treason, and
heroism emergent from ghastly crimes. Our drama began with a
translation of Ariosto's 'Suppositi' and ended with Davenant's 'Just
Italian.' In the very dawn of tragic composition Greene versified a
portion of the 'Orlando Furioso,' and Marlowe devoted one of his most
brilliant studies to the villanies of a Maltese Jew. Of Shakspere's
plays five are incontestably Italian: several of the rest are
furnished with Italian names to suit the popular taste. Ben Jonson
laid the scene of his most subtle comedy of manners, 'Volpone,' in
Venice, and sketched the first cast of 'Every Man in his Humour' for
Italian characters. Tourneur, Ford, and Webster were so dazzled by the
tragic lustre of the wickedness of Italy that their finest dramas,
without exception, are minute and carefully studied psychological
analyses o