picturesque incident and
passionate fervor.

Robert Henryson wrote his Robin and Makyne, a charming pastoral, which
has come down to us in Percy's Reliques.

Gavin Douglas, Scotch Bishop of Dunkeld in the beginning of the
sixteenth century, translated the Aeneid into English. This is the
earliest known attempt in the British Isles to render classical poetry
into the national language.

In the sixteenth century Erasmus gave a new impulse in England to the
study of Latin and Greek, and Sir Thomas More in his "Utopia" (wherein
he imagines an ideal commonwealth with community of property),
unconsciously gave birth to a word (utopia), which has ever since been
used to designate the ideally impossible.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the same century made a translation of
the Aeneid and wrote sonnets and lyrical poems. The sonnet he borrowed
from Petrarch, giving it the amatory tone common to the Italians. He
also took from the Italian poets the blank verse of his Aeneid, a style
in which the best poetry of England has since been written.

The genius of John Milton has been greatly hampered by the
self-inflicted laws under which he labored, conditions which did not
affect Dante and Tasso, who were his models; for Milton denied in a
great measure the use of history, tradition and symbolism. Of this
defect he was sensible, so he tried to make amends for it by borrowing
fables and allegories out of the Koran and Talmud. English poetry has
inclined more to the style of Milton than to that of Spenser, who was
thoroughly embued with the romantic spirit of the Teutons and the
Troubadours, though, like Milton, he was influenced by Tasso; and
unlike him, by Ariosto. His Faerie Queene, Gloriana, is supposed to be
the beloved of the courtly Arthur of the British legends.

The English poets of the Elizabethan age were under deep obligations to
the Italian poets, especially Tasso; and this is particularly true of
Spenser, many critics think his eighty-first sonnet is almost a literal
translation of Tasso. Be that as it may, the obligations of many
English poets of the age to the Italians, is unmistakable.

After the Puritan period the English language and literature was
strongly influenced by the French, and in both Pope and Addison there
is a marked leaning toward French poetry. Pope's translation of Homer
while it lacks the simple majesty and naturalness of the original (a
trait which Bryant in the nineteenth century happily c