Lancaster.


ITALIAN INFLUENCE.--From a literary point of view, the period of his birth
was remarkable for the strong influence of Italian letters, which first
having made its entrance into France, now, in natural course of progress,
found its way into England. Dante had produced,

... in the darkness prest,
From his own soul by worldly weights, ...

the greatest poem then known to modern Europe, and the most imaginative
ever written. Thus the Italian sky was blazing with splendor, while the
West was still in the morning twilight. The Divina Commedia was written
half a century before the Canterbury Tales.

Boccaccio was then writing his _Filostrato_, which was to be Chaucer's
model in the Troilus and Creseide, and his _Decameron_, which suggested
the plan of the Canterbury Tales. His _Teseide_ is also said to be the
original of the Knight's Tale. Petrarch, "the worthy clerke" from whom
Chaucer is said to have learned a story or two in Italy for his great
work, was born in 1304, and was also a star of the first magnitude in that
Italian galaxy.

Indeed, it is here worthy of a passing remark, that from that early time
to a later period, many of the great products of English poetry have been
watered by silver rills of imaginative genius from a remote Italian
source. Chaucer's indebtedness has just been noticed. Spenser borrowed his
versification and not a little of his poetic handling in the Faery Queen
from Ariosto. Milton owes to Dante some of his conceptions of heaven and