claim a Transalpine parentage. Italy was then not merely the
stronghold of Popery. That in itself would have been a fair reason
for others beside Puritans saying, 'If the root be corrupt, the fruit
will be also: any expression of Italian thought and feeling must be
probably unwholesome while her vitals are being eaten out by an
abominable falsehood, only half believed by the masses, and not
believed at all by the higher classes, even those of the priesthood;
but only kept up for their private aggrandisement.' But there was
more than hypothesis in favour of the men who might say this; there
was universal, notorious, shocking fact. It was a fact that Italy
was the centre where sins were invented worthy of the doom of the
Cities of the Plain, and from whence they spread to all nations who
had connection with her. We dare give no proof of this assertion.

The Italian morals and the Italian lighter literature of the
sixteenth and of the beginning of the seventeenth century were such,
that one is almost ashamed to confess that one has looked into them,
although the painful task is absolutely necessary for one who wishes
to understand either the European society of the time or the Puritan
hatred of the drama. Non ragionam di lor: ma guarda e passa.

It is equally a fact that these vices were imported into England by
the young men who, under pretence of learning the Italian polish,
travelled to Italy. From the days of Gabriel Harvey and Lord Oxford,
about the middle of Elizabeth's reign, this foul tide had begun to
set toward England, gaining an additional coarseness and frivolity in
passing through the French Court (then an utter Gehenna) in its
course hitherward; till, to judge by Marston's 'Satires,' certain
members of the higher classes had, by the beginning of James's reign,
learnt nearly all which the Italians had to teach them. Marston