matters notorious and undeniable.) 'Where that close Atheism, which
secretly laughs God in the face, and thinks it weakness to believe,
wisdom to profess any religion? Where the bloody and tragical
science of king-killing, the new divinity of disobedience and
rebellion? with too many other evils, wherewith foreign conversation
hath endangered the infection of our peace?'--Bishop Hall's 'Quo
Vadis, or a Censure of Travel,' vol xii. sect. 22.


Add to these a third plain fact, that Italy was the mother-country of
the drama, where it had thriven with wonderful fertility ever since
the beginning of the sixteenth century. However much truth there may
be in the common assertion that the old 'miracle plays' and
'mysteries' were the parents of the English drama (as they certainly
were of the Spanish and the Italian), we have yet to learn how much
our stage owed, from its first rise under Elizabeth, to direct
importations from Italy. This is merely thrown out as a suggestion;
to establish the fact would require a wide acquaintance with the
early Italian drama; meanwhile, let two patent facts have their due
weight. The names of the characters in most of our early regular
comedies are Italian; so are the scenes; and so, one hopes, are the
manners, at least they profess to be so. Next, the plots of many of
the dramas are notoriously taken from the Italian novelists; and if
Shakspeare (who had a truly divine instinct for finding honey where
others found poison) went to Cinthio for 'Othello' and 'Measure for
Measure,' to Bandello for 'Romeo and Juliet,' and to Boccaccio for
'Cymbeline,' there were plenty of other playwrights who would go to
the same sources for worse matter, or at least catch from these
profligate writers somewhat of their Italian morality, which exalts
adultery into a virtue, seduction into a science, and revenge into a