The effect of Italian literature in Italy was, it has been said, not at the time great; the contrast between the study of Shakespeare at this time in England and the study of Dante in Italy has, I have no doubt, defrayed the expense of many a literary-historical comparison.[338] But Italian—though it had lost something of the prerogative importance which it had once, and justly, and for a long time held—retained a great, and, as regards the products of its best time, a wholly salutary, influence over the rest of Europe. That rather treacherous turning of French critics on their Italian masters, which Hurd so acutely noticed, had, like other things evil, its soul of goodness in it. Ariosto, and Tasso, and Petrarch, though not Dante, had entered so thoroughly into the _corpus_ of European literature that they could not be driven out by any scoffs of Boileau or scorns of Voltaire. And when people began to examine them for themselves there was, with the different set of tide and wind which we have seen throughout this book, a very good chance, almost a certainty, of a healthy voyage back. There was all the more chance of this that the strong Renaissance admixture in the authors of the _Orlando_ and the _Gerusalemme_, the at least not strongly mediæval character of Petrarch, made them more suitable for eighteenth-century consumption than the pure milk of the mediæval word. The argument which Hurd himself put about Spenser and Milton—“_These_ were no barbarians; _these_ were men of real learning, of polished and statesman-like society; and _they_ liked romance”—was applicable with even greater force to the Captain of the Garfagnana and the friend of Leo X., to the familiar (if also victim) of princes and princesses at Ferrara, and the Laureate elect of Rome. [Sidenote: _Especially Dante._]