There can indeed be no doubt that throughout the eighteenth century it was from these two poets that men drew most of their ideas of Romance itself. Dryden, on the eve of that century, betrays the fact in his own case by his designation of our own Guenevere under her Italian name of Ginevra. Scott, at its close and far beyond it, wide as was his knowledge of the true and real mediæval romance itself, is still haunted by the Italians. While as for Petrarch (to put out of question the fact that he is of all time, if not of the highest of all time), he means the sonnet; and the sonnet is anti-classical from centre to circumference. Even if Dante was somewhat neglected, the fact of Gray’s attraction to Nicholls at their first meeting, because he found that the young man read that Florentine, is evidence for exception as well as for rule. At any rate, a man who studied Italian, whether he were Englishman or Frenchman, German or from Mesopotamy, might always, and must certainly not seldom, be brought into contact with the _Commedia_. And when that contact is established in a fitting soul, “A drear and dying sound, Affrights the Flamens” of Neo-classicism “at their service quaint.” You read no more in Boileau that day, nor any day thereafter by preference and as a disciple. [Sidenote: _Of Spanish._] So also in Spain the home study of the home literature—though as above noted its results were not by any means nugatory—was far inferior to the effect of the study of that literature abroad. The general and half-blind impulse towards collection and reproduction, however, was especially important,—hardly even in England, putting the works of the very greatest out of the question, did anything appear more precious than the _Poesias Anteriores_: and Spain had, in three different divisions and directions, inestimable and inexhaustible treasures for the foreign student, especially for the foreign student who felt the gall and the cramp of the classical strait-waistcoat and wished to cast it off. The first of these in order of time was the ballad matter provided by the _Cancioneros_. The second was the Spanish drama, and the reflections which it had drawn from native poets and critics. The third was the work of Cervantes and the picaresque novel.