Miss Scott,[66] in her scholarly monograph on Elizabethan translations from the Italian, in referring to the large influence exercised by the literature of Italy upon the work of the writers of the Elizabethan age, says that she has “collected more than one hundred and sixty translations from the Italian, made by ninety translators. The translators include nearly every well-known Elizabethan author, except Shakespeare and Bacon.” Apart from the translations, it is evident that a very liberal use was made by English authors of the time, and especially by the dramatists, of Italian stories and other literary material which could be reshaped for the requirements of English readers. Italy seems in fact to have served as a kind of literary quarry for the authors of Elizabeth, very much as Greece had done for the writers of the Augustan age. The taste for romances appears to have continued without abatement throughout the sixteenth century, the stories put into print being very largely translations or free adaptations of French and Italian tales. It was a period when Italian thought and Italian literary methods were beginning to exert a very large influence upon both writers and readers in England. Roger Ascham declaimed against the pernicious tendencies of the Italian literature in much the same language as has been used to-day against the influence of French books upon the morals of English readers. From Paynter’s _Palace of Pleasure_, printed in 1561, which contained a series of studies from French and Italian authors, were derived the plots of several of Shakespeare’s plays, including that of _Romeo and Juliet_.[67] Certain of these volumes secured what can be described as a popular success. _The Goodli History of the Ladye Lucres of Scene in Tuskane and of her Lover Eurialus_, a translation from the _Æneas Piccolomini_, went through twenty-three editions in the fifteenth century and was eight times translated.[68] I do not find record of the names of the fortunate publishers, but it is not probable that the publisher who arranged for the translation first issued, was able to keep his version from being appropriated by others. Mr. Furnivall cites a curious list of books which, in 1575, were recorded as the property of a man of the lower-middle class, a mason by trade,--such a man, remarks Jusserand, as would have been an average member of a Shakespearian audience. The titles include _Kyng Arthurz Book_, _Huon of Burdeaus_, _The Foour Suns of Aymion_, _Bevis of Hampton_, _Lucres and Eurialus_, and a number of other illustrated romances.[69] English readers of the time were not only interesting themselves in translations from the Italian, but were evidently to some extent prepared to read their Italian literature in the original. Among the books of which editions printed in Italian were issued in London in the latter part of the sixteenth century, was the _Pastor Fido_ of Guarini, published in 1590.[70]