The literary sceptre passed from France to Italy during the 14th century. Brunetto Latini, who wrote in French as well as in Italian, is the connecting link between the literatures of the two countries; but Italy owes its eminence not so much to a general diffusion of literary accomplishment as to the emergence of three great personalities. Dante, Boccacio and Petrarch created a new art of poetry and of prose. England yielded to the fascination in the person of Chaucer, Spain in the person of her chancellor López de Ayala, and France in the person of Charles d'Orléans, the son of an Italian mother. Petrarch, once ambassador in France, alleged that there were no poets out of Italy, and indeed there were no living poets to compare with him elsewhere. But in all countries he raised up rivals--Chaucer, Marot, Garcilaso de la Vega--as Sannazaro did a century and a half later. Sannazaro's _Arcadia_ captured the Portuguese Montemôr, whose pastoral novel the _Diana_, written in Spanish, inspired d'Urfé no less than Sidney, and, as d'Urfé's _Astrée_ is considered the starting-point of the modern French novel, the historical importance of the Italian original cannot be exaggerated. Spain never obtained any intellectual predominance corresponding to that exercised by France and Italy, or to her political authority during the 16th and 17th centuries. This may be attributed partly to her geographical position which lies off the main roads of Europe, and partly to the fact that her literature is essentially local. Cervantes, indeed, may be said to have influenced all subsequent writers of fiction, and the influence of Spanish literature is visible in the body of European picaresque tales; but, apart from Corneille and a few other dramatists who preceded Molière in France, and apart from the Restoration drama in England, the influence of the Spanish drama was relatively small. In some respects it was too original to be imitated with success. Much the same may be said of England as of Spain. Like Spain, she lies outside the sphere of continental influence; like Spain, she has innumerable great names in every province of literature, and, in both cases, to Europe at large these long remained names and nothing more; like Spain, she is prone to reproduce borrowed materials in shapes so transformed and rigid as to be unrecognizable and unadaptable. Moreover, the Reformation isolated England from literary commerce with the Latin races, and till the 18th century Germany was little more than a geographical expression. Even when Germany recovered her literary independence, Lessing first heard of Shakespeare through Voltaire. Neither Shakespeare nor Milton was read in France before the 18th century--the first translated by Ducis, the second by Dupré de Saint-Maur--and they were read with curiosity rather than with rapture. On the other hand, Boileau, Rapin and Le Bossu were regarded as oracles in England, and through them French literature produced the