By this time the latter had accomplished the work of collating and printing the classic authors and had produced a varied mass of literature in the modern languages; all of which became food for the omnivorous appetite of the English. Assimilation, at first, was slow and retarded by imitation. Wyatt and Surrey, for example, grafted the graces of Italian poetry onto the native stock, introducing the forms of the sonnet and blank verse; Sidney experimented with the classic metres, while tragedies in the style of Seneca, rivalled the similarly pedantic imitations of Italian and French dramatists. Gradually, however, the vigour of English digestion accomplished a complete assimilation. England, through her sympathy with Holland, had found herself involved in the conflict of the Counter-Reformation. She broke the rival power of Spain by the destruction of the Armada, and through the buccaneering exploits of Raleigh, Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins opened up the beginnings of colonial expansion. She leaped at a bound into consciousness of nationality and in the glow of her enthusiasm discovered her own capacity of originality. Shakespeare is at once the crown and symbol of the English Renaissance. He drew the material of his plots from a variety of foreign sources, but creatively impressed upon his plays either a new and a universal significance or unmistakably the English spirit of his day. Meanwhile, Spenser, while deriving his allegory from the Middle Ages and decorative richness from the Italian Renaissance, added thereto a sweetness, purity, and splendour of imagination peculiarly English. And by the side of Spenser and Shakespeare, as representative of the creative imagination of the English Renaissance, must be set Bacon, the expositor of the modern scientific method. This flowering of the English Renaissance, in which intellectual brilliance walked hand in hand with beauty, was rudely interrupted, firstly, when the spirit of the Counter-Reformation was revived by James I and Charles I; secondly, by the resultant Puritan reaction, and the equally resultant license of the Restoration. A cleavage between morals and beauty was opened up that to this day has not been bridged. On the other hand, the spirit, let loose by the Renaissance and the Reformation, pushed forward persistently on the path of political liberty, and England’s mightiest contribution to the civilisation of the world has been the realisation, however imperfect, of the ideal of human freedom. Meanwhile, in the realm of the arts, it is in the province of Literature, rather than in those of the Fine Arts, that her Renaissance has reaped its most abundant harvest. CHAPTER II RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY The foregoing summary of Renaissance culture anticipates three marked characteristics of the architecture which responded to it.