After the age of Milton the connection between Italy and England is interrupted. In the seventeenth century Italy herself had sunk into comparative stupor, and her literature was trivial. France not only swayed the political destinies of Europe, but also took the lead in intellectual culture. Consequently, our poets turned from Italy to France, and the French spirit pervaded English literature throughout the period of the Restoration and the reigns of William and Queen Anne. Yet during this prolonged reaction against the earlier movement of English literature, as manifested in Elizabethanism, the influence of Italy was not wholly extinct. Dryden's 'Tales from Boccaccio' are no insignificant contribution to our poetry, and his 'Palamon and Arcite,' through Chaucer, returns to the same source. But when, at the beginning of this century, the Elizabethan tradition was revived, then the Italian influence reappeared more vigorous than ever. The metre of 'Don Juan,' first practised by Frere and then adopted by Lord Byron, is Pulci's octave stanza; the manner is that of Berni, Folengo, and the Abbé Casti, fused and heightened by the brilliance of Byron's genius into a new form. The subject of Shelley's strongest work of art is Beatrice Cenci. Rogers's poem is styled 'Italy.' Byron's dramas are chiefly Italian. Leigh Hunt repeats the tale of Francesca da Rimini. Keats versifies Boccaccio's 'Isabella.' Passing to contemporary poets, Rossetti has acclimatised in English the metres and the manner of the earliest Italian lyrists. Swinburne dedicates his noblest song to the spirit of liberty in Italy. Even George Eliot and Tennyson have each of them turned stories of Boccaccio into verse. The best of Mrs. Browning's poems, 'Casa Guidi Windows' and 'Aurora Leigh,' are steeped in Italian thought and Italian imagery. Browning's longest poem is a tale of Italian crime; his finest studies in the 'Men and Women' are portraits of Italian character of the Renaissance period. But there is more than any mere enumeration of poets and their work can set forth, in the connection between Italy and England. That connection, so far as the poetical imagination is concerned, is vital. As poets in the truest sense of the word, we English live and breathe through sympathy with the Italians. The magnetic touch which is required to inflame the imagination of the North, is derived from Italy. The nightingales of English song who make our oak and beech copses resonant in spring with purest melody, are migratory birds, who have charged their souls in the South with the spirit of beauty, and who return to warble native wood-notes in a tongue which is their own.