The greater the display of feeling in such tales of Italian origin, the bitterer were the denunciations of moral censors, and the greater at the same time their popularity with the public. The quarrel did not abate for one minute during the whole of the century; the period is filled with condemnations of novels, dramas and poems, answered by no less numerous apologies for the same. The quarrel went on even beyond the century, the adverse parties meeting with various success as Cromwell ruled or Charles reigned; it can scarcely be said to have ever been entirely dropped, and the very same arguments used by Ascham against the Italian books of his time are daily resorted to against the French books of our own age. Be this as it may, the Italian novels had the better of it in Elizabethan times; they were found not only "in every shop," but in every house; translations of them were the daily reading of Shakespeare, and as they had an immense influence not only in emancipating the genius of the dramatists of the period, but, what was of equal importance, in preparing an audience for them, we may be permitted to look at them with a more indulgent eye than the pre-Shakespearean moralists. A curious list of books, belonging during this same period (1575) to a man of the lower middle class, an average member of a Shakespearean audience, has been preserved for us. It is to be found in a very quaint account of the Kenilworth festivities, sent by Robert Laneham, a London mercer, to a brother mercer of the same city. Laneham states how an acquaintance of his, Captain Cox, a mason by trade, had in his possession, not only "Kyng Arthurz book, Huon of Burdeaus, The foour suns of Aymon, Bevis of Hampton," and many of those popular romances, illustrated with woodcuts of which a few specimens are to be seen above, but also, mason as he was, the very same Italian book, the "Lucres and Eurialus," of which we have just given an account.[48]