This being so, it might seem a most inconsistent and regrettable fact that, while there are thousands who go, guidebook in hand, through the galleries of the Vatican or the palace of the Venetian Doges, or through that Florentine church of Santa Croce where they read the name of a Michelangelo or a Machiavelli on illustrious tombs, yet a very few have thought fit to look into Italian literature, to see if it perhaps contains things as worthy of regard as Italian edifices or Italian pictures. Few also realize that it is often impossible to understand Italian art without understanding contemporary Italian literature. Time was when education was hardly a complete and liberal education if it did not include the knowledge of Italian and of the best thoughts of Italy. Time was when England was the pupil of Italy in letters, as it has largely continued to be in those other arts which are called “fine.” At two periods, namely, first in the days of Chaucer, and afterwards for more than a century, from the time of Wyatt and Surrey to the prime of Milton, Italian masterpieces and Italian style were chief patterns to Englishmen, and Italian thoughts and subjects were borrowed without stint. Doubtless Italy has had her day as our teacher in letters, and we look to her no more for inspiration or guidance in poetry or prose. Nevertheless it is a mistake to seek so little direct knowledge of what is meant by the names of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Ariosto and Tasso, and of others well known to the ear. The study of writers like these in their own tongue would do much to remove the false impressions we are so apt to form of foreign peoples and their character. Literature is the “expression of the soul of a people,” and the only sure way of getting at a people’s soul is to study the expression of that soul in its literature. For instance, are the Italians a people of profound feeling, of much imagination, of high ideals of conduct? It is not travel which will readily tell us this, but a study of the emotions, imaginings, and moral conceptions which are revealed in their books. * * * * * The Italians are in but a partial degree descendants of the ancient Romans. The Romans proper never did fill much of Italy. To the south of Rome and in Sicily lay colonies of Greeks, at Naples, Reggio, Taranto, Syracuse and Palermo. To the north lay the alien and rather mysterious Etruscans in modern Tuscany. Still further north lay various Celtic Gauls along the valleys of Piedmont and Lombardy. And even in central Italy there were many tribes and many dialects, which were only brought by force under a common Roman empire and a common literary and official Latin tongue. The Romans did their best to weld all these diverse elements into a homogeneous people with a common feeling of nationality, common ideals and common customs. But at no time did one identical race or one identical dialect fill the peninsula of Italy.