In the seventeenth century Italian literature fell into its decline, and by about 1650 its influences on English writers ceased. Milton is perhaps the last great poet whose debts to Italian models and Italian culture can be declared measurable. His own knowledge of the Italian language, his travels in Italy, and his friendships with Italians kept him in touch with the current literature of the country. The sonnet was not dead in a land which was still to produce a Filicaia, and Milton was a sonneteer both in his own language and in Italian. His _Comus_ is an Italian pastoral masque raised for once to the scope and dignity of literature, and to two famous poems he is led to attach the Italian names _L’Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_. What his great epic owes to his reading of Dante and Tasso is readily perceived, and the student of the two literatures cannot but feel that the quiet tone of noble sweetness in his earlier work is largely due, as it is with Spenser, to the fine example of Italy. We should, perhaps, add at this point that a less considerable contemporary of Milton, the artificial Cowley, was much under the influence of the Italian lyrist Chiabrera (1552-1637), whose sumptuous, courtly, glittering, but very un-Pindaric, “Pindarics” for a time challenged the lyric supremacy of Petrarch. It is not a little strange that Wordsworth also was so far attracted by Chiabrera as to translate certain of his poetical epitaphs. Nor is it to be passed over that Pope’s heroi-comical _Rape of the Lock_ was suggested—and in such compositions the suggestion counts for much—by the _Rape of the Bucket_ (_La Secchia Rapita_) of Tassoni, who died in 1636. It is hardly part of our subject to dwell upon Italian drama, inasmuch as it exerted but very little effect upon ours. So far as there was any, it was in the “masques,” which owe their birth to the age of Poliziano, played no inconsiderable part in the court festivities of England from the time of Henry VIII, and came to engage so much of the learning and ingenuity of Ben Jonson. Yet masques are little more than glorified tableaux in glorified “private theatricals,” accompanied by some form of libretto written _ad hoc_, and of almost no permanent value. Milton’s _Comus_ is no fair specimen of the class. It is, perhaps, scarcely relevant to literature to record that we owe our Harlequin and Pantaloon to the stock characters in the Italian semi-improvisations known as _commedie dell’arte_.