The “Novella” is regularly a short story outlined round a situation which is intended to be exciting. It is not a novel, but rather the sketch of one. In this domain Italy was exceedingly prolific. True to the national instinct for fidelity to patterns, the Italian _novellieri_ are fond of the old device of Boccaccio, borrowed by Chaucer; they frequently pretend that their various stories are related by a company of persons accidentally brought together in a country house, or on a voyage, or the like, and placed in need of such mutual entertainment. The _Pecorone_ of Ser Giovanni, the _Hecatommithi_ of Cinthio, and the stories of Straparola, Da Porto, Bandello, and others, enjoyed a wide vogue in France and England, and formed matter for the exploitation of every class of our Elizabethan dramatists or writers of fiction. * * * * * What English literature owes to that of Italy, except in the case of Byron’s Bernesque period, it owes before the middle of the seventeenth century. From Dante to Tasso the obligations were great and manifold. To Italian stories, Italian sonnets and lyrics, to Italian epic, romance and pastoral, our writers from Chaucer to Milton are multifariously indebted. Most indebted of all is the great epoch which culminated in Shakespeare. Before his day the Tudor Court had much affected the language and courtesies of Italy. Italian travel was common, and Italians were relatively numerous in London. Even that sweet stateliness which characterizes so much of the Elizabethan lyric is a gift of Italy. To Italian skill and refinement of language, to Italian melodies of versification, our rough lyric beginnings owe debts more appreciable than to Italian matter. In other words, Italy taught us the art of writing, while leaving us to use it upon our own realities of thought and feeling. Before the poetical innovations of Wyatt and Surrey, English verse had stood in much need of further moulding of form and polish of language. It was an outcome of the partiality of the Court of Henry VIII for Italian art and manners that there arose the new school of poets whom Puttenham describes as “a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having travelled into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style.” Both Wyatt and Surrey are best known as sonneteers. Sometimes they are translating from Petrarch, but they are by no means mere translators, or even servile imitators. It is well known that the sonnet, as introduced by them, differs somewhat from the Italian, and its ending in an epigrammatic couplet is a purely English novelty.