The wealth of the period which we here call the Later Renaissance makes the task of giving the results of a survey of its manifold activities one of extreme difficulty. It is, indeed, sufficiently easy to point out the common element of the time--namely, the revival or the development of the literary genius of Spain, England, and France, under the influence of the classic models, and of Italy. In Italy itself the classic impulse had been felt earlier and had borne its best fruits before the middle of the sixteenth century. The time there was one of decadence. Tasso and Giordano Bruno are unquestionably, though in widely different ways, writers of original force. But the author of the _Jerusalem Delivered_ was a survivor,--one, too, who had lived into an unhappy time. His weakness of health and character may have--or rather must have--made him suffer with exaggerated acuteness from the forces which were weighing on the intellect of Italy. Yet on that very account he shows only the more clearly the exhaustion of the race, and the deadening influence of the Roman Catholic revival. As for Bruno, interesting, and in a way attractive, figure as he is, it is doubtful whether he can be said to have had any literary influence at all. His modern fame is even not quite legitimate, since he owes it in some measure to the circumstances of his death. In his own age he fell rapidly into obscurity. He also had lived into an unhappy time, though he bore himself in it very differently from Tasso. Too Italian to reconcile himself to Calvinism or Lutheranism, too independent in mind to be an obedient son of the Church, from the moment he was asked for more than mere outward conformity to ceremonies, he was destined to be crushed between hammer and anvil in an age of religious strife. There was no room for independence of mind in Italy, and there was to be none for long, as the lives of Galileo and of Fra Paolo Sarpi were to show. It required all the power, and the strong political anti-papal spirit of Venice, to preserve Fra Paolo. In literature nothing was any longer quite safe except the more or less elegant presentment of harmless matter. Tasso did the utmost which it was now allowed to an Italian poet to achieve. Beyond him there could only be mere echo, as in the case of Guarini. Beyond Guarini the downward path of Italian literature led only to the preciosities and affectations of Marini.