It clearly answered a want and thus created a demand. It remains to consider the want which was thus satisfied by Painter and his school. [Footnote 17: The tales are ten--1. Sinorix and Camma [= Tennyson’s _Cup_]; 2. Tereus and Progne; 3. Germanicus and Agrippina; 4. Julius and Virginia; 5. Admetus and Alcest; 6. Silla and Minos; 7. Curiatius and Horatia; 8. Cephalus and Procris; 9. Pigmalion and his Image; 10. Alexius.] [Footnote 18: M. Jusserand gives a list of most of these translations of French and Italian novels in his just issued _English Novel in the Elizabethan Age_, 1890, pp. 80-1. He also refers to works by Rich and Gascoigne in which novels occur.] The quarter of a century from 1565 to 1590 was the seed-time of the Elizabethan Drama, which blossomed out in the latter year in Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine the Great_. The only play which precedes that period, _Gordobuc_ or _Ferrex and Porrex_, first played in 1561, indicates what direction the English Drama would naturally have taken if nothing had intervened to take it out of its course. _Gordobuc_ is severely classical in its unities; it is of the Senecan species. Now throughout Western Europe this was the type of the modern drama,[19] and it dominated the more serious side of the French stage down to the time of Victor Hugo. There can be little doubt that the English Drama would have followed the classical models but for one thing. The flood of Italian _novelle_ introduced into England by Painter and his school, imported a new condition into the problem. It is essential to the Classical Drama that the plot should be already known to the audience, that there should be but one main action, and but one tone, tragic or comic. In Painter’s work and those of his followers, the would-be dramatists of Elizabeth’s time had offered to them a super-abundance of actions quite novel to their audience, and alternating between grave and gay, often within the same story.[20] The very fact of their foreignness was a further attraction. At a time when all things were new, and intellectual curiosity had become a passion, the opportunity of studying the varied life of an historic country like Italy lent an additional charm to the translated _novelle_. In an interesting essay on the “Italy of the Elizabethan Dramatists,”[21] Vernon Lee remarks that it was the very strangeness and horror of Italian life as compared with the dull decorum of English households that had its attraction for the Elizabethans. She writes as if the dramatists were themselves acquainted with the life they depicted. As a matter of fact, not a single one of the Elizabethan dramatists, as far as I know, was personally acquainted with Italy.[22] This knowledge of Italian life and crime was almost entirely derived from the works of Painter and his school. If there had been anything corresponding to them dealing with the tragic aspects of English life,