These Italian novelists were fine workmen, and ingenious story tellers, but Shakspeare clothed their creations in the flesh and blood of perennial humanity. They made the puppets of passion, true to the fashions and humors of their day, and invaluable as such; Shakspeare took them and gave them that philosophy and humanity that rings true through all the changes of custom, and knowledge and philosophy. These writers had the faculty of invention, of incident and situation, and dramatic movement and climax. Shakspeare may have really lacked these ingenious faculties of mind, but yet he had the dramatic perception of life—the whole of life, quick and stirring, all emotion and thought and passion. In his day the play was the thing in England, and he needed a strong current of human action to show the soul of life on the stage as he saw it in the commonplaces of everyday existence. So he borrowed from the Italians, who supplied him with the very plots he needed to develop his own philosophy of life, in a fashion that gave thought its real place in life, as a concrete force on a level with action. If the novel had been established in England earlier, if the English writers had borrowed the form of the novel from the Italians bodily, instead of their plots, Shakspeare might have been our psychological novelist; for it seems that his dramatic power was of the deeper sort that seizes the heart and soul of life, rather than that which devises effective scenes and climaxes. That is, if this English writer is to be trusted, and he seems to write with authority. He says _Cymbeline_ and _All’s Well That Ends Well_ were taken from Boccaccio’s _Decameron_, _The Merchant of Venice_ and _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ from Florentino’s _Pecarone_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Much Ado about Nothing_, _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and _Twelfth Night_ from Bandello, and _Measure for Measure_ and _Othello_ from Giraldi’s _Ecatommiti_. If any contemporary writer put himself in such indebtedness the critics would probably howl. And yet the richest imaginations, the most fantastic fancy, the keenest wit and widest comprehension of human nature and life is often given to a writer who is destitute of the mere dramatic knack of improvising a story to carry on the frame of life as he knows and sees it.