The man who wrote this page of criticism on Dante and vindicated him once more after centuries of anti-Dantesque taste (or mere Dantesque grammar or Dantesque scholasticism) and vindicated him in the very height of the prosperity of the Arcadianism so hostile to him, deserved to have made the acquaintance of William Shakespeare genius, which he was perhaps the only man alive capable of understanding. But in Italy, as in most countries outside England, nothing was known of Shakespear at this time, and Vico has only the vague and belated remark about him that the English, untouched by the prevailing delicacy of the century, took no pleasure in tragedies which had not an element of atrocity in them, just as the earliest taste of Greek drama was for the abominable feast of Thyestes and Medea's impious slaughter of her brother and children. The tendency towards Teutonic poetry and literature remained in Vico as we know an aspiration only; he was unable to get a clear view of it however closely he tried to examine it; and when he does mention it upon the strength of second-hand information, it is only to say that in the German nation, especially in the purely agricultural province of Silesia, "poets arose naturally"; in his search for an unsophisticated popular poetry he had in fact stumbled without realising his mistake upon the Silesian school of Hoffmanswaldau and Löhenstein, the German imitators of the Neapolitan Marino. But the only value of the anecdote is to illustrate anew the tricks played upon Vico by his lively fancy.