The romantic traveller, Coryat, writing well within the seventeenth century in praise of the luxuries of Italy (among which he numbers forks for table use), is as enthusiastic as the authors who began the imitation of Italian metres in Tottel's _Miscellany_, and Donne and Hall in their satires written under James wield the rod of censure as sternly as had Ascham a good half century before.

No doubt there was something in the danger they dreaded, but the evil was not unmixed with good, for insularity will always be an enemy of good literature.

The Elizabethans learned much more than their plots from Italian models, and the worst effects dreaded by the patriots never reached our shores.

Italian vice stopped short of real life; poisoning and hired ruffianism flourished only on the stage.
(3) The influence of the spirit of discovery and adventure, though it is less quickly marked, more pervasive, and less easy to define, is perhaps more universal than that of the classics or of the Italian fashions which came in their train.

It runs right through the literature of Elizabeth's age and after it, affecting, each in their special way, all the dramatists, authors who were also adventurers like Raleigh, scholars like Milton, and philosophers like Hobbes and Locke.