Dante Alighieri, whom Chaucer could read with pleasure and Byron with delight or even identification, has not always been so well-met in England. Horace Walpole found him “absurd, disgusting, in short a Methodist parson in bedlam.” The line is often cited as an example of how limited were the literary tastes of the eighteenth century. But I must confess that Walpole's reaction does not seem strange to me. Whether one may sympathize with it or not, I expect, depends upon the degree of one's experience with Christian zealots. D. H. Lawrence, in his depressing book Apocalypse, draws a vivid picture of the gleeful ease with which such persons come to employ the millenarian poetry of the New Testament. To consign one's enemies to immortal tortures while reserving for one's heroes all the delights of a tropical resort constructed largely out of diamonds and emeralds is not a subtle pleasure. Its appeal can reach the crudest minds. So urbane and elegant a fellow as Walpole, confronted by the self-righteous hymn-singing disciples of John Wesley, not only recoiled in disgust but quite properly recognized in the scheme of the Commedia something of the same primitive spirit. In every age, there will be persons to whom the blunt simplicity of this arrangement, say what you will for the profundities and revisions in Dante's handling of it, will be repulsive. Nowadays, perhaps, we are so hermeneutically splintered, so historically well-nourished, that we can entertain sympathies for Dante and for Walpole, for Byron and for Chaucer, for Eliot and even for Pound, all at the same time, always keeping in mind that our understanding of the one sets some kind of boundary

Victorian writers and artists gazed at the phenomenon that was Rome and found in it what they wanted and needed to find. Rome cast a longer shadow than did the Bible on the British upper and upper-middle classes, for whom Latin was a second language and Roman history a second past. The Bible's influence pervaded the culture of the classes below them, many of whose members had learned to read precisely in order to read the Scriptures according to evangelical interpretive and meditative practice. Since many individual members of the lower and middle classes rose in power, wealth, and social position during the Victorian period, cultural attitudes based on the Scriptures came into conflict with those based on the classical past. But for those in power, Rome and its grand, diverse, tortured, ambiguous history remained the predominant cultural example, though at times notions of chivalry and Hellenism rivaled its influence.

Rome was central to the Anglo-American imagination; for Isabel Archer “in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective.… Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater.” James here records (in the preterit tense) an occurrence which can be recovered from the past definite and replicated in the present and future progressive tenses – Isabel needs only to position herself before the “large Roman record” and the experience of soothing Time, Time as continuum, becomes a possibility once again. This replicable consciousness may be further specified “how it feels when one is in the happening of experiencing Time as the fluid medium of all lived experience.” Rome occasions the consciousness of an alternative time sense, one which might lighten the burden of living within a deterministic temporal dimension where past actions condition present and future actions to such an extent that one feels hopelessly locked into an imprisoning narrative pattern of before and after, cause and effect. James obviously believed that such temporal epiphanies offered root room for the psyche, a possibility of returning to the actual with renewed or composed psychic energies. (Other interpretations were, of course, possible-the complacent and self-satisfied traveller was often troubled by this extension of consciousness.) However interpreted, one finds this shock of recognition everywhere – in Canto 4 of Childe Harold, in The Education of Henry Adams, in Middlemarch and Romola, The Marble Faun, in the verse of all the major poets from Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley through both Brownings, Rogers, and Tennyson, in The Stones of Venice, Dipsychus, Amours de Voyage, and dimly in Rienzi and The Last Days of Pompeii, not to mention Harriet Beecher Stowe's less-than-immortal Agnes of Sorrento.

In a fragmentary preface to St. Mark's Rest, now in Princeton University's Firestone Library, Ruskin gives a brief history of his Venetian experiences, emphasizing the reading that conditioned his early responses to the city that proved so important to his life and work:

My father had trained me well in Shakespeare I knew the Two Gentlemen, & the Merchants of Verona and Venice, better than any gentlemen or merchants in London. had learned most of Romeo and Juliet, by heart; and all the beautiful beginnings of Othello. From Byron though with less reverence, I had received even deeper impressions – nor can I to this day be enough thankful for the glorious ideal of Venetian womanhood and Venetian patriotism which he gave me in Faliero and the Foscari, as I became capable of receiving it in later years Add to these Rogers poems, with Turner Vignettes – and Shelleys Julian & Maddalo, Prouts drawings in the Watercolour Rooms of its Old Society and the list of my first tutors in Venetian work will be full.

To read closely Nathaniel Hawthorne's Marble Faun in light of its genesis is to discover a series of remarkable parallels between the author, who sometimes copied passages from his notebooks into his romance, and the character Hilda, who copies paintings. But the correlations do not end there: they extend to Sophia, Hawthorne's wife, who resembles Hilda and who carried on her own practice of selectively copying her husband's journals for publication after his death. No matter what caused him to copy in the first place, Hawthorne's manner of composing in part by copying served him as artistic and psychological motivation to develop a certain theme. In this case, Hawthorne's activity of self-borrowing while composing The Marble Faun finds reflection in its theme of copying, and the character Hilda reflects not only Sophia but Hawthorne himself. In The Marble Faun Hawthorne created a microcosm of his current obsession with the practice and implications of copying.

On Christmas day 1832 the twenty-nine-year-old Emerson, then a young Boston clergyman in ill health and low spirits, went aboard the brig “Jasper” and set off into the wintry north Atlantic just ahead of a storm. He was bound for the Mediterranean, for Italy, then Switzerland, France, and England. The trip would change his life. Emerson left home with his ministerial career broken off, uncertain of himself, and without an aim in life. He came back from Europe with a changed outlook, sure of himself, and with a new vocation. His six months in Italy prepared him for and led him toward a culminating moment in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, to a dramatic, decisive, career-changing moment of insight into the connection, not between man and God, but between the mind and the natural order of things, directing him away from theology, preaching, and scholarship, and providing a new imperative to become a naturalist and a teacher. Home again after the trip, he observed: “the teacher of the coming age must occupy himself in the study and explanation of the moral constitution of man more than in the elucidation of difficult texts.” When he left he was a minister without a church. When he returned he took up a new career as a public lecturer, and his first set of lectures would be on science, on natural history.

When first published in 1855, Doctor Antonio immediately caught the imagination of English readers, in part because it seemed a beguilingly unusual creation. Although written by a former Italian exile, Giovanni Ruffini, it had been composed in an English that struck critics as of the purest in its evocative simplicity and fervid earnestness. And while narrating a familiar story of an English heart captivated by the beauty of Italy and its inhabitants, it told the story largely from the unaccustomed viewpoint of an Italian protagonist. This Italian also perceived a charming freshness in the English heroine's idealistic vision of his country. Perhaps the novel thereby conveyed the subtle but interesting impression that the Italy of the Englishman's romantic dreams owed as much to the imagination and desires of the English beholder as to the realities of Italy itself.

Anyone familiar with the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard must, upon reading Browning's “The Glove,” be struck by the inappropriateness of the French poet as “loquitor.” Indeed, one is forced to the conclusion that Browning must have known very little about this prince des poètes of the French Renaissance, nor could he have been acquainted with much of Ronsard's verse, which amounts to a huge corpus. In “The Glove,” Ronsard is depicted as a wry and amused observer of, and commentator on, court life under Francis I; in reality, however, he was totally unknown as a poet during Francis's reign (1515–47). He published virtually nothing until 1550, which date begins, when Ronsard was twenty-six, the period of his great renown. Further, during that period he enjoyed a place at court far more lofty than that suggested by Browning:

When in 1970 Gordon Pitts edited Strafford. An Historical Tragedy (1837) for Roma A. King's critical edition of Browning's works, he claimed that there was no known manuscript of Strafford. However, as early as 1954, Walter Federle had discussed the manuscripts of Strafford and A Blot in the 'Scutcheon in his Ph.D. thesis for Zürich University. In the years to come, Federle's close study of Browning's dramas was disregarded, and so were the manuscripts of Strafford, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon and Colombe's Birthday in the Lord Chamberlain's Office Records, now housed in the British Library.