The study of medieval Italian history in England has always tended to the picturesque in character. This is an old tradition; we see it already in Elizabethan plays; and may trace it through Byron and Browning to modern writers of biographies and histories of a time or of a city. Stodgily virtuous in Dennistoun, rhetorically philosophical in Symonds, stirring and graphic in Heywood, Clio has here had the opportunity to be a melodramatic muse, and has used it to the full. The moving accident has been almost all her theme, and she seems at times to have found in it the pleasure that Charles Lamb did in Restoration plays, the escape to the country “where no cold moral reigns.” This attitude is natural enough when we consider that Italian history comes to us in the light of the Renaissance and of Dante, of a time when personality in its most exuberant forms not only had free play in life, but full record, and record which is living literature and not a mere “source.”
From the confessionals “we” hear arise
Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies.