I began my work upon this subject with a study of the Anglo-Saxon year; but this, I was soon convinced, meant nothing less than a study of medieval astronomical science, and required far more leisure and aptitude than I possessed. I have, therefore, chosen to limit myself to particular portions of this broad subject.

The Middle English poem Patience, it will be remembered, is in the main a paraphrase of the book of Jonah. In the main also, the medieval writer has followed the biblical narrative, as he has in Clannesse when narrating the fall of the angels, the flood, the destruction of Sodom, and the capture of Babylon. But just as in these latter stories the English poet has taken considerable freedom with the biblical account, both in vividness at the expense of a literal rendering and in the use of medieval scripture interpretation, so in recounting the life of Jonah there are passages which have no close connection with the book of the prophet. The most remarkable of these is the extension of two sentences in the book of Jonah into some thirty-nine lines, describing vividly and picturesquely the storm at sea which overtook Jonah and his companions. Of this striking extension, and of certain additions which also occur in it, no source has ever been pointed out so far as I am aware. Nor has attention been called to a close parallelism between this portion of Patience, and a similar extension of the same story in the poem De Jona et Nineve, formerly attributed to Tertullian.

All readers of the Elizabethan drama must have noticed the profound influence of the Italian literature of the Renaissance upon the poets of that time. Some of the playwrights, like Greene and Munday, were men of travel, “Italianated” Englishmen, who returned home with their heads full of the ideas and culture of the South. Ford and Marston do not hesitate to introduce Italian dialogue into their plays, for many of the dramatists were University men, and the Italian language was studied at Oxford and Cambridge along with Latin and Greek. The scholarly Ascham, inveighing against the Italian leanings of his countrymen, in The Schoolmaster, yet confesses,—” not because I do contemne either the knowledge of strange and diverse tonges, and namelie the Italian tonge, which nexte the Greeke and Latin tonge I like and love above all others.”