Yet Bembo's _Asolani,_ Castiglione's panegyric of Platonic Love, and much of the lyrical poetry in vogue warn us to be cautious.

The old romantic sentiment expressed by the Florentines of the thirteenth century still survived to some extent, adding a sort of dignity in form at least to these affections.
[1] Much might be written about the play of the imagination which gave a peculiar complexion to the profligacy, the jealousy, and the vengeance of the Italians.

I shall have occasion elsewhere to maintain that in their literature at least the Italians were not a highly imaginative race; nor were they subject to those highly wrought conditions of the brooding fancy, termed by the northern nations Melancholy, which Duerer has personified in his celebrated etching, and Burton has described in his _Anatomy._ But in their love and hatred, their lust and their cruelty, the Italians required an intellectual element which brought the imaginative faculty into play.
It was due again in a great measure to their demand for imaginative excitement in all matters of the sense, to their desire for the extravagant and extraordinary as a seasoning of pleasure, that the Italians came to deserve so terrible a name among the nations for unnatural passions.[1] This is a subject which can hardly be touched in passing: yet the opinion may be recorded that it belongs rather to the science of psychopathy than to the chronicle of vulgar lusts.

English poets have given us the right key to the Italian temperament, on this as on so many other points.

Shelley in his portrait of Francesco Cenci has drawn a man in whom cruelty and incest have become appetites of the distempered soul; the love of Giovanni and Annabella in Ford's tragedy is rightly depicted as more imaginative than sensual.