was represented, staid at home, every man eager to fight with his neighbour and trade profitably with the world. The provincial tongues of the old Roman Empire within the peninsula were marked by hundreds of conflicting local forms; each city scorned its neighbour's dialect; classical Latin was a neutral ground of speech, on which a writer for more than the circle of his townspeople could tread without offence. There was little Italian prose before the middle of the fourteenth century; and the first Italian poema Dialogue between Lover and Lady, by Ciullo d'Alcamo-dates only from the years 1172-78, when the new stir of poetic life, south of the Loire and in Spain, had transmitted to Italy the impulse derived by others from their contest with the Moor. D'Alcamo was a Sicilian. Folcachiero, whose Canzone upon his Condition through Love is almost, or altogether, contemporary, was a Tuscan.

It was at Palermo, in the thirteenth century, under the Emperor Frederic II. and his natural son Manfredi, both kings of Naples, that the true beginning was made of an Italian literature. In the men who preceded this period, when Italian poetry was even known as "the Sicilian language," there is no very strong trace of direct influence from Provence. The troubadours on one side of the Alps were but a livelier and more numerous body, kindred even in language to the few rhymers on the other. The boundary line was not strongly drawn between the Romance dialects on either side of Alps or Pyrenees. When the Sicilian Court became a haunt of poets, although troubadours were tempted thither, it was rather from Spain than from France that the chief influence proceeded. The Italian sonnets by the earlier precursors of Dante do not greatly resemble poems of the troubadours, but are far more kindred in versification to the Spanish poems of the "Cid,” written a century before the marriage of Frederic of Sicily with. Constance of Aragon.

When Frederic II., at Palermo, married to Constance of Aragon, made the Sicilian Court the haunt of poets, it was through Aragon, or from the Mediterranean coast of Spain, that stray murmurs of the Castilian music penetrated. But the dialects of Aragon and Castile were almost two languages; the Aragonese, spoken along the whole Mediterranean coast of Spain, from Cape Palos northward, being in close relation to the Provençal. Unsettled variations, indeed, of the same Occitanian tongue of the troubadours, differing in Provence itself from Italian and Spanish no more than the Tuscan dialect from the Lombard and Venetian, were the language of song along the whole line of Mediterranean coast westward of Genoa, and almost to the Straits of Gibraltar. Thus, for example, with an air to modern readers of the most intelligible polyglot, begins one of the songs of Bernat de Ventadorn, born of the people of the Limousin :

"Non es meravelha s'ieu can

Meils de nul autre cantador."

The second or "Sicilian" period of early Italian literature received, then, some of its inspiration from a Spanish province, but in the days of Dante, and the generations next before him, they were the poets of Provence itself who gave the law of song to Italy.

In the outset

Literature.

Not Italy alone was influenced thus from without. The concourse and conflict of mind in the Crusades had infected courtly wits in Germany also--where the ruggedly grand poem of the "Nibelungen" be- of German longed to the true mind of the people-with the epidemic of the gai saber. The Suabian Minnesänger in the generations before Dante were rivalling the troubadours of Provence in the fanciful delicacy of their praise of women. Emperor Barbarossa had been crowned King of Provence in 1133, and after the land of song was thus

parted from France as a fief of the German empire, the Court of the Suabian Emperors cherished among its own minstrels the artifices of Provençal poetry. The reign of Barbarossa's grandson, Frederic II., not only established around his Italian throne a golden day of Italian song before the age of Dante; in his own land also he was surrounded by the minstrelsy of such great chiefs of the minnesänger as Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide, who went with Frederic to the Crusadesmen without equals in Italy.

In England under the

early

Norman kings.

To England also there passed through Northern France the same spirit of southern song and story, not unaffected by the adventurous and busy temper of the thriving Normans, who found work and pay for Chroniclers in verse and prose. They liked well that the history they made should be written by cunning scholars who, being priests, must have licence to mingle histories of abbeys with the stories of the rise and fall of thrones. Old British tales that had passed out of mind came home again in song from Brittany, ever a distinct stronghold of fiction, yielding the true fairyland of Northern France. Out of such impulse arose also in England, during the generation or two before Dante, little or nothing indeed in imitation of the fantastic and courtly southern love-song which the earnest men of the soil, and the adventurous Normans, with the blood of the Sea Kings in their veins, were alike inapt to invent—but the first English metrical imitations of the cunningly invented. narrative lays and fabliaux, or of the brisk tales of chivalrous adventure. We had in England, during a few generations before Dante, such literature of feigned enterprise and adventure, or true narrative of action by the chroniclers who waited on a race of energetic history-makers; and together with it there remains enough to show the dominant characteristic of religious earnestness marking the scanty

written utterances of the English of the people. Brother Orm's "Ormulum," a body of metrical homilies, founded on paraphrases of the Gospel for each day, designed for instruction of the congregation in the daily service of the Church, remains to us from the century before the birth of Dante. It is carefully furnished with a peculiar device of spelling, doubtless intended to secure the right pronunciation of their own words to the people by ignorant or half-Norman readers.

Foundations of the early influence of Italy on European Literature.

This being the condition of poetry among the men with whom the new kingdoms of modern Europe were rising into life, whence the sudden predominance of Dante's genius? Why should it be through a most unfortunate outcast from Florence in its day of utmost discord that there came suddenly the Divine Poem which first raised the literature of the moderns to a level with the highest utterances of the ancient world? The rare gift of genius in Dante really fell on the best soil in Europe when, surrounded by the warm artistic spirit of the Tuscans, it lay nurtured in the soul of a man linked to the life of the chief Tuscan city.

In activity

Florence was, in spite of its rude turmoil of independence, great among cities of Europe in commerce, a resort of nations, a hive of the most active, earnest, enterprising life. Only in the stir of the city of commerce. where man meets man, and each man's energies are called into the fullest play; where commerce brings the world within the city's gates, and yet is not its whole life, but leaves room for all that there is in man besides and beyond the trading spirit to assert itself can a great centre of literature be established. Such a centre Florence was in

Dante's day, and after it.

To the chief discords of North Italy there was an animating soul; the struggle between Guelf and Ghibelline was for a long time practically the battle of popular right

I

against Imperial feudalism. The Peace of Constance, in 1183, established for those Italian republics the possession of the rights they fought for; and during another forty years the Guelfs, who were then the Italian

In the liberal and busy sense of individual and social rights.

party, had their way.

But that grandson of Barbarossa, Frederic II., whom we have found inaugurating in Sicily an Italian new birth, main

tained again the Imperial cause in battle against North Italian republicanism. When Dante was born, in 1265, this conflict, not of men only, but of principle, was raging; for Frederic's son, Manfredi, still ruled in Sicily and Naples. During the last five years, since their triumph at the famous battle of Mont Aperti, the Ghibellines had been enjoying sway in Florence; and as the exiled chiefs of the Guelfs did not return till two years after Dante's birth, when Charles of Anjou, crowned by the Pope King of Naples, had overcome Manfredi, we cannot suppose that the respectable, unbanished lawyer, of whose second · wife, Donna Bella, Dante was born, though of good family, held anything like the consideration of a party chief.

.

The Ghibellines who left Florence when, after the arrival of Charles of Anjou, the Guelfs returned, were restored to their homes twelve years afterwards; and already the identification of the Guelfs with a French party was beginning to deprive their cause of its very soul in its connection with Italian nationality. Both parties, after the Ghibellines returned, were again combatant fellow-citizens in Florence, from the time when Dante was a boy of thirteen, left during the last four years, by his father's death, in charge of a most careful mother. After four more years, when the poet was in the first flush of manly youth, the famous Constitution of 1282, representative of the highest point of free political strength attained by the city, was established. The soul of liberty had animated even the licence of many a lawless street conflict. The republican spirit, wild enough in some