From the Critic.

THE RETURN.

From Fraser's Magazine.

HISTORY OF ITALIAN

While such was the progress of the human mind in the East, a struggle was taking place in the West of an opposite character. There anathemas were being ceaselessly pronounced against the old classical systems of philosophy, Christianity and Paganism being considered as such completely antagonistic forces that a compromise between them was looked upon as simply absurd and impossible. Accordingly when Christianity at last gained the victory, she trampled her vanquished enemy under foot, and in the fury of her iconoclastic zeal defaced every heathen temple, and dashed in pieces every monument of pagan worship.

tem of doctrine. Now began the golden | and eleventh centuries as the period durage of ecclesiastical literature, properly ing which the intellect was employed in so called a literature from which the gathering up the fragments of anterior muse of Poetry turned away her head in systems, and moulding them into the aversion, having yet to learn how to at- form which they were thenceforth to tune her spirit to the reception of ideas maintain. This social synthesis was comutterly foreign to those from which she pleted by Pope Gregory VII., under had hitherto been accustomed to draw whose pontificate began the struggle beinspiration. tween the powers of Church and State which has been going on ever since. With this period also begins the true history of Italian literature, which in its origin is closely connected with the growing energy manifested in the study of theology and of the speculative sciences. But although a general impulse was given at this era to the human mind, the sole literature of the people consisted in nothing beyond a stock of wonderful legends and childish myths. The spirit of chivalry was, however, gradually extending the domain of poetry, on which the influence exerted by the Provençals and the Saracens was much smaller than is generally supposed. The Italian language had been Years passed on, and with their pro- meantime undergoing a process of disorgress rapidly increased the influence ex-ganization and reconstruction, the result ercised by the clergy. In secluded retreats and amidst the solemn repose of the monastery, companies of pious and learned men guarded the lamp of human knowledge, whose light was destined thenceforth never to be extinguished. In those sanctuaries of literature, as well as of religion, the monks were obliged, by the rules of their order, to spend a portion of every day in the copying of manuscripts, and thus innumerable inestimable works were preserved and transmitted to posterity.

The era had now arrived in which Signor Giudici conceives that the Italian language had its origin. As regards the question which has been often raised, why its creation was so long retarded, it may be answered that the Latin language never having become entirely extinct, the Italian was thereby hindered from freely developing itself; the autonomous nature of the various Italian States being of itself antagonistic to the speedy formation of a national language. Signor Giudici wisely desists from any attempt to determine the precise period when the new epoch commenced, and contents himself with assigning the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries as the time when the destruction of the ancient order of things was being consummated, and the ninth, tenth,

of which was shown in a "cantilena" written by Ciullo, a native of Alcamo, a city about thirty miles distant from Palermo. This poem appeared in the reign of Frederick II., of whom Dante, in his treatise, "Della Volgare Eloquenza," speaks in terms of the highest commendation, as also of his son Manfredo, who was, equally with his father, a patron of letters. "On account of their seats of government being in Sicily," says Dante, "every thing which was composed by our predecessors at that time was styled Sicilian." Petrarch, in his "Familiar Epistles," also states that the art of versifying-or, more properly speaking, of writing poetry in the vulgar tongue-had its birth among the Sicilians, and in a very short time spread over the whole of Italy.

In accounting for the phenomenon of Sicily being the birthplace of the Italian language, Signor Giudici observes that from the time of the conquest of the island by the Greeks, a great number of the aborigines, who derived from the same parentage as the people of Latium, had continued to inhabit it. Moreover, it is well known that even after the Saracens had taken possession of Sicily, a dialect was in existence among the people which was neither Greek, Saracenic, nor Latin. The Latin element, however, gradually

diffused itself over the island; and when | Cino da Pistoia, who perhaps, of all the the Normans conquered it they found the writers of that period, was least addicted inhabitants speaking a dialect so nearly to make poetry a vehicle for syllogisms; akin to their own, that instead of impos- and while his compositions have a slight ing their language upon the vanquished odor of Platonism about them, they are people, they adopted the Sicilian dialect, not trammeled by the scientific forms to which being thus made use of by the higher which his predecessors, and even Guido classes, received a fresh impulse at the Cavalcanti, had considered it necessary to hands of the troubadours, who sang their adhere. love-ditties in the dialect of the country. And in this way, and without any presentiment of the future destinies of the language, Italian poetry had its existence, but it was not until the reign of Frederick II. that the vulgar tongue possessed a grammar of its own. Before his time the dialects of Italy had consisted of a great mass, various as to its parts, but homogeneous as to its substance; and circumstances having moulded the Sicilian dialect into a form which harmonized with the general mass of dialects, it was embraced by all the Italian people, and received its complete development at the hands of the Tuscans.

Among the most noted of the early Italian poets is Guido Guinicelli of Bologna, who taught poetry to assume new forms, and to adorn herself with more varied and richer colors. While Ciullo d'Alcamo and his successors had sung only of the pleasures and torments of love, its doubts and certainties, its hopes and fears, Guinicelli introduced the historic element into his treatment of the passion, and widened the field in which poetry had loved to expatiate. To Guinicelli succeeded Guido Cavalcanti, whose birthplace was Florence, then, as still, a fitting and beautiful home for a poet. Cavalcanti was a scion of one of the noblest and wealthiest of the Florentine families, and inherited his love of letters from his father, who had written a commentary on the Epicurean philosophy. All his contemporaries speak of the youthful Guido in a strain of the greatest enthusiasm, as one of the most accomplished cavaliers of his day. Of noble manners, dignified deportment, and energetic, earnest speech, he was also an acute and ingenious philosopher. Majestic in stature, handsome in feature, ardent in his affections, and endowed with a brilliant imagination, he loved to sing of love in passionate strains which captivated the souls of all who read or listened to his voice, and caused him to be regarded as the prince of Erotic poetry. Amongst his contemporaries was

Hitherto it had been the practice of Italian poets to make love their only subject, but now that the general intellect was being gradually emancipated, and the light of knowledge burning ever brighter, they set themselves other aims, and extended the range of their subjects. As on the extinction of Pagan literature the doctrines of Christianity had been promulgated under the form of visions, in which virtue was held up as an object of admiration, and vice of abhorrence-so now, when the enlightened intellect demanded that the religious element should be introduced into poetry, the poets of the time availed themselves of a form which had already become familiar to the minds of the people. Among those who after this fashion introduced religious doctrines and sentiments into their compositions, Brunetto Latini is the most distinguished; some have even thought that it was to his poem of the Tesoretto that Dante was indebted for the idea of the Commediaan opinion for which there is, however, no foundation. Another of the writers who flourished at that time was a certain Fra Jacopone da Podi, who seems to have been little else than a madman, and with whom the religious sentiment had become a kind of monomania. It appears that he was blessed with a wife not less lovely than pure and holy in life. On the occasion of some high festivity, it chanced that she was standing upon a platform which suddenly gave way and precipitated her to the ground. In a few hours afterwards she breathed her last. When her disconsolate husband was removing her raiment, which was saturated with blood, he discovered that she had been accustomed to torture her delicate limbs by wearing a hair shirt. The unexpected sight deprived him of reason. Instantly he burnt his books, girded himself with the coarse garments of a Franciscan monk, and made it his whole aim to provoke the scorn and anger of the world. To place the things of this life in a contemptible point of view became the great object of

his thoughts; madness, and the power of
expressing his fancies in verse, visited
him at one and the same moment; and
while in his lucid intervals he wrote verses
touching in their melancholy and heart-
felt sincerity, he would at other times
pour forth such wild effusions as the fol-
lowing:

"Oh Signor, per cortesia
Mandami la malsania;
A me la febbre quartana,
La continua, e la terzana,
La doglia cotidiana,
Colle grande idropisia.
A me venga mal di dente,
Mal di capo e mal di ventre,
Allo stomaco dolor pungente,
In canna la squinanzia,
Mal di occhi, e doglia di fianco
La postema la lato manco,

Ed ogni tempo la frenesia."

A more original composition was certainly never penned; but it is a comfort to think that some of the diseases for which the pious brother prays are so antagonistic in character that they could not have afflicted the patient simultaneously. In his own time, Fra Jacopone does not appear to have been considered enough of a madman to be irresponsible; for on the occasion of his writing a poetical satire on Boniface VIII., and addressing an epistle to him in which he presumed to reprove the Pope, he was thrown into prison, where he languished until Boniface was himself made prisoner. There have been writers senseless enough to assert that Tasso was indebted to Fra Jacopone for many of the most beautiful passages in his Gierusalemme, and that even Dante himself drew inspiration from the same source! "May God pardon such calumniators!" exclaims Signor Giudici-" at any rate, those amongst them who are least to blame; and may he shed light upon their darkened intellects, and make them ashamed of the crime which they have committed against our great poets."

As yet our attention has been occupied with those who first made the Italian language a vehicle for poetry; who it was that first wrote Italian prose it would be difficult to say. A collection of stories has, however, come down to us which may safely be assigned to the reign of Frederick II.; but the first Italian prose writer of any note is Ricordano Malespini, a native of Florence, and author of a history of that republic. A more distin

guished name than his is that of Dino Compagni, who also wrote a history of Florence, beginning the narration where Malespini had concluded his, and carrying it down to the year 1312. Of him Signor Giudici thus writes:

"Descended from one of the most distinguished families of Florence, Dino had been appointed in his earliest youth to the highest offices in the State. Self-reliant and composed in manner, a finished, profound, earnest, and impetuous speaker, he exercised such an influence over the minds of his fellow-citizens, that in the most important crises of the affairs of the republic they were constantly guided by his advice. Notwithstanding, however, the intrepidity of his character, his courage, prudence, and longanimity, and the energy with which he was accustomed to defend a good cause when others had abandoned it in despair, he was of opinion that it would be impossible for him to put an end to the dissensions which agitated Florence, and there were times when his beloved and beautiful city seemed to him like a very hell.

Living in and for the place of his nativity, it may be that he did not feel any desire to pierce the mists which hid the future from him, and to delight himself in the noble idea of an Italy one and undivided; a sublime illusion, which if it had become general might have been transformed into a reality, and decided the fate of the nation. For Dino, Florence was the unidressed himself to the affairs of the republic verse; the profound interest with which he adconcentrated in a single focus all the affections of his heart. Who can tell whether a difference in political opinions may not have led him to make little account of Dante who had preceded him in the Priorate? Whatever may be the reason, certain it is that he scarcely names him. There is no one among his contemporaries, however, who has painted the state of Florence so graphically as Dino, or whose pictures harmonize so entirely with those drawn by Dante himself. In both there is the same zeal, the same fire, the same generous desire to further the welfare of their country, the same noble disdain of all dissensions, and though the necessities of the times forced them to side with a party, they doers, of whatever sect they might be.” were both inspired with the same horror of evil

Given a man of Dino's character and intellect, it will not be difficult to form some idea of the kind of historian he would make; working from the life, as it were, he proceeds, with rapid, firm, and bold touches, to paint the picture of his times; and his volumes, severely historical though they be in their style, exercise upon all who read them, says Signor Giudici, so great an influence, and so enchain the attention, that after having once