who crowded the streets and squares of Lombard cities.[15] The exchange of courtesies and refined sentiments between a Tristram and Iseult or a Lancelot and Guinevere must naturally have been less attractive to a rude populace than narratives of battle with the Infidel, and Roland's horn, and Gano's treason, and Rinaldo's quarrels with his liege. In the Arthurian Cycle names and places alike—Avalon, Camelot, Winchester, Gawain, Galahaut—were distant and ill-adapted to Italian ears.[16] The whole tissue of the romance, moreover, was imaginative. The Carolingian Cycle, on the contrary, introduced personages with a good right to be considered historical, and dwelt upon familiar names and traditional ideas. We are not, therefore, surprised to find that this Epic took a strong hold on the popular imagination, and so penetrated the Italian race as to assume a new form on Italian soil, while the Arthurian romance survived as a pastime of the upper classes, and underwent no important metamorphosis at their hands. In the course of this volume, I shall have to show how, when Italian literature emerged again from the people after nearly a century of neglect, it was the transformed tale of Charlemagne and Roland which supplied the Italian nation with its master-works of epic poetry—the Morgante and the two Orlandos.

The Lombard, or rather the Franco-Italian period is marked by the adoption of a foreign language and foreign fashions. Literature at this stage was exotic and artificial; but the legacy transmitted to the future was of vast importance. On the one side, the courtly rhymers who versified in the Provençal dialect, bequeathed to Sicily and Tuscany the chivalrous lyric of love, which was destined to take its final and fairest form from Dante and Petrarch. On the other hand, the populace who listened to the Song of Roland on the market-place, prepared the necessary conditions for a specific and eminently characteristic product of Italian genius. Without a national epic, the Italians were forced to borrow from the French. But what they borrowed, they transmuted—not merely adding new material, like the tale of Gano's treason and the fiction of Orlando's birth at Sutri, but importing their own spirit, positive, ironical and incredulous, into the substance of the legend.

In the course of Italianizing the tale of Roland, the native dialects made their first effort to assume a literary form. We possess sufficient MS. evidence to prove that the Franco-Italian language of the songs recited to the Lombard townsfolk, was composed by the adaptation of local modes of speech to French originals. The process was not one of pure translation. The dialects were not fit for such performance. It may rather be described as the attempt of the dialects to acquire capacity for studied expression. With French poems before them, the popular rhapsodes introduced dialectical phrases, substituted words, and, where this was possible, modified the style in favor of the dialect they wished to use. French still predominated. But the hybrid was of such a nature that a transition from this mixed jargon to the dialect, presented in a literary shape, was imminent.

There is sufficient ground for presuming that the Italian dialects triumphed simultaneously in all parts of the peninsula about the middle of the thirteenth century.[17] This presumption is founded partly on the quotations from dialectical poetry furnished by Dante in the De Eloquio, which prove a wide-spread literary activity; partly on fragments recovered from sources which can be referred to the second half of the century. The peculiar problems offered by the conditions of poetry at Frederick II.'s Court, though these are open to many contradictory solutions, render the presumption more than probable. It is difficult to understand the third or Sicilian period of literature without hypothesizing an antecedent stage of vulgar poetry produced in local dialects. But, owing to the scarcity of documents, no positive facts regarding the date and mode of their emergence can be adduced. We have on this point to deal with matters of delicate conjecture and minute inference; and though it might seem logical to introduce at once a discussion on the growth of the Italian language, and its relation to the dialects which were undoubtedly spoken before they were committed to writing, special reasons induce me to defer this topic for the present.

While the North of Italy was deriving the literature both of its cultivated classes and of the people from France, a new and still more important phase of evolution was preparing in the South. Both Dante and Petrarch recognize the Sicilian poets as the first to cultivate the vulgar tongue with any measure of success, and to raise it to the dignity of a literary language. In this opinion they not only uttered the tradition of their age, but were also without doubt historically correct. Whatever view may be adopted concerning the formation of the lingua illustre, or polished Italian, from the dialectical elements already employed in local kinds of poetry, there is no disputing the importance of the Sicilian epoch. We cannot fix precise dates for its duration. Yet, roughly speaking, it may be said to have begun in 1166, when troubadours of some distinction gathered round the person of the Norman king, William II., at Palermo, and to have ended in 1266, when Manfred was killed at the battle of Benevento. It culminated during the reign of the Emperor Frederick II. (1210-1250), who was himself skilled in Latin and the vulgar tongues of France and Italy, and who drew to his court men distinguished for their abilities in science and literature. Dante called Frederick, Cherico grande. The author of the Cento Novelle described him as veramente specchio del mondo in parlare et in costumi, and spoke of his capital as the resort of la gente ch'avea bontade ... sonatori, trovatori, e belli favellatori, uomini d'arti, giostratori, schermitori, d'ogni maniera gente.[18] The portrait drawn of him by Salimbene in his contemporary Chronicle, though highly unfavorable to the schismatic enemy of Holy Church, proves that his repute was great in Italy as a patron of letters and himself a poet of no mean pretensions.[19]

It is impossible in these pages to inquire into the views of this great ruler for the resuscitation of culture in Italy, which, had he not been thwarted in his policy by the Church, might have anticipated the Renaissance by two centuries. Yet the opinion may be hazarded that the cultivation of Italian as a literary language was due in no small measure to the forethought and deliberate intention of an Emperor, who preferred his southern to his northern provinces. Unlike the Lombard nobles, Frederick, while adopting Provençal literature, gave it Italian utterance. This seems to