Those Lombard schools, of which mention has already been made, did indeed maintain the traditions of decadent classical education more alive than among the peoples of the North. Better Latin, and particularly more fluent Latin verse, was written during the dark ages in Italy than elsewhere.[6] Still it does not appear that the whole credit of medieval Latin hymnology, and of its curious counterpart, the songs of the wandering students, should be attributed to the Italians. While we can refer the Dies Iræ, Lauda Sion, Pange Lingua and Stabat Mater with tolerable certainty to Italian poets; while there is abundant internal evidence to prove that some of the best Carmina Burana were composed in Italy and under Italian influences; yet Paris, the focus of theological and ecclesiastical learning, as Bologna was the center of legal studies, must be regarded as the headquarters of that literary movement which gave the rhyming hexameters of Bernard of Morlas and the lyrics of the Goliardi to Europe.[7] It seems clear that we cannot ascribe to the Italians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries any superiority in the use of Latin over the school of France. Their previous vantage-ground had been lost in the political distractions of their country. At the same time, they were the first jurists and the hardiest, if not the most philosophical, freethinkers of Europe.

This is a point which demands at least a passing notice. Their practical studies, and the example of an emperor at war with Christendom, helped to form a sect of epicureans in Italy, for whom nothing sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority was sacred. To these pioneers of modern incredulity Dante assigned not the least striking Cantos of the Inferno. Their appearance in the thirteenth century, during the ascendancy of Latin culture, before the people had acquired a language, is one of the first manifestations of a national bias toward positive modes of thought and feeling, which we recognize alike in Boccaccio and Ariosto, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Pomponazzi and the speculators of the South Italian School. It was the quality, in fact, which fitted the Italians for their work in the Renaissance. As metaphysicians, in the stricter sense of that word, they have been surpassed by Northern races. Their religious sense has never been so vivid, nor their opposition to established creeds so earnest. But throughout modern history their great men have manifested a practical and negative good sense, worldly in its moral tone, impervious to pietistic influences, antagonistic to mysticism, contented with concrete reality, which has distinguished them from the more fervent, boyish, sanguine, and imaginative enthusiasts of Northern Europe. We are tempted to speculate whether, as they were the heirs of ancient civility and grew up among the ruins of Roman greatness so they were born spiritually old and disillusioned.

Another point which distinguished the Italians in this Latin period of their literature, was the absence of the legendary or myth-making faculty. It is not merely that they formed no epic, and gave birth to no great Saga; but they accepted the fabulous matter, transmitted to them from other nations, in a prosaic and positive spirit. This does not imply that they exercised a critical faculty, or passed judgment on the products of the medieval fancy. On the contrary, they took legend for fact, and treated it as the material of history. Hector, Alexander, and Attila were stripped of their romantic environments, and presented in the cold prose of a digest, as persons whose acts could be sententiously narrated. This attitude of the Italians toward the Saga is by no means insignificant. When their poets came to treat Arthurian or Carolingian fables in the epics of Orlando, they apprehended them in the same positive spirit, adding elements of irony and satire.

For the rest, the Italians shared with other nations the common stock of medieval literature—Chronicles, Encyclopædias, Epitomes, Moralizations, Histories in verse, Rhetorical Summaries, and prose abstracts of Universal History—the meager débris and detritus of the huge moraines carried down by extinct classic glaciers. It is not needful to dwell upon this aspect of the national culture, since it presents no specific features. What is most to our purpose, is to note the affectionate remembrance of Rome and Roman worthies, which endured in each great town. The people, as distinguished from the feudal nobility, were and ever felt themselves to be the heirs of the old Roman population. Therefore the soldiers on guard against the Huns at Modena in 924, sang in their barbarous Latin verse of Hector and the Capitol[8]:

The Tuscan women told tales of Troy and Catiline and Julius Cæsar[9]:

A rhyming chronicler of Pisa compared the battles of the burghers against the Saracens with the Punic wars. The tomb of Virgil at Naples was an object for pilgrimage, and one of the few spots round which a group of local legends clustered. The memory of Livy added luster to Padua, and Mussato boasted that her walls, like those of Troy, her mother-city, were sacrosanct. The memory of the Plinies ennobled Como, that of Ovid gave glory to Sulmona, that of Tully to Arpino. Florence clung to the mutilated statue of Mars upon her bridge with almost superstitious reverence, as proof of Roman origin; while Siena adopted for her ensign the she-wolf and the Roman twins. Pagan customs survived, and were jealously maintained in the central and southern provinces; and the name of the Republic sufficed to stir Arnold's revolution in Rome, long before the days of Rienzi. To the mighty German potentate, King Frederick Barbarossa, attended with his Northern chivalry, a handful of Romans dared to say: "Thou wast a stranger; I, the City, gave thee civic rights. Thou camest from transalpine regions; I have conferred on thee the principality."[10] It would be easy to multiply these instances. Enough, however, has been said to show that through the gloom of medieval history, before humanism had begun to dawn, and while the other nations were creating legends and popular epics, Italy maintained a dim but tenacious sense of her Roman past. This consciousness has here to be insisted on, not merely because it stood in