and Salmasius, Grotius and Puffendorff, are denounced by the Papal Index, as it might naturally have been expected they would be. Nor can we be surprised that it should bar all access to the teaching of religious reformers in every successive age, -of the Protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century, the Puritan Reformers in the seventeenth, the Rational Reformers of the eighteenth, and Practical Reformers of the nineteenth.

These are equally abominable to the Index, which was contrived by the Jesuits and recommended by the Council of Trent as a barrier to dam out the flood of enlightenment threatening the rotten Papacy with ruin. So the Index operates in its appointed way, damning high and low, good and bad, the ribald and the reverend, including the works of clerical authors in either kind, alike the story of Pantagruel by the jolly curate of Meudon, and Maxims on the Inner Life of the Saints, by the saintly Archbishop of Cambray. We have turned over its pages with some amusement, admiring the picturesque variety of all this literary forbidden fruit. Every thing readable, whatever be its moral tone, its style or purport, is equally withheld as unwholesome food, if it be leavened with any ideas of the present age, or with the spirit of intellectual liberty. Recent decrees involve in a sweeping proscription books of the most opposite character, and belonging to the most widely-different class of compositions, such as Mr. Maurice's Theological Essays on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Balzac's most cynical dissections of the social depravities of Parisian life. The exhibition of these strange contrasts might be multiplied without end, by hap-hazard selection, or by enumerating together the works comprised in a single decree. Enough examples have been cited, however, to show the omnivorous appetite of denunciation with which this ogre of Catholic booksellers and readers (if in these days the Catholic laity could be held to the observance of their Church's law) craves to eat up the literature of the world. There is one little book the existence of which is only known to us from the Index, but for whose preservation we would fain intercede. It is modelled in the form of a Pontifical Bull, and its title is thus set forth: "Bullus Diaboli, qui Papam admonet." Would it be too much to ask the Index at least to spare us this? What fault can the Prince and Pope of Darkness have to find with the obscurantist procedure of his Romish vicegerent? We are curious to know why the nether powers should be dissatisfied with that system, of which the Index is a part, which tends to the consummation sublimely described by our own Pope, Alexander, as the apotheosis of bigoted stupidity. "Lo, thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored, Light dies before thy uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall,-
And Papal prohibition darkens all.”

ART. IV. THE GROWTH OF THE EARLY ITALIAN

POETRY.

The Early Italian Poets, from Ciullo d'Alcamo to Dante Alighieri (1100, 1200, 1300), in the original metres, together with Dante's Vita Nuova. Translated by D. G. Rossetti. Part I. "Poets chiefly before Dante." Part II. "Dante and his Circle." London: Smith and Elder, 1862.

THE literary language of Italy is popularly supposed to be a purified form of the Tuscan dialect, established by the prëeminence of Dante and his successors. We have Dante's own word for it that the latter part of the supposition is erroneous, and that he adopted a language which was already recognised. His great poem, indeed, being principally written (as the name of Commedia indicates) in a middle and more colloquial style, it contains many idiomatic words, which are pronounced by him to be unfit for the tragic or highest style; and the astonishing (we may say scriptural) power attained by it must have given a certain Tuscan flavour to the whole Italian literature. But at present we have only to deal with his lyrical poems: they are not much more antiquated than the sonnets of Shakespeare, and yet they substantially resemble many earlier poems, for instance, those of Guinicelli of Bologna, who died when Dante was ten years old. Of course sounds and words were constantly changing, and continued to change for generations after Dante; but it may be said, that on the whole the language was complete in structure and rich in its vocabulary, and skilfully employed by several fine poets, before there was one of any note in Tuscany. The subject has an antiquarian interest, which cannot be met by the best translations; and accordingly Mr. Rossetti must be content to wait till we have borrowed a few pages from the critical historians.

The earliest philological treatise upon a modern language is by Dante himself. It forms the first of his two Latin books, entitled "De Vulgari Eloquio." It has been partially quoted by Cary and others, but never (we believe) fully translated into any languages but Italian and German. Apart from its characteristic oddities and occasional eloquence, it is worth examining, as the subject of many a literary faction-fight. It was sure to be attacked by the doubters, for they have questioned every thing connected with Dante, from the personality of his Beatrice to the authorship of his Commedia. They accused Trissino of forging the treatise, because he had published his Italian translation of it separately in 1529; but more copies than one of the Latin text have been lately discovered in Mss. of the *We believe that only Père Hardouin has gone quite so far; he averred that it was written by a follower of Wickliff about 1412.

fourteenth century, and these all ascribe the work to Dante. It is Dante, then, who, using a dead language for his lecture, in deference to school authorities, commences with asserting it to be less noble than the living Vulgar Tongue. He enters upon the origin of language, and the first utterance of it. Our readers may remember how the same question was debated in the days of Psammitichus,-how they brought up two children in a goatstall, and found them to bleat nothing but "bek," and decided it to be pure Phrygian for bread. The tale is told with simple gravity by Herodotus. Dante is grander and more magisterial. He does not doubt but what Eli was the first word spoken: for though in later days every exordium is wont to begin with alas, yet God must have been the first word in the joyful days of Paradise; and God was pleased so to tune the voice of Adam that he should call upon him by the name of Eli. In the 8th chapter Dante turns to modern Europe, and (leaving the Greeks apart) divides it into north and south, the nations of the first using Jo for an affirmative, and those of the second, Oil, or Oc, or Si. Thus the southern idiom is now (he says) triform, though its sages often approach one another in expressions, especially those of love. The language of Oil may boast that its flexible grace has made foreign inventions its own-such as the Bible, the records of the Trojans and the Romans, and the fair fables of King Arthur; on the other hand, the language of Oc may affirm that its native orators were the first to speak in verse; the third claim is made by Italy, because the softest and subtlest poems have been produced by her children and servants, such as Cino da Pistoia and his friend [Dante himself]; and yet more because their language comes nearest to the old grammatical one, which is the common foundation of them all. He now proceeds to divide Italy itself: he says that there are fourteen dialects in it, and these again are subdivided,-as in Tuscany, into those of Sienna and Arezzo, &c., in Lombardy into those of Ferrara and Piacenza, &c.; two varieties are found in Bologna alone; and thus more than a thousand may be easily reckoned up. The images used by Dante are not always in accordance with our modern taste. Thus he compares himself to a hunter following up the track of a noble creature called the "Vulgare Illustre;" in other words, his object is to search for the birthplace of the classical Italian. On setting out he clears a path through the thorns and fallen trees-such as the dialects of Rome and Ancona, of Milan and Bergamo, &c. His objections apply to faults, not so much of grammar and composition, as of pronunciation. Of the Genoese he says, that if they lost the letter z, they would be left without any speech; of the Romagnols, that their words are so soft as to unman the speaker: this effeminacy he especially notes at Forli, for there the inhabitants use

Deusci for an oath, and for blandishment say oclo meo, and corada mea. The other extreme prevails at Verona, Padua, &c., where the words are too rugged for any feminine mouth; and their alliances have barbarised their neighbours, even south of the Po, so that they are stiff in the use of the courtly tongue; and hence (how strange the conclusion sounds now!) there are no poets in Ferrara and Modena. The two extremes (continues Dante) are modulated in the Bolognese more harmoniously than in any other dialect. Now, in later days, the Bolognese has been made a by-word of provincialism. No wonder, then, that the Florentine doctors were loud against the author of this treatise, -even if he had not added to his sins by directly rebuking the Tuscans for writing in their own dialect, and fancying it to be the "Vulgare Illustre ;" and this folly of the common herd, he says, has been shared by such men as Guittone of Arezzo, Bonaggiunta of Lucca, and Brunetto Latini of Florence. No wonder then, considering how shrewish are the tongues of doctors, that they denounced Dante (if indeed it were he who wrote the treatise) as a renegade, spiteful against his country with all the rancour of a defeated partisan. They most bitterly ridiculed the notion of Italian poetry's being called Sicilian. But here their patriotism was over-jealous. We will quote the offending passage, and then take leave of our proto-philologist. He says (in the 12th chapter) that, having thrown away the chaff, he will test what remains in the sieve, and begin with the Sicilian: "It appears that the Sicilian dialect takes credit to itself because the name of Sicilian is given to all Italian poems, and because many sages of the land have sung very worthily,as in those canzoni [by Guido delle Colonne], Ancor che l'aigua per lo foco lassi, and Amor, che longiamente m' hai menato. But if we examine the gist of the matter, we shall see that this fame of Sicily has only endured to the shame of the Italian princes, who have not cherished an heroic but a vulgar pride. Of a truth, those illustrious heroes, Frederick Cæsar and his well-begotten Manfred, displayed the nobility and uprightness of their nature as long as fortune suffered them, and they preferred the pursuits of men to those of beasts; wherefore the noble in heart and heirs of the graces were drawn around the majesty of such great princes. And thus it happened that from their courts issued all the works of the choicer spirits of the age. And their royal seat being Sicily, the Italian productions of our predecessors are all called Sicilian: we retain the name, and our successors will never change it." Dante, it will be perceived, was unconscious of his own greatness, and he could not foresee that he would be so quickly followed by men like Petrarch and Boccaccio. It was not till their time that Tuscany began to have her rights acknowledged. We now believe that, in the main,

her claims were just; and that, when intercourse between educated men was gradually forming a language superior to their native idioms, her own contributions outweighed all the rest put together; and that thus the written Italian became a standard for even her colloquial idiom, which was not the case elsewhere; but her advocates ought not to forget how, during the long period of formation, the University of Bologna for centuries, and the court of Sicily for one brilliant interval, were the chief places of intercourse, the schools of a metropolitan civilisation. After all, Dante says little or nothing more: his object was to subordinate every dialect to the one Vulgare Illustre, or (as he afterwards calls it) cardinale, aulicum, et curiale,-cardinal, courtly, and palatial,—or finally vulgare Latinum, that is, Italian.

The germs of this new Latin may be traced even below the classic soil. We are hardly speaking hyperbolically, for the critics all agree that in the oldest Latin there are already the traces of an elementary change, which was checked by the authority of great writers, but which ultimately resulted in the creation of Italian. We allude to the partial use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs in connection with certain cases and tenses, instead of inflections alone being relied upon. Unfortunately, Raynouard, the great founder of Romance philology, has let his theory run away with him. By the Romans any provincial dialect was called "lingua rustica," but Raynouard holds that they were speaking of one distinct language, coeval with the Latin, a "primitive Romance," virtually the same as the Provençal. His Italian adjutant, Perticari, puts forward very similar views, calling Latin the grandmother and Provençal the mother of Italian, French, and Spanish. More sober judges, of the schools of Fauriel and Diez, reject Raynouard's theory, but they also reject the more obvious one, that the new languages may have been constructed under Germanic influence. We cannot pursue their arguments, but their conclusions amount to this: the main structure of the Romance languages is of native origin and natural growth;-one notable instance may be given of their departing from the Latin structure without approaching the German: the future is formed by prefixing the infinitive to the verb have; thus, I will sing is in French chanter-ai, Prov. chantar-ai, Span. cantar-é, Port. cantar-ei, and Ital. canter-ò, and in the old Italian it was canter-aggio, as long as aggio was used instead of ho. The popular inclination to employ auxiliaries and to drop the terminal distinctions is strongly attested by the inscriptions in the Catacombs, many of them prior to the Gothic invasions; and these, we may mention, contain many such Italian forms as salbo for salvus, fece

F