years of constant fighting, Frederick Barbarossa consented to a truce in 1177, and to the treaty of Constance in 1183. Folcachiero is asserted to have flourished at that period, and the first line of the following strophe is adduced as conclusive:

"All the whole world is living without war,
And yet I cannot find out any peace.
O God, that this should be!

O God! what does the earth sustain me for?
My life seems made for other lives' ill-ease:
All men look strange to me;

Nor are the wood-flowers now

As once, when up above

The happy birds in love

Made such sweet verses, going from bough to bough."

Allacci,* one of the early collectors of these poets, gave our knight the date of 1200; Tiraboschi thought he was rather later; but the modern Tuscan critics are pleased to set him up as older than Ciullo d' Alcamo, and they make the most of a poetical expression. Surely, when a lover is contrasting his own mental struggles with the tranquillity around him, his "whole world" is very apt to be limited to his native city, even if it be not so important and independent as Sienna. But we must escape from these two rivals, with their one chick apiece. Of the date of St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) there can be no doubt. A hymn, known as the Cantico del Sole, is his most famous poem, if it can be called so; it is unrhymed, and though modern editors have arranged it in a lyrical form, the pauses are not always marked enough to sustain the rhythm. Mr. Rossetti has represented him by two strophes from " a long poem on Divine Love, half ecstatic, half scholastic," and (we may add) not very attractive.

We must now pay a longer visit to Sicily. William the Good+ had been one of the firmest supporters of Pope Alexander III.; but he was cajoled into giving his aunt and heiress, Constance, to Barbarossa's son, whom the English only remember as the Emperor Henry VI., who kept Coeur-de-Lion in prison. About three years after this alliance William the Good died peacefully; whereupon Tancred, a bastard scion of his house, seized the crown.

Constance at the time of her marriage was thirty-one, and she remained barren for nearly nine years. Meanwhile Barbarossa had died on the road to Palestine: his son Henry VI. had established himself in Germany, and carried a cruel war

* Better known, under the name of Leo Allatius, as a librarian at the Vatican, and a writer on the Greek ecclesiastical books: he died in 1669.

† Guelfissimo he is called by Galvani.

into southern Italy; Tancred opposed him manfully, but died in 1194; and Henry summoned Constance to enter Palermo as Queen of Sicily. She was forced to stop at Jesi, near Ancona, and there gave birth to Frederick, the last of the imperial Hohenstaufens. So much depended upon this unexpected event, that she is said to have publicly invited any ladies to be present in the pavilion prepared for her delivery. Thus strangely born, Frederick was as strangely tutored. When he was barely five years old, the deaths of his father and mother left him at once the natural head of the German Ghibelines, and the adopted one of the Italian Guelphs. For the highsouled Pope Innocent III. had accepted his guardianship, and long refused to crown the great Guelph himself, the Bavarian Otho IV. Innocent died soon after this entanglement of parties and war-cries had been simplified by the accession of his ward; Frederick II. immediately showed the instincts of the Ghibeline, and was duly excommunicated by successive popes. His reign is most interesting for a study of the two parties; but we have only to do with his court at Palermo. It was maintained by him and his sons from 1220 to 1265, the year of Dante's birth. It was not only in the glitter of his Saracen cavalry, and his Moorish dancing girls, that Frederick resembled the old Caliphs of Bagdad, but in his eager patronage of poetry and philosophy. Among the learned Moors who visited him were the sons of Averroes, the Aristotelian commentator. He sent Latin translations of Aristotle to Bologna, and to his own new University of Naples. He was not content with merely patronising science. Humboldt asserts that his Latin treatise on birds was in advance of the age, and added greatly to the knowledge of their anatomy. Finally, he not only founded a college of poetry at Palermo, but three of its members were his sons Enzo and Manfred, and himself. For though he spoke Greek, they say, and Latin, as well as German and Provençal, yet the language of his heart was Italian. One of his canzoni is given by Mr. Rossetti, rounded off into a work of modern art: we warn our readers that Frederick was not a Tennyson; on the other hand, the passion and the force of his sentiments and expressions are not ill suited to the ring of the following verses. We like Mr. Rossetti's practice of introducing the pieces; this is headed "Of his Lady in Bondage."

"For grief I am about to sing,

Even as another would for joy;

Mine eyes which the hot tears destroy

Are scarce enough for sorrowing;
To speak of such a grievous thing
Also my tongue I must employ,

Saying, Woe's me, who am full of woes;

Not while I live shall my sighs cease
For her in whom my heart found peace;
I am become like unto those

That cannot sleep for weariness,
Now I have lost my crimson rose.

And yet I will not call her lost;
She is not gone out of the earth;
She is but girded with a girth
Of hate, that clips her in like frost.
Thus says she every hour almost,
'When I was born 'twas an ill birth;
Oh, that I never had been born,
If I am still to fall asleep

Weeping, and when I wake to weep;
If he whom I most loathe and scorn
Is still to have me his, and keep
Smiling about me night and morn.'

Thus grieves she now; but she shall wear
This love of mine, whereof I spoke,
About her body for a cloak,

And for a garland in her hair,

Even yet; because I mean to prove,
Not to speak only, this my love."

Some have exalted the verses of Frederick's Chancellor, Pier delle Vigne, above those of his master; they are more flowing, but not otherwise remarkable. To him, indeed, is attributed the invention of the Italian sonnet in fourteen lines, arranged upon almost the same plan as the modern sonnet; a specimen remains, and Mr. Rossetti would no doubt have translated it, if he had not found it too insipid; still it might have been recommended by its form, and by the interest attached to its author. He was a stanch and most able servant, and his rewards were imprisonment and blindness. He killed himself, and he was therefore condemned by the stern prophet of the "Inferno;" but the real guilt was Frederick's, and it can never be shifted on to the slanderers who misled him. Frederick died two years afterwards, in 1250. A fiery tomb is assigned to him, in the sixth circle, among the unbelievers: but Dante always honoured the memory of his reign as that of a great monarch.

His court is well represented by the Sicilians and Neapolitans in this volume. Some of them have been conjectured to belong to an earlier period. The critical champions of the North and South carry on a sort of game, of which the object is to push their respective pieces further and further back into antiquity. The former expected to win with the Knight of Sienna; but Trucchi met the move with a masterly counter

move.* If the reader will refer to the first line of Folcachiero's, he will find that it is completely answered by a strophe from Rinaldo d' Aquino, beginning, "The emperor maintains the whole world in peace." Now there are half a dozen undated Sicilian poets whose style resembles that of Rinaldo; nothing can be easier than to group them around him, and we have at once an entire school of the Norman days of William the Good. One figure on the list is that of Frederick's adventurous fatherin-law, Jean de Brienne, King of Jerusalem and Constantinople, and other castles in the air; though his native Champagne is not very Sicilian. Trucchi dates his poem about 1178, admitting that he is not known to have set foot in Italy till 1205, when he was forty-seven years old. This funny judgment is due to the usual partiality of a discoverer: for Trucchi swears by a Ms. which he has found in the Vatican library (numbered 3793), written "between 1265 and 1275." He calls it "Libro reale," and "Codice Vaticano dei Trovatori Italiani." He shows that the names of authors have been stupidly shifted about by all other scribes; but he fancies that his own is infallible. The Ms. is undoubtedly valuable; and we sincerely admire the editor's enthusiasm, and we sympathise in his bewilderment as to the identity of " Messer lo re Giovanni.” We agree with him that it is not likely to have been the English John Lackland; but (in default of further proof) we are more inclined to believe that his scribe has made a blunder of some sort, than that Jean de Brienne was an Italian Trovatore in his youth. He lived till 1238, and there has long been a vague tradition that he wrote verses in his old age, but he more likely paid for them. Still, without him, the knight of Sienna is outnumbered: but Trucchi is not yet satisfied. He prints (from a Ms. in a private library) some fragmentary stanzas in nona rima, and ascribes them to a Sicilian, probably about 1150. Unluckily for this last move, the poem exists entire in a fourteenth-century Ms. in the Magliabecchian collection at Florence, and it is now published by Ozanam. It speaks of Saladin (who died in 1193) as a man of the past; and a "somewhat later hand" (says Ozanam) has added the title "La 'ntelligenzia" (Intelligence being the queen of the allegory contained in it), and the name of the author "Dino Chompag. .:" the name is half effaced, but there is every probability of its being that of Dino Compagni, the Florentine chronicler, who died in 1323.+ Our Trucchi will have to find another leader for his Trovatori in his next edition: we trust that it will be a more legitimate substitute. Meanwhile he

*Poesie Italiane inedite. . raccolte.. da Francesco Trucchi. Prato, 1846. For the whole poem, and remarks upon it, see Documents inédits pour servir à l'histoire littéraire de l'Italie, by A. F. Ozanam. Paris, 1850.

marshals them with affectionate pride, and maintains even their originality. If it is pointed out that they borrowed metres and phrases and images from the Troubadours, he challenges Provence itself, averring (chiefly on the authority of real "documents inédits") that the case was precisely the reverse. He will find very few adherents north of the Alps. On the other part, Count G. Galvani is equally decided,* stating that the Sicilians did little more than change the Provençal words,trobar (to poetise) into trovare, chausir (to choose) into ciausire, and so on, and that thus they semi-Italianised the foreign ditties. Friedrich Diez says that they rarely translated a whole poem, he gives an instance of one in his "Poësie des Troubadours," but they adopted hundreds of expressions and similes and isolated passages. The statistics of the German are, as

usual, the most reliable.

Again, various theories have been started as to the original orthography of these compositions. Dante calls his "Vulgare Illustre" a creature whose scent is perceived every where, but its lair nowhere. It has since made itself at home in Tuscany, but it has always been ill at ease in Sicily. When William the Good was young, the magistrates of the island were chiefly Moors, and the court-language was French; and William's bride, Joanna (a sister of our Coeur-de-Lion), came attended by a Norman retinue. But a few years later there suddenly arises a band of poets, and with one accord they adopt an artificial Italian, half-foreign to all classes except a few scholars and merchants, and utterly unsupported by any literature from without. It may well be made a question, whether we possess their works in their original form. A modern writer† justly observes that their chief merit was elegance of style, and that it has been terribly obscured by the ignorance of the scribes. Now, according to Galvani, they have gained more than they have lost in the copying. The principal collections are printed from Mss. written in central Italy. To this circumstance Galvani attributes the greater portion of their so-called illustrious diction. He reprints two pieces which happen to be preserved in Sicilian orthography, and he points with great glee to their ugliness. The first is by Frederick's son Enzo, king of Sardinia, and the second by Stefano, prothonotary of Messina; and they both appear barbarous enough at first sight. But we must remember that these poems were committed to memory and recited; and, supposing them to come second or third hand to two scribes, the one a Sicilian, and the other a Tuscan, the verses would assume See the Essay on the "Dottrine Perticariane," by Count Giovanni Galvani, of Lucca. Milan, 1846.

† Emiliani-Guidici, in his History of Italian Literature.