opinion would have been reversed: if it is remembered that, as an Italian, he was accustomed to reckon on double rhymes, it will be seen that his hendecasyllable is the same as the English heroic verse, and that he is describing pure iambics. These iambics have always been varied in the usual way. Taking the poem of Folcachiero as a specimen of the early canzone, we find the first line to consist of a trochee, four iambs, and a syllable left, thus: "Tutto lo mōndo vivě sānză guerra." This heroic measure, so generally adopted, except in Parisian France, was a Provençal invention; hence Dante, in his illustrative quotations, invariably gives the place of honour to the Troubadours.-But that name recalls us to our Trovatori. We must leave the further remarks upon metrical arrangement till we come to the Florentine school. 66 The Sicilians soon found imitators in central Italy; and they too affected the court poetry. Every one of them declares in turn that the high worth of his lady has turned him from a wild-beast to a man, and shed some light upon his own unworthiness, and that simple permission to do her service is its own guerdon; or he reminds her that nothing but the lance that dealt the wound can heal it; or that fealty is only secure under a gracious signiory. Tristram and Iseult are still the model pair. One of their favourite figures is contained in a line by Inghilfredi Siciliano, "The fruit commends the flower in God's good time." This is fine and concise; but it was continually repeated in every shape and size for twenty or thirty years. Some of the images appear strange to us now: we should not think well of a man if he were to sing that his mistress had the smell of a panther, and that he loved her like an assassin. No wonder that the French taste of Ginguené recoiled at such similes: he bethought himself (in a note) of the Old Man of the Mountain to account for the assassin; but he was comically puzzled about the panther.* Yet the many Bestiaria of the Middle Ages, or (still more to the purpose) the Tesoro of Brunetto Latini, ought to have enlightened him. There he would have found that such a sweet odour exhales from the mouth of the panther, that all beasts, except the dragon, are attracted to pay her homage. Mr. Rossetti seems in this case to have resembled the dragon: he has avoided all the poems, and they are legion, that smell of the panther. He has not been so shocked by some of the other stock images, such as the stag, who renews his youth by eating a snake, and so on; as for the pelican and the more classical phoenix, they are in vogue to this day. All these figures were common to the Italian and Provençal schools, See Histoire Littéraire d'Italie, par P. L. Ginguené, tom. i. pp. 402, 431. Paris, 1811. G and individual merit was only shown by a happy arrangement of them: even this was not always as new as it should be. Mr. Rossetti has culled his specimens very judiciously; most of them are interesting, some are beautiful poems. No one will hesitate to apply the latter designation to the Canzone of Giacomino of Pugliese, on "his dead Lady;" but it stands apart, and we have only to deal with the characteristics of the school. We cannot class them high, and they were moreover artificial. The Italian poets were not so much men of the castle as of the university. Some caught the spirit of the Troubadours; the Notary of Lentino is a pleasant instance: but when the native strains of Italy began, they were in a higher mood. Two more names may first be mentioned, both Tuscan,-Fra Guittone of Arezzo, and Bonaggiunta Urbiciani of Lucca. Guittone joined the military order of the Frati Gaudenti, about 1261, on its first establishment by Pope Urban IV. for the protection of the poor and the furtherance of good government. In pursuance of these duties, Guittone addressed a series of remonstrances to heads of parties and town councils; and this collection is the first important monument of Italian prose. They are thirty-two in number; the twelfth is addressed to Florence, about 1266-7, when the Guelphs had got the upper hand, and the city seemed to the Ghibeline writer to be given up to disorder and depravity. His poems are not generally remarkable; but a batch of his sonnets has been fought over by the critics, the one side glorying in their early Tuscan purity, and the other denouncing them as cinque-cento fabrications. In spite of his contemporary fame, the language and style of his verses are said by Dante (in his Treatise) to be never more than commonplace. Bonaggiunta da Lucca is valuable as a boundarymark between the styles. In the "Purgatorio" (c. xxiv.) he says to Dante, "Do I behold the man who hath put forth the new rhymes, beginning, 'Ye ladies, who have cognisance of love' ?" Then Dante replies, "When love inspires, I note; and even as he dictates within, so I make utterance." brother" (he said), "now I see the knot that held the Notary, and Guittone, and myself, back from the sweet new style which I hear." This was the passage, of course, which we had in mind when treating of Jacopo da Lentino. It is clear that Dante is here contrasting the feigned love of the three minstrels with his own real passion for Beatrice, the passion that inspired his first and favourite canzone:* love was the theme of all four, "Oh, "Donne ch'avete intelletto d' amore." He quotes it twice in his Treatise (lib. ii. cap. 8 and 12) as an earnest strain, and as one composed entirely of hendecasyllables. but only sung worthily by one; the point is lost to the commentators, who deny the reality of Dante's passion, or else they must be prepared to assert, with the late Professor Rossetti, that all the medieval love-poems of Italy are symbolical. There was indeed a change taking place, not of matter, but of style; it is recognised by Bonaggiunta, in a sonnet to Guinicelli, beginning, "You have changed the manner of the pleasant ditties of love; you surpass every man in subtlety, but there is none who may well expound it." To Guido Guinicelli, then, is due the prelude to the "sweet new style," the genuine poetry of Italy. Little is known of him except that he and all his family were Ghibelines, that he was banished from his native Bologna in 1274, and died two years after, in the prime of life. It must have been about 1260 that he began to practise law in Bologna. Frederick II. had then been for ten years lying in the cathedral of Palermo; his "well-born" son Manfred was keeping court in even more voluptuous splendour, and the court-poets were still basking in it. In this year (1260) Florence was reentered by the Ghibelines, and narrowly escaped utter destruction. Among the Guelphs who were banished was Dante's father, Alighiero. Manfred's party was dominant in nearly all Italy. But five years later, Charles of Anjou, invited from Provence by the Pope, mustered his forces at Rome. Manfred met him (26th Feb. 1266) at Benevento, and fell sword in hand. He was excommunicated; but the star of Constance shed light on her grandson's memory, and his own knightly bearing has been immortalised by Dante (Purg. iii.). And now, under a Provençal sovereign, the echoes of Provençal poetry quickly died away. The Troubadours hated Charles, though he pretended to be one of them; and the Trovatori do not seem to have liked him much better: he was not only a cruel bigot, but a niggard, and what can be worse in a king of court-poets? The period of the Trovatori coincides with that of the Swabian Court at Palermo, from 1220 to 1265, though a few of them sang for some twenty years longer; and, though poetry might still go by the name of Sicilian, it was in fact already Tuscan. Bologna contributed but little to it; her ten thousand students, intent upon law, medicine, and philosophy, sought their honours in the old language, and their homes were in all parts of Italy. Only one of her citizens is remembered as a great poet, and she banished him. Guinicelli (says Emiliani-Giudici) wedded the spirits of chivalry and platonism. Figures of speech are dangerous; and if his poetry was the offspring of such a union, it was sometimes surprisingly passionate. Let us read his sonnet "concerning Lucy:" "When Lucy draws her mantle round her face, That hence unto the hills there lives not he That holds high rule in France or Germany: The lids of her two eyes, which are two flames. Where some man's patient love abides its growth." We may be told, perhaps, that Lucy was the Santa Lucia who dwelt with the sainted Beatrice: if so, she would surely have saved her adorer from the purgatory, where Dante met him among the amorous penitents (c. xxvi.). Dante did not know the shade; but when it said, "I am Guido Guinicelli," he stood speechless for a while; for "I heard" (he says) "that man name himself, who was the father of me and of my better fellows, whoever have used the sweet and graceful rhymes of love." He addressed Guido, saying, "Your sweet ditties will endear their very ink as long as the modern speech remains." Guido replied that the praise was more merited by another, and pointed to the shade of Arnaud Daniel. These men had been guilty of the usual failings of the love-poets, and they were doomed to plunge into "the fire that makes them pure." Dante's love was similar in kind, though it was far nobler in quality, and had long become idealised by bereavement. "Guido the Supreme"* has been sadly robbed by Time; but there still remains one canzone which his great disciple is never tired of quoting and imitating. It begins "Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore:" this and other lines of the first strophe are dwelt upon by Dante with delight. Again, in the episode of Francesca di Rimini, when he wrote the words, " Amor' ch' al cor gentil ratto s' apprende," he almost repeated the first line of Guinicelli's second strophe,-" Foco d' amore in gentil cor s'apprende." The sympathy between the star and the gem, alluded to in the strophe, was correct enough in the thirteenth century. We are sure that our readers will long remember something of our extracts from this canzone, "Of the gentle Heart:" "Within the gentle heart Love shelters him, As birds within the green shade of the grove. * * "Maximus Guido." De Vulg. El. i. 15. In the fifth strophe he attributes divine influence to his lady; but, in a more serious and critical mood than that of the Troubadours, he concludes thus: "My lady, God shall ask, 'What daredst thou?' (When my soul stands with all her acts reviewed ;) To me doth praise belong, And to the Queen of all the realm of grace Who endeth fraud and wrong.' Then may I plead: 'As though from Thee he came, Lord, if I loved her, count it not my shame."" "Poetry," says Coleridge, "is its own exceeding great reward;" and it cannot have failed to soothe Guinicelli in his exile: but the more vulgar reward of popular applause was soon grudged him; and, though he died early (in 1276), he may have lived to hear the name of Guido the Poet associated with one, doomed like himself to exile and an untimely death, the Florentine, Guido Cavalcanti. The judgment of the day has been maintained by most modern critics; but with Dante, in spite of friendship for Cavalcanti, Guinicelli was always "Maximus Guido." The passage in Purg. xi. 94 refers merely to the fickleness of fame, and altogether more significance has been given it than it deserves. Let the reader judge: a miniaturepainter is speaking: "Cimabue thought in painting to keep the field; and now Giotto has the cry, so that the fame of the former is growing dim. Thus the one Guido has taken from the other the glory of speech, and perchance the man is born who will chase the one and the other from the nest." The "glory" here mentioned was not spiritual but earthly; and surely Dante does not point to himself in the last line; commentators may say so, but we do not believe them. At last we reach the period when Florence became the centre of Italian literature. This was partly owing to political causes. Though many of her sons were born Ghibelines, and the noblest of them all was destined to be driven into their ranks, yet Florence was now the head-quarters of the Guelphs, |