the sultan gracefully yielded to him the Holy City by the treaty of 1229, Frederick took possession as with the shrug of a philosopher and man of the world who had a high respect for the learning and civilization of the Arabs. At his court in Sicily there was a welcome for all poets and all men of learning, whether Christians, Saracens, or Jews. For the Saracens he had especial liking, and took pains to maintain a good knowledge of Arabic in his dominions. To him Michael Scot dedi. cated his translation of Avicenna's work upon Animals, and at his request Michael composed a treatise upon Physiognomy. Grosseteste was among Frederick's correspondents. Of the University of Naples Frederick was the founder. He had weaknesses and vices, but his free encouragement of learning, alike of the East and West, the wholesome companionship at his Court of men who had much to learn one from another, and the gay encouragement of song, made Sicily, in the days of our Henry III., the birthplace of modern Italian literature.

Its

Fifteen years after Frederick's death Dante was born. With Frederick II. had arisen the Italian form of the old German struggle between Ghibelline (to the Germans Waiblingen) and Guelf. In the summer of 1236, at the head of the Ghibelline party, Frederick prepared war against Northern Italy-against that part of Italy in which not only the Lombard League, but also the very rivalries and dissensions among and within its free cities, testified to the spirit of freedom that set noblest minds at work. Barbarossa had in vain struggled to force back the leagued Italian free cities under feudal government. In vain Frederick allied himself to the Italian feudal party. The popular party, then called that of the Guelfs, were without a leader, but it suited the pope's policy to befriend it. strength was drawn from the growing spirit of independence which caused prisoners of Brescia, bound to the machines advanced against the town, to bid their townsfellows strike fearlessly and count no man's safety of more worth than their country's honour. After Frederick's death, the pope and the Guelfs led armed revolt against the Italian rule of the House of Suabia. But the policy of Rome placed always the feuds and immediate worldly interests of the Papal Court above the larger interests of Italy; and in 1264, the year before the birth of Dante, Pope Urban IV. brought the dull, cruel, and grasping Charles of Anjou into Italy, as King of Naples, and allied the name and cause of the Guelfs to the lowest forms of foreign

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tyranny. The political theory of the Ghibellines was now that by acceptance of a strong imperial rule unity was to be secured, and a liberal chief, strong to contend against usurping tyrannies of priestcraft, would give life and law to society. The political theory of the Guelfs was that the proposed head of society would be a foreign master. They declared strongly for the citizen's individual right of self-government, and watched so jealously over municipal privileges, and each city's, each family's right to equality with its neighbour, that feuds between city and city, family and family-to which the Ghibellines pointed as justification of their different political view-arose out of the very energies that gave to Italy a Dante for her son. Men's souls were deeply stirred in contest upon questions involving the essential problems of society; and out of the energy so roused, there came, as usual, the best expression of man's genius. The development of commerce in North Italy, which had been quickened by the Crusades, brought citizens into wholesome contact with all forms of life; gave vigour of mind, quickened enterprise, and widened the sense of the worth of civil rights. Thus Florence throve. Within a generation before Dante's birth, its streets had been paved with stone, the Palace of Justice, the prisons, and the Bridge of the Trinity had been built. Greek painters also had been brought to Florence, whom young Cimabue saw at work in the chapel, and whose art was transcended by the genius of that Florentine. Dante was seventeen in the year of the Constitution of Florence, that expressed the political mind of this Athens of the Middle Ages. The Palazzo Vecchio was built when Dante was twenty-four years old. Five years later the builders were at work on the Baptistry and Cathedral; and Dante was but in his thirty-fifth year when there were cast for the Baptistry Ghiberti's brazen gates, which Michael Angelo declared "worthy to be the gates of Heaven."

If we look out of Italy to France we find there also the independent stir of thought. Guillaume de Lorris had begun, as a troubadour, between the years 1200 and 1230, or in the days of our King John and the earlier years of Henry III., an allegorical love poem, called the "Roman de la Rose." He died, leaving it a fragment of 4,070 lines, which had no special popularity. But in the days of Dante's childhood and youth, between the years 1270 and 1282, Jean de Meung, a poet, born, like Guillaume of Lorris, in the valley of the Loire, but no mere

troubadour, took up the unfinished “ Romaunt of the Rose,” and, by the addition of 18,000 lines, completed it in a new spirit. The timid grace of one young poet was followed by the bold wit of another, who was crammed with the scholarship of his time and poured it out in diffuse illustration of his argument, but who, a man of the people, alive with the stir of his time against polished hypocrisy, annoyed priests with his satire and court ladies with a rude estimate of their prevailing character. Underlying all Jean de Meung's part of the "Romaunt of the Rose" is a religious earnestness that gave its verses currency, and made them doubly troublesome to those who dreaded free thought and full speech.

Into the midst of all this energetic life DANTE was born in Florence, a lawyer's son, in the year 1265, seven years before the close of the reign of our King Henry III. His father died during his early childhood, and he was left to the care of a rich mother, who caused him to be liberally trained. Lombardy was without a written language, and the choice of language for the poets of North Italy was between Provençal and Sicilian. Dante chose Sicilian, and blended music of the South with Northern energy. At first, in his early manhood, he wrote the "Vita Nuova❞—the New or the Early Life-connecting, with a narrative of aspiration towards Beatrice, as the occasion of them, sonnets, and canzone, representing artificially, according to the manner of that time, various moods of love. Fifty yards from the house in which Dante lived was the house of Folco Portinari, father of the little Beatrice on whom Dante founded, not a set of personal love sonnets, but his ideal of a dawn of life and love distinguished by the chastest purity. When the actual Beatrice died, in the year 1290, she was the young wife of Simon dei Bardi; but this fact nearly concerned neither Dante nor the poem. At the very outset he describes his ideal as "the glorious lady of my mind," for she represented the pure Spirit of Love, Beatrice, the Blesser; earthly love in the "Vita Nuova," heavenly love in the "Divine Comedy." There is the most careful exclusion of all fleshly longing from Dante's picture of the Spirit of Love that walks abroad on the same earth with us, while yet, to our hearts, the world is young. When, by the spiritual eye, she is seen no more in the street, Dante's small treason to her memory is checked by a dream of her as the nine years' old child in the crimson dress, who represented the warm glow of love in the heart blessed with a child

TO A.D. 1292] ITALIAN INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE

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like innocence. Dante's unfinished " Convito," continues the allegory of the "Vita Nuova" by showing how, after the actual vision of love in youth and early manhood has departed, the poet, or the soul of man, turns to a new love, and seeks consolation in philosophy. And so the spiritual sense of these works proceeds by definite steps upward to the higher mysteries of the "Divine Comedy." Here, after the early days of faith and love, and when, after the first passage from emotions of youth to the intellectual enjoyments of maturer years, enthusiasm also for philosophy has passed away, Dante, or the Soul of Man represented in his person, passes through worldly life (the wood of the first canto) into sin, and, through God's grace, to a vision of his misery-to the "Hell." But by repentance and penance"Purgatory"—the marks of the seven deadly sins are effaced from his forehead, and the bright vision of Beatrice-heavenly love-whose handmaids are the seven virtues, admonishes him as he attains to "Paradise." There Beatrice, the Beatifier, Love that brings the Blessing, is his guide to the end of the Soul's course, the glory of the very presence of the Godhead, where a love that is almighty rules the universe. The date of the action of the "Divine Comedy" is in the year 1300; and the whole development of the genius of Dante, which laid the foundation of Italian influence upon literature almost throughout Europe, belongs to a time corresponding to that of the reign of King Edward I. in England.

Towards the end of that reign, Dante still living, Petrarch was born. As Dante was a child of seven at the accession of King Edward I., so Petrarch was a child of three at the accession of King Edward II. Early in the reign of Edward II. Boccaccio was born; and in the reign of Edward III. we shall begin to find how great was the influence of these Italian writers upon English literature.

37. John of Oxnead, a monk of the Abbey of St. Benet Holme, was our chief Latin chronicler who lived in the reign of Edward I. His Chronicle began with the year 449 and ended with the year 1292. For events after the Conquest he chiefly followed Roger of Wendover, with interpolations, which became long and important in the reigns of Richard I., John, and Henry III. He gave particular account of the injustice and cruelty with which the Jews were treated in his time, was full in his account of the barons' war with Henry III., and detailed from contemporary knowledge the wresting of Wales from the

last of the Llewellyns in 1282, and the coming out of the London citizens with horns and trumpets to meet the head of the slain patriot.

Nicholas Trivet, son of one of the king's justices in eyre, was born about the year 1258, and became one of the Dominican or Preaching Friars. He wrote Latin Annals of the Six Kings of the House of Anjou, ending in 1307 at the death of Edward I. His chronicle is well written, religious in its tone, and very trustworthy in its citation of testimony or transcripts of historical documents.

Peter Langtoft, of Langtoft, in Yorkshire, a regular canon of Augustinians at Bridlington, wrote in French verse a Chronicle of England, from Brut to the end of the reign of Edward I. His inaccurate French was that of an Englishman who had not lived in France; the first part of this chronicle abridged Geoffrey of Monmouth, professing to omit what Peter Langtoft took for fable, and to repeat only so much as he thought true. He then gave, from various authorities, the history of First English and Norman kings, down to the death of Henry III., and in the third part of his chronicle became a contemporary historian of the reign of Edward I. Writing in French for noblemen and gentlemen of England, Langtoft took especial care to make out the best case he could for the justice of King Edward's Scottish wars.

38. Writing in English for the English common people, Robert of Gloucester, a monk of the abbey in that town, produced at the same time a rhymed Chronicle of England, from the siege of Troy to the death of Henry III. in 1272. It was in long lines of seven accents, and occasionally six, and was the first complete history of his country, from the earliest times to his own day, written in popular rhymes by an EnglishThe language is very free from Norman admixture, and represents West Midland Transition English of the end of the thirteenth century. Part of the work must have been written after the year 1297, because it contains a reference to Louis IX. of France, as Saint Louis, and it was in 1297 that he was canonised. Robert of Gloucester wrote also, perhaps, Lives and Legends of the English Saints in rhyme.

man.

Among other books written in English during the reign of Edward I., was the English version of The Lay of Havelsk the Dane, which was made about the year 1280, and is one of the brightest and most interesting examples of the English of