nce: in Provence at the
South, and in and around the Ile de France at the North; and from both
these regions a quickening influence diffused itself eastward into
Italy.

The conditions of Italy throughout the Dark and Middle Ages were widely
different from those of other parts of Europe. Through all the ruin and
confusion of these centuries a tradition of ancient culture and ancient
power was handed down from generation to generation, strongly affecting
the imagination of the Italian people, whether recent invaders or
descendants of the old population. Italy had never had a national unity
and life, and the divisions of her different regions remained as wide in
the later as in the earlier times; but there was one sentiment which
bound all her various and conflicting elements in a common bond, which
touched every Italian heart and roused every Italian imagination,--the
sentiment of the imperial grandeur and authority of Rome. Shrunken,
feeble, fallen as the city was, the thought of what she had once been
still occupied the fancy of the Italian people, determined their
conceptions of the government of the world, and quickened within them a
glow of patriotic pride. Her laws were still the main fount of
whatsoever law existed for the maintenance of public and private right;
the imperial dignity, however interrupted in transmission, however often
assumed by foreign and barbarian conquerors, was still, to the
imagination, supreme above all other earthly titles; the story of Roman
deeds was known of all men; the legends of Roman heroes were the
familiar tales of infancy and age. Cities that had risen since Rome fell
claimed, with pardonable falsehood, to have had their origin from her,
and their rulers adopted the designations of her consuls and her
senators. The fragments of her literature that had survived the
destruction of her culture were the models for the rude writers of
ignorant centuries, and her language formed the basis for the new
language which was gradually shaping itself in accordance with the
slowly growing needs of expression. The traces of her material dominion,
the ruins of her wide arch of empire, were still to be found from the
far West to the farther East, and were but the types and emblems of her
moral dominion in the law, the language, the customs, the traditions of
the different lands. Nothing in the whole course of profane history has
so affected the imaginations of men, or so influenced their destinie