the earliest vernacular literature in
Italy shows very little trace of classical influence[187]: and though
that influence appears strongly in the age immediately succeeding
ours, and helps to produce the greatest achievements of the language,
it may be questioned whether its results were wholly beneficial. In
the earliest Italian, or rather Sicilian, poetry quite different
influences are perceptible. One of them--the influence of the
literatures of France, both Southern and Northern--is quite certain
and incontestable. The intercourse between the various Romance-speaking
nations surrounding the western Mediterranean was always close; and
the development of Provencal literature far anticipated, both in date
and form, that of any other. Moreover, some northern influence was
undoubtedly communicated by the Norman conquests of the eleventh
century. But two other strains--one of which has long been asserted
with the utmost positiveness, while the latter has been a favourite
subject of Italian patriotism since the political unification of the
country--are much more dubious. Because it is tolerably certain that
Italian poetry in the modern literary sense arose in Sicily, and
because Sicily was beyond all doubt almost more Saracen than Frank up
to the twelfth century, it was long, and has not quite ceased to be,
the fashion to assign a great, if not the greatest, part to Arabian
literature. Not merely the sonnet (which seems to have arisen in the
two Sicilies), but even the entire system of rhymed lyrical verse,
common in the modern languages, has been thus referred to the East by
some.

[Footnote 187: I have not thought it proper, considering the system of
excluding mere hypothesis which I have adopted, to give much place
here to that interesting theory of modern "Romanists" which will have
it that Latin classical literature was never much more than a literary
artifice, and that the modern Romance tongues and literatures connect
directly, through that famous _lingua romana rustica_ and earlier
forms of it, vigorous though inarticulate, in classical times
themselves, with primitive poetry--"Saturnian," "Fescennine," and what
not. All this is interesting, and it cannot be said, in the face of
inscriptions, of the scraps of popular speech in the classics, &c., to
be entirely guesswork. But a great deal of it is.]

[Sidenote: _The "Saracen" theory._]

This matter can probably never be pronounced upon, with complete
satisfact