r oddly on Jacopone da Todi (_v._ p.
8) in his Italian work. Professor d'Andrea's book, cited above, opens
with an excellent essay on him.]

[Sidenote: _Heavy debt to France._]

There is no valid reason for doubting that these influences and
materials were mainly French. As has been partly noted in a former
chapter, the French _chansons de geste_ made an early and secure
conquest of the Italian ear in the north, partly in translation,
partly in the still more unmistakable form of macaronic Italianised
French. It has indeed been pointed out that the Sicilian school was to
some extent preceded by that of the Trevisan March, the most famous
member of which was Sordello. It would appear, however, that this
school was even more distinctly and exclusively a branch of Provencal
than the Sicilian; and that the special characteristic of the latter
did not appear in it. The Carlovingian poems (and to some, though a
much less, extent the Arthurian) made a deep impression both on
popular and on cultivated Italian taste as a matter of subject; but
their form, after its first results in variation and translation, was
not perpetuated; and when Italian epic made its appearance some
centuries later, it inclined for the most part to burlesque, or at
least to the tragi-comic, until the serious genius of Tasso gave it a
new, but perhaps a not wholly natural, direction.

[Sidenote: _Yet form and spirit both original._]

In that earliest, really national, and vernacular school, however,
which has been the chief subject of discourse, the direction was
mainly and almost wholly towards lyric; and the supremacy of the
sonnet and the _canzone_ is the less surprising because their rivals
were for the most part less accomplished examples of the same kind.
The _Contrasto_[191] of Ciullo itself is a poem in lyric stanzas of
five lines--three of sixteen syllables, rhymed _a_, and two
hendecasyllabics, rhymed _b_. The rhymes are fairly exact, though
sometimes loose, _o_ and _u_, _e_ and _i_, being permitted to pair.
The poem, a simple discourse or dispute between two lovers, something
in the style of some French _pastourelles_, displays however, with
some of the exaggeration and stock phrase of Provencal (perhaps we
might say of all) love-poetry, little or nothing of that peculiar
mystical tone which we have been accustomed to associate with early
Italian verse, chiefly represented, as it is to most readers, by the
_Vita Nuova_, where the spirit i