nch conquerors. In the North the earlier communal freedom had
already made way for the rule of tyrants when it was just springing into
life in the city by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the
cities of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa had been
rivals in commercial activity a hundred years before the merchants of
Florence were known out of Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song
from the Provencal troubadours half a century before the Florentine
singers. Too insignificant to share in the great struggle of the Empire
and the Papacy, among the last to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline,
Florence emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan or Bologna
was already in decay.

The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh
vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became
living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative
poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and
Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so
grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni
sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful
struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by
the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an
unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies
in the impression of a distinct personality which is left on us by a
simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt
rises from the naive simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and
with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose
begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young
Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous
picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the
charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the
man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its
contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory
which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs
discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the
tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a
pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The
sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of th