ge, suffering and inarticulate. The two dramatists in their several
centuries also recognized the inability of the dialect. They laid none
but light loads upon it. They caused it to carry no more in their homely
plays than it carries in homely life. Their work leaves it what it
was--the talk of a people talking much about few things; a people like
our own and any other in their lack of literature, but local and all
Italian in their lack of silence.

Common speech is surely a greater part of life to such a people than to
one less pleased with chatter or more pleased with books. I am writing
of men, women, and children (and children are not forgotten, since we
share a patois with children on terms of more than common equality) who
possess, for all occasions of ceremony and opportunities of dignity, a
general, national, liberal, able, and illustrious tongue, charged with
all its history and all its achievements; for the speakers of dialect, of
a certain rank, speak Italian, too. But to tamper with their dialect, or
to take it from them, would be to leave them houseless and exposed in
their daily business. So much does their patois seem to be their refuge
from the heavy and multitudinous experiences of a literary tongue, that
the stopping of a fox's earth might be taken as the image of any act that
should spoil or stop the talk of the associated seclusion of their town,
and leave them in the bleakness of a larger patriotism.

The Venetian people, the Genoese, and the other speakers of languages
that might all have proved right "Italian" had not Dante, Petrarch and
Boccaccio written in Tuscan, can neither write nor be taught hard things
in their dialect, although they can live, whether easy lives or hard, and
evidently can die, therein. The hands and feet that have served the
villager and the citizen at homely tasks have all the lowliness of his
patois, to his mind; and when he must perforce yield up their employment,
we may believe that it is a simple thing to die in so simple and so
narrow a language, one so comfortable, neighbourly, tolerant, and
compassionate; so confidential; so incapable, ignorant, unappalling,
inapt to wing any wearied thought upon difficult flight or to spur it
upon hard travelling.

Not without words is mental pain, or even physical pain, to be undergone;
but the words that have done no more than order the things of the narrow
street are not words to put a fine edge or a piercing point to a