it is certain that grammatical Latin had ceased to be employed in
ordinary discourse, at least from the time of Charlemagne, we have not a
single passage of undisputed authenticity, in the current idiom, for
nearly four centuries afterwards. Though Italian phrases are mixed up in
the barbarous jargon of some charters, not an instrument is extant in
that language before the year 1200, unless we may reckon one in the
Sardinian dialect (which I believe was rather Provencal than Italian),
noticed by Muratori.[875] Nor is there a vestige of Italian poetry older
than a few fragments of Ciullo d'Alcamo, a Sicilian, who must have
written before 1193, since he mentions Saladin as then living.[876] This
may strike us as the more remarkable, when we consider the political
circumstances of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. From the
struggles of her spirited republics against the emperors and their
internal factions, we might, upon all general reasoning, anticipate the
early use and vigorous cultivation of their native language. Even if it
were not yet ripe for historians and philosophers, it is strange that no
poet should have been inspired with songs of triumph or invective by the
various fortunes of his country. But, on the contrary, the poets of
Lombardy became troubadours, and wasted their genius in Provencal love
strains at the courts of princes. The Milanese and other Lombard
dialects were, indeed, exceedingly rude; but this rudeness separated
them more decidedly from Latin: nor is it possible that the Lombards
could have employed that language intelligibly for any public or
domestic purpose. And indeed in the earliest Italian compositions that
have been published, the new language is so thoroughly formed, that it
is natural to infer a very long disuse of that from which it was
derived. The Sicilians claim the glory of having first adapted their own
harmonious dialect to poetry. Frederic II. both encouraged their art and
cultivated it; among the very first essays of Italian verse we find his
productions and those of his chancellor Piero delle Vigne. Thus Italy
was destined to owe the beginnings of her national literature to a
foreigner and an enemy. These poems are very short and few; those
ascribed to St. Francis about the same time are hardly distinguishable
from prose; but after the middle of the thirteenth century the Tuscan
poets awoke to a sense of the beauties which their native language,
refined from the impu