rities of vulgar speech,[877] could display, and
the genius of Italian literature was rocked upon the restless waves of
the Florentine democracy. Ricordano Malespini, the first historian, and
nearly the first prose writer in Italian, left memorials of the republic
down to the year 1281, which was that of his death, and it was continued
by Giacchetto Malespini to 1286. These are little inferior in purity of
style to the best Tuscan authors; for it is the singular fate of that
language to have spared itself all intermediate stages of refinement,
and, starting the last in the race, to have arrived almost
instantaneously at the goal. There is an interval of not much more than
half a century between the short fragment of Ciullo d'Alcamo, mentioned
above, and the poems of Guido Guinizzelli, Guitone d'Arezzo, and Guido
Cavalcante, which, in their diction and turn of thought, are sometimes
not unworthy of Petrarch.[878]

[Sidenote: Dante.]

But at the beginning of the next age arose a much greater genius, the
true father of Italian poetry, and the first name in the literature of
the middle ages. This was Dante, or Durante Alighieri, born in 1265, of
a respectable family at Florence. Attached to the Guelf party, which had
then obtained a final ascendency over its rival, he might justly promise
himself the natural reward of talents under a free government, public
trust and the esteem of his compatriots. But the Guelfs unhappily were
split into two factions, the Bianchi and the Neri, with the former of
whom, and, as it proved, the unsuccessful side, Dante was connected. In
1300 he filled the office of one of the Priori, or chief magistrates at
Florence; and having manifested in this, as was alleged, some partiality
towards the Bianchi, a sentence of proscription passed against him about
two years afterwards, when it became the turn of the opposite faction to
triumph. Banished from his country, and baffled in several efforts of
his friends to restore their fortunes, he had no resource but at the
courts of the Scalas at Verona, and other Italian princes, attaching
himself in adversity to the Imperial interests, and tasting, in his own
language, the bitterness of another's bread.[879] In this state of exile
he finished, if he did not commence, his great poem, the Divine Comedy;
a representation of the three kingdoms of futurity, Hell, Purgatory, and
Paradise, divided into one hundred cantos, and containing about 14,000
lines. He die