Of Frederick's verse little is extant, Bologna. To a crowd of rhymers of less and that little, as has already been re- social distinction fortune has been less marked, is disappointing. The sceptical unkind; for, as we have no biographical criticism of our time has cast doubts upon knowledge of any of them, it is hardly the authenticity of most of the few poems worth the while even of a German Dryasthat have heen attributed to him. Both dust to dispute the authenticity of the the tenzone beginning "Dolze meo drudo work which passes under their names, of e vattene," published in the first volume which there is a considerable mass. It of D'Ancona and Comparetti's edition of must be owned that on the whole these the "Libro Reale" (Vat. MS. 3793), and poems are apt to be rather tedious reading, the canzone published by Carducci ("Di owing to the iteration of almost identical dol mi convien cantare") in his "Canti- sentiments, images, and modes of expres. lene e Ballate Strambotti e Madrigali nei sion which characterizes them; nevertheSecoli XIII e XIV," present a marked less, Rinaldo d' Aquino's lament of a lovecontrast in point of style to the undoubt- lorn maiden, which from internal evidence edly genuine productions of the Sicilian would seem to have been written about court-poets. Both have the directness the time of Frederick's expedition to the and simplicity which characterize Ciullo Holy Land, and the canzone by Odo delle d'Alcamo, Ruggieri Pugliese, and Ciacco Colonne, in which a lady half indignantly, dell' Anquillara, whose work the first-half plaintively, reproaches her absent mentioned poem also resembles in being lover with neglect, are written with unof an amœbean character. Four other deniable grace and a certain (very superfi poems ascribed to Frederick will be found cial) pathos. in Valeriani's collection, "Poeti del Primo Secolo." They have little or no merit.

Rugierone de Palermo's lament of a Crusader who has left his lady behind The same year that was so disastrous him, and who remembers in Syria her to Piero delle Vigne saw Frederick's nat- "dolze compagnia" and "dolze segnaural son, the gallant Enzo, king of Sar- mento," is really touching in its simple dinia, a prisoner at Bologna. Taken in a naturalness of sentiment. And when the skirmish before the walls of the city, he stern reality of death abruptly challenges was barbarously sentenced to imprison- the attention of that lightly dallying, idle ment for life. All offers of ransom were knight, Giacomino Pugliesi da Prato, the rejected, and various plans of escape, con- naïve sincerity of his almost childlike grief trived, it is said, by Lucia Biadagioli, a finds expression in language which goes young Bolognese lady, whose heart was straight to the heart. touched with pity for the beautiful and brilliant captive, were frustrated by the vigilance of the gaolers. Enzo, after languishing in prison for twenty-three years, died of a broken heart in 1272, the city which had used him so shamefully during his life honoring his remains with a magnificent funeral.

Three canzonets and a sonnet are ranked under the name of Enzo in Valeriani's collection. The sonnet has been trans. lated by Rossetti in his "Dante and his Circle." It is a variation upon the theme of the preacher, "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven," and is interesting as show ing how early the capabilities of the sonnet as a vehicle of sententious moralizing were recognized. As a work of art it is not of a high order. The canzonets, on the other hand, are written in a graceful and almost natural style a refreshing contrast to that of the emperor.

One of them, however, is now assigned by D'Ancona, on the authority of the Vatican MS. 3793, to Sir Nascimbene da

Solea aver sollazzo e gioco e riso
Più che null' altro Cavalier che sia.
Or n'è gita Madonna in Paradiso;
Portonne la dolce speranza mia.
Lasciò me in pene e con sospiri e pianti,
Levommi gioco e canti,

E dolce compagnia,

Ch' io m' avea degli amanti.

Or non la veggio, nè le sto davanti,
E non mi mostra li dolci sembianti,
Che solia.

The most prolific writer of this period appears to have been Giacomo da Lentino; at any rate, more work of his than of any of his contemporaries has been preserved. He wrote both sonnets and canzoni, and is recognized by Dante (De Vulg. Eloq. i. cap. xii.) as having exercised a refining and ennobling influence on Italian style. From the point of view of mere diction, with which in that treatise Dante was exclusively concerned, the praise is probably deserved; but as a poet his merits are by no means extraordinary. His imaginative faculty moves within the narrowest limits, a few figures, such as the

basilisk, the phoenix, the salamander, learn from Nannucci or Gaspary that comprising almost the whole of his available stock in trade; and when he essays a flight beyond, he is apt to fall into some peculiarly frigid conceit, as when he compares himself to a ship, his lady to the tempestuous ocean, and his sighs and melodious wailings to the jettison by which the ship is lightened, or elaborating the commonplace by which the lady is said to hold her lover or his heart in balia (a hardly translatable expression), insists in the most absurdly explicit way that his heart is no longer in his body, but in the custody of his lady, just as though that important part of his anatomy might be seen any day on her premises by any lady or gentleman that might choose to pay a visit to Lentino. So also in one of his sonnets he does his best to exhaust the catalogue of precious stones known to the lapidary, in order to exalt Madonna's virtues above theirs, and in another gravely propounds the question

Or come puote si gran donna entrare
Per gli occhi miei, che si piccioli sone?
E nel mio core come puote entrare,
Che mentresso la porto ovunque vone?

It was doubtless this vicious manner of writing, at once frigid and extravagant, that induced Dante to class him with Guittone d'Arezzo and Buonaggiunta Urbiciani da Lucca (Purg. xxiv. 56), as one of those who sought to eke out their poverty of imagination by inappropriate embellishment. Vernon Lee discovers in him a tendency to Platonism. Platonic love is an expression to which it is very difficult to attach a definite signification; but we own we are at a loss to understand in what sense the term can be used in connection with Giacomo da Lentino. If Platonic love implies indifference to sensual pleasure, we fail to see any trace of such a disposition in the notary. We suspect that Vernon Lee has been misled by the frigidity of the man's style into cred iting him with a corresponding quality of sentiment which probably did not belong to him.

The vices of the notary's style are, however, by no means peculiar to him. In a greater or less degree they are characteristic of the majority of his contemporaries. To say a thing naturally would seem to have been thought by them beneath the dignity of poetry; their range of ideas is limited in the extreme, and too often when in reading them we have chanced upon something which is imaginative and! seems original, we are disappointed to;

it has been said before by some Provençal troubadour. At the same time, it is easy to underrate the originality of the Sicilian poetry. On a cursory survey we might be inclined to exclaim contemptuously, "An echo of Provençal poetry in its decadence!" When, however, the debt which they owed to the Provençals has been recognized to the full, when even the diligence of Adolf Gaspary has exhausted itself in tracing back their happiest ideas to Provençal sources, it remains that the Sicilians have after all an origi. nality of their own. Not only were they the first to write Italian, but they invented and carried far on the way to perfection one metrical form which seems destined to last as long as human speech itself— viz., the sonnet; another, the canzone, which Dante did not disdain to use; a third, the strambotto, a stanza of eight iambic five-accented lines, which, with certain modifications in the arrangement of the rhymes, became, in the hands of Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto, the peculiar vehicle of narrative, and suggested to Spenser the noble stanza which bears his

name.

Dante (De Vulg. Eloq. i. cap. xii.) fully acknowledges the importance of the part played by the Sicilians in the development of Italian poetry, observing that, so pow erful was the influence exerted by them, even in his own day, "quicquid poetantur Itali Sicilianum vocatur," which seems to imply that it was the custom to use some such expression as "uno Ciciliano," as a generic term for a poem, whether written in the Sicilian dialect or not. At what rate the movement began to spread northward cannot be decided with precision, nor the route which it traversed. The older Italian critics fixed the date of a canzone by a Sienese poet, Folcachiero de' Folcachieri, about the year 1177, on the strength of its first line, "Tutto lo mondo vive sanza guerra," which was supposed to refer to the peace concluded in that year between Barbarossa and Pope Alexander III. As, however, we now know that the canzone was invented by the Sicilians, and not earlier than the second quarter of the thirteenth century, some other period of general peace must be sought, if we still suppose the line to contain a reference to historical fact. A similar expression occurs in a poem by Rinaldo d'Aquino, already referred to.

Manuale della Letteratura del primo secolo della Lingua Italiana. Firenze. 1874

↑ Die Sicilianische Dicterschule. Berlin. 1878.

phizing, "Con gran disio pensando lunga- | death of Isabella. He inherited a much mente," and "In quanto la natura," may possibly be genuine work of Guinicelli in a lean and hungry mood. Of two other canzoni which remain to be noticed, one ("Donna l'amor mi sforza") is printed as Guinicelli's without comment, by D'Ancona, but is so poor in sentiment and affected in style that we doubt very much whether it is genuine; the other (vol. i., p. 78) is certainly spurious. Thus out of eleven canzoni which have been attributed to Guinicelli, there are only two of which we can feel reasonably certain that they are really his. These, however, rank amongst the best lyric work ever produced. Thirteen sonnets are also ascribed to Guinicelli, and of these the greater num ber are probably genuine. They are to be found in the "Raccolta di Rime Antiche Toscane" (Palermo, 1817). Three have been exquisitely translated by Rossetti. It may not perhaps be altogether fanciful to suppose that in the sonnet which follows, dictated, as it clearly was, by a very real anguish, we have the expression of that late penitence, of which Dante tells us (Purg. xxvi. 92), for the terrible sin with which Guinicelli's memory is stained.

Si son io angoscioso e pien di doglia,
E di molti sospiri e di rancura,
Che non posso saper quel che mi voglia,
Ne qual possa esser mai la mia ventura.
Disnaturato son come la foglia,
Quando è caduta della sua verdura ;
E tanto più ch'è 'n me secca la scoglia,
E la radice della sua natura.

Si ch'io non credo mai poter gioire,
Nè convertire mia disconfortanza
In allegranza di nessun conforto.
Solatto come tortora vo' gire,
Sol partire mia vita in disperanza
Per arroganza di così gran torto.

For grandeur of style this sonnet has few equals in literature. There are several others of Guinicelli's sonnets of which no poet need be ashamed.

larger share of his father's ability than Conrad, and on the death of the latter took prompt and energetic measures to assert the independence of the Sicilian kingdom against the pope, who saw in the minority of Conradin an opportunity of extending his sway over the whole of Italy. Manfred's vigorous administration elicited universal enthusiasm, and at the request of the Estates of the Realm, he assumed the crown in 1258. Having in conjunction with Pisa and Siena crushed Florence, in which the Guelf faction was then predominant, at the battle of Montaperti in 1260, he formed an alliance with Genoa and Venice. Thus both on the north and on the south the Papal States were threatened by a powerful coalition. The pope accordingly (Urban IV.) began to cast about for a foreign prince whom he might induce to adventure the conquest of the Sicilies in the Church's interest and his own. Louis IX. of France was sounded on the subject, but was found too scrupulous, and his brother, Charles of Anjou, was selected. Urban died in 1264, but his policy was adopted by his successor, Clement IV. The invasion took place in the summer of the following year, and by the apathy or treachery of Manfred's northern allies, Charles was permitted to cross the Po, and advance as far as Ceperano without opposition. The one decisive battle of the campaign was fought at Benevento on February 26, 1266. The conflict was protracted and sanguinary. It ended in the total rout of the Italian forces, Manfred himself, who seems to have displayed the most brilliant courage, being amongst the slain.*

Manfred shared his father's literary tastes. In Buhle's catalogue of Aristotelian literature, mention is made of a translation by him from Hebrew into Latin of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, "De Pomo seu de Morte." † One canzone of some slight merit is ascribed to him, on very doubtful authority, by Truc chi. Both father and son are referred to by Dante (De Vulg. Eloq. I., c. xiii.) in terms of emphatic eulogy.

Guinicelli lived to see the ruin of the Swabian dynasty, and Apulia and Sicily groaning beneath the tyranny of Charles of Anjou. On Frederick's death, his son Conrad succeeded to the throne of the Sicilies. He continued the struggle with the pope with indifferent success, and, dying in 1254, bequeathed it to his bastard brother Manfred, whom he named regent during the minority of his infant son Conradin. Manfred was the natural son of Frederick by Bianca Lancia, of the noble family of Asti in Piedmont, whom the which is historically accurate. emperor is said to have married after the

The stern and oppressive character of the Angevin rule put an end to the native literary movement in the Sicilies. Villani expressly mentions that Charles took no pleasure in "gente di corte minestrieri o

See for the manner in which his body was treated by the pope, Manfred's speech (Purg. ii. 118-132), ↑ Buhle's Aristotle, I. 199.

giocolari." The poets probably migrated | we read Mr. Symonds's remarks on this to northern Italy. One Italian trouba poet. He dour, however, Prenzivalle Dore, is known to have followed him, or rather his wife, Beatrice, Countess of Provence, to Naples. He seems to have had a liaison with Beatrice, and to please her, wrote chiefly in Provençal. He died at Naples in 1276. Two canzoni by him, however, exist, both probably written before the battle of Benevento. One of these is of rare beauty.