For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. FROM THE ROMAIC OF SOUTSOS. (Ο Καυχησιάρης.) SOUTSOS, if there is a creature whom I heartily abhor, 'Tis the knave who blows his trumpet noisily from door to door. T'other day a blatant braggart - always at it, day and night Sought to deafen me outright. Bygone grandeur, stale achievements, formed the staple of his story, Just as if I were a dunce And a baby, all at once, I should be a noted person, and in human estimation Hold a most exalted station, Were I not so mighty modest,-loth my deeds abroad to blazon; And had never heard of greatness, or of riches, But I can not blow my trumpet, or of glory! never be so brazen ! I could Praise me, then, dear Soutsos, do! That the world may learn at last our real As when some workers, toiling at a loom, So do we seek to penetrate the doom For each day has its own completed piece. From The London Quarterly Review. THE FIRST EPOCH IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.* We have come to speak in a succinct way of the Renaissance as an intellectual movement of transcendent importance in the history of modern civilization; of the literature of the Renaissance, the painting and sculpture of the Renaissance, the architecture of the Renaissance, as though the movement itself lay within limits so clearly defined as to allow of no sort of doubt in any given instance, whether the poet, artist, or thinker we are studying belongs to the Renaissance or not. Yet, if we seriously attempt to give logical precision to our use of the term, it is impossible to avoid either so extending it as to make it embrace much of what is usually supposed to belong exclusively to the Middle Ages, or, on the other hand, confining it to the period during which the energies of the Italian mind were directed almost exclusively to the resuscitation of the antique in literature and art: a period extending, roughly speaking, from the latter end of the fourteenth century to the beginning of the sixteenth. If we adopt the latter alternative, we exclude, on the one hand, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, on the other, Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto, from part or lot in the Renaissance, the typical representatives of the movement, so far as literature is concerned, being Filelfo, Bembo, and Politian. Properly speaking, however, the Renaissance is, as Vernon Lee observes, "not a period, but a condition,”. a con dition "which began to exist with the earliest mediæval revival," which "did not exist all over Italy," and "existed outside Italy," though "in Italy it was far more universal than elsewhere." In this larger and, as we think, more philosophical sense of the term, the Italian Renaissance may be said to have come into being as early as the twelfth century in the revival of the study of Roman law which then took place at Bologna. How the school of civil law founded there by Irnerius* in the first quarter of that century grew and flourished we know by the long list of eminent glossators or commentators on the Code and Digest of Justinian whose works are still extant; and the high repute in which the university was held in the following century is attested by the fact that in 1226 the emperor Frederick II. attempted to suppress it, commanding the students to transfer themselves to his newly founded university at Naples. The Bolognese treated his edicts with contempt, and the university continued to prosper as before.† But while the severe study of the civil law was prosecuted at Bologna with an ardor which it is difficult for a modern Englishman to understand, the only literature which existed in the northern provinces of Italy was an exotic. During the latter half of the twelfth and the earlier decades of the thirteenth centuries troubadours from Provence visited Italy in large numbers, enjoying the hospitality of the various feudal courts, and in return practising their art for the diversion of their hosts. Thus, at least in the north, the langue d'oc came to be regarded by the Italians themselves as the proper vehicle of poetry, and was exclusively used by those among them who first cultivated the art, such as Bonifacio Calvi of Genoa and Sordello of Man3. Le antiche Rime Volgari secondo la Lezione tua; so that, at the beginning of the thirCodice vaticano 3793. Per cura di A. D' ANCONA eteenth century, the langue d'oc was in a D. COMPAREtti. Vols. I. and II. Bologna: 1875 * 1. Renaissance in Italy. By JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. Vols. I. and IV. & Co. 1880 and 1881. London: Smith, Elder 2. Euphorion: being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaval in the Renaissance. By VERNON LEE. London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1884. and 1881. 4. Cantilene e Ballate Strambotti e Madrigali nei Secoli XIII. e XIV. A cura di GIOSUE CARDUCCI. Pisa: 1871. 5. Poesie Italiane Inedite di Dugento Autori dall' origine della lingua infino all secolo 17mo. Raccolte ed illustrate da FRANCESCO TRUCCHI. Vol. I. Prato: 1846. 6. Raccolta di Rime Antiche Toscane. Palermo: 1817. 7. Poeti del Primo Secolo della Lingua Italiana. Firenze: 1816. fair way to establish itself as the literary language of Italy. The disengagement of the Italian mind from the Provençal influence, the creation of a vernacular literature, is the most signal achievement of Hallam's Middle Ages, cap. ix. pt. ii. sub tit. "Civil Law." † Von Savigny's Gesch. des Römischen Rechts im Mittelalter, iii. 161. resulted in the cold and clumsy classicism of Palladio. Mr. Symonds does not adopt either of these alternatives; his work is a kind of compromise between them. To Dante, out of a volume containing some five hundred odd pages, rather less than twenty are assigned, and as at the close of them we are again reminded that Dante was after all a merely mediæval poet, and that with Petrarch the Renaissance begins, we should be inclined to wonder why Mr. Symonds had noticed him at all were it not that we are already familiar with his peculiar mode of handling his subject. This is naturally seen to least advantage in his introductory chapter on "The Origins." The manner in which the thir teenth century is there treated seems to us singularly unsatisfactory. If we take the narrower view of the subject, the chapter is at once seen to be irrelevant, while as an introduction to the history of the Renaissance in the larger sense of the term it is altogether inadequate. that century. The history of a revolution | checked, the noble art of architecture, so momentous, not only for Italy, but for the whole Western world, is worth writ ing with the utmost care and elaboration, and, as the movement was from first to last under the guidance of men learned in all the learning of their age, mindful of the ancient intellectual supremacy of their country, and bent upon restoring it, no account of the Italian Renaissance which does not deal with it in detail can fail to be unsatisfactory. The fault of Mr. Symonds's elaborate work is that he has never clearly settled with himself what he means by the Renaissance. On the one hand, he tells us that its golden age was inaugurated by Lorenzo dei Medici in the latter half of the fifteenth century, when Italian, which had been driven from the field a century before by the indifferent Latinity of the humanists, was reinstated as the literary language; on the other hand, he ranks Dante as a medieval poet. The Renaissance, according to Mr. Symonds, begins with Petrarch and ends with Ariosto. Its golden age is not the golden age of Italian literature Ariosto is a poor substitute for Dante- but it is a reaction against the pedantic classicism of the humanists. It is not a revival of the antique, but a vindication of the claims of the modern as against the antique. This seems to us a paradoxical, not to say selfcontradictory, position. If by the Renaissance we mean the attempt to recover and appropriate the intellectual heritage left by Greece and Rome, then, properly speaking, the Renaissance was coeval with the earliest efforts of the Italian mind, and is not ended yet; while, if we mean by it the imitation of antique models in literature, art, and life, it becomes synonymous with the combination of ped-influence which this brilliant and versatile antry and sensualism absurdly and bar barously designated the humanistic movement; a movement which consigned Dante and Petrarch to oblivion, and would have made Italian a dead language but for the reaction of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; a movement which prepared the way for the debasement of Italian painting by Giulio Romano, Correggio, and the Caracci, and in the case of the one art in which it had its way un We propose, accordingly, in the present paper to attempt, not indeed to write the history of Italian literature in that century, but to fill up a few lacunæ in Mr. Symonds's account of it. We have said that the establishment of Italian as the literary language was the signal achievement of the thirteenth century. Both Bologna and Florence exerted a powerful - influence the latter city a decisive upon the movement. But the original impetus came, not from the north, but from - from the school of poets the southwhich during the second quarter of the century formed itself in the Apulian and Sicilian dominions, and under the patronage, of the emperor Frederick II. The prince, by race half Swabian, half Norman, by birth Italian, by culture cosmopolitan, exerted on the development, of Italian literature was so important that it is necessary briefly to recapitulate some of the chief events of his life. The son of the emperor Henry VI., by Constance, daughter of Roger, the great count, he was born at Jesi, in the Marches of Ancona, December 26, 1194. Orphaned of both parents while yet in his fourth year, he Italy. Old enough to remember Freder ick's grandfather, the great Barbarossa, Gregory seems to have made up his mind that the ancient theory of the two co-ordi. nate headships of the Christian world would no longer work; that, if the Empire was not to reduce the Church to a subordinate position, the Church must become paramount. In particular, he appears to have regarded the presence of an emperor on Italian soil, and the steady consolidation of his power there, as a standing menace to the Church, and to have therefore determined to pick a quarrel with Frederick at the very first opportunity. Nor was the opportunity long in offering itself. In the summer of 1227 Frederick duly set sail for the Holy Land, but, suddenly falling ill-his health was always rather weak, and the season was unusually sultry, so that the mortality amongst the troops had been excessive - he returned to Sicily after an absence of three days, the expedition, however, proceeding on its way. The pope treated the emperor as a malingerer, and promptly excommunicated him. was educated at Palermo, nominally as Meanwhile, however, the vow which the ward of the pope, but really under Frederick had taken at his coronation at Moslem instructors, in all the learning of Aix-la-Chapelle of necessity remained unthe East and West- Latin, French, Pro- performed. In 1226 he solemnly renewed vençal, Greek, and Arabian — developing | it, pledging himself, on pain of excomunder these influences an acuteness and munication, to set sail for the Holy Land subtlety of intellect, an energy and decis in August of the following year. The ion of character, which made him even in death of Pope Honorius (March 18, 1227), his boyhood a potent force in the affairs and the election of Gregory IX. in his of the world. In his sixteenth year he place, were fraught with momentous issues found himself called upon to defend Apu-alike to Frederick, to the Church, and to lia, which, with Sicily, he had inherited from his mother, against an unprovoked attack by the newly crowned emperor Otho. He did so by inducing the pope to excommunicate the emperor, and the electors to depose him in favor of himself. This diversion recalled Otho to Germany, but in the autumn of 1212 Frederick, accompanied merely by a small body guard, crossed the Alps to assert his title to the imperial crown. In November he met Philip of France at Vaucouleurs, on the Meuse, and concluded a treaty of alliance with him, and in the following month he was crowned at Mayence. Two years later Otho sustained a crushing defeat at the hands of the French king at Bouvines. In 1215 Frederick was crowned at Aix-laChapelle, when he pledged himself to lead the crusade which had just been proclaimed by Innocent III. The death of Otho in 1218 rendered his position secure; and in 1220 he returned to Italy to receive the imperial crown from the pope's hands. The next eight years were spent in grappling with the chronic disorder which reigned in Apulia and Sicily, a revolt of the Saracen population of the island which broke out in 1222 being only crushed after a severe struggle. While thus engaged almost from day to day in a desperate conflict with anarchy, he yet found time to spare for the encouragement of literature and science. He fostered the medical school of Salerno, he founded the University of Naples, he encouraged the study of Aristotle, Michael Scott, better known as an astrologer, and honored by Dante with a place in the "Inferno" (xx. 115), being commissioned to execute a Latin translation of the Arabic versions of the Περὶ ψυχῆς and the Περὶ τὰ ζῶα. Μ Frederick, however, had not the slightest intention of abandoning the crusade; for, though he cared nothing about the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre on its own account, he felt, as he expressed himself to Fakreddin, that it was necessary in order that he might "keep up his credit with the Franks." With a small squadron he sailed from Otranto in the spring of 1228, reached Acre in the autumn, and proceeded to occupy Jaffa. He had, however, no desire to use force if diplomacy would serve the turn. Accordingly, after rendering Jaffa practically impregnable, he opened negotiations with Kameel, the sion of Jerusalem. Their intercourse was sultan of Egypt, who was then in posses |