The lady, whose lover has taken the cross, complains: Lo 'mperador con pace Che m'a tolta la mia spene. Che tene per tal via Che perir gli convene. Quella, che m'ha in balia, Che si dura si tene. (Val. i. 261.) In the canzone ascribed to Guinicelli we find the following: Però sacciate che'n tal guisa pero, Quando fa dolce canto, ch'è sì fero ; Si fa 'n ver lei parvente E la Serena anċidelo in cantare. (Ib 77.) So, again, the notary thinks that to compare his heart to a salamander is rather elegant: Tanto coralemente Foco aggio, che non credo mai s'estingua; Perchè non mi consuma ? La salamandra audivi Che'nfra lo foco vivi stando sana; Chè il mio lavoro spica, e poi non grana. This latter poem we are inclined to refer to 1228, when Frederick was on the eve of sailing for the Holy Land. Folcachiero's canzone was probably written some years later-i.e., at some date between the conclusion of the treaty of peace with the pope in 1230, and the outbreak of the war with the Lombard League in 1235. Bologna seems to have been one of the first of the cities of the north to respond to the Sicilian influence. Besides Nascimbene, already mentioned as the author of a canzone erroneously ascribed to Enzo, we know of four other poets belonging to this town who wrote during the first half of the thirteenth century Semprebene, Fabrizio, Guido Guislieri, and Guido Guinicelli. Of the three former no work seems to be now extant. The last mentioned was a poet of remarkable iginality, whom Dante did not disdain .o describe as his father in art (Purg. xxvi. 97). Except that he was of noble family, a lawyer by profession, in politics a Ghibelline, and podestà of Narni in Umbria in 1266, little is known of his history that is worth repeating here. His poems will be found in D'Ancona and Comparetti's edition of the "Libro Reale," Valeriani's collection, and the "Raccolta di Rime Antiche Toscane (Palermo, 1817). Two, however, of those ascribed to him by Valeriani are certainly not his work. One of these beginning, "Lo fin To this false and artificial style Guinipregio avanzato," is assigned by D'An- celli's canzone on the "Gentle Heart" cona, with some plausibility, to Buonag-presents a contrast complete in all points. giunta Urbiciani da Lucca. It is a very There we find a mystical philosophy of poor performance, in the style of Giacomo love propounded in chaste and nobly imda Lentino. The other is clearly the work aginative language, while the verse has a either of Giacomo da Lentino or of some solemn richness of harmony which marks servile imitator of that poet. The re- a new epoch in the development of Italian semblance between the two following metre. The 60 Gentle Heart," with anpassages, of which the first is from an other canzone ("Tegno di folle impresa undoubted canzone of the notary, the sec-allo ver dire ") of equal elevation of tone ond from a canzone which is ranked under and nobility of style, has been translated Guinicelli's name in Valeriani, cannot be by Rossetti. Other two canzoni, attributed merely accidental, while it is impossible to Guinicelli in Valeriani's collection ("Avto suspect Guinicelli of imitating the no- vegna ched'eo m'aggio più per tempo" tary. and "La bella stella che il tempo misura"), are not at all in his style, and are probably the work of Cino da Pistoia. Nor do we believe that he wrote the obscure and somewhat crabbed canzone beginning, "Madonna il fino amore ch'eo vo porto." Two canzoni of meagre philoso Giacomo da Lentino trills forth rather sweetly: Son rotto come nave Che pere per lo canto Che fanno tanto dolce le Sirene. Tanta vi è piagenza Si in ogni parte vive lo meo core. (Ib. 70.) phizing, "Con gran disio pensando lunga- | death of Isabella. He inherited a much mente," and "In quanto la natura," may larger share of his father's ability than possibly be genuine work of Guinicelli in Conrad, and on the death of the latter a lean and hungry mood. Of two other took prompt and energetic measures to canzoni which remain to be noticed, one assert the independence of the Sicilian ("Donna l'amor mi sforza") is printed as kingdom against the pope, who saw in the Guinicelli's without comment, by D'An- minority of Conradin an opportunity of cona, but is so poor in sentiment and extending his sway over the whole of affected in style that we doubt very much Italy. Manfred's vigorous administration whether it is genuine; the other (vol. i., p. elicited universal enthusiasm, and at the 78) is certainly spurious. Thus out of request of the Estates of the Realm, he eleven canzoni which have been attributed assumed the crown in 1258. Having in to Guinicelli, there are only two of which conjunction with Pisa and Siena crushed we can feel reasonably certain that they Florence, in which the Guelf faction was are really his. These, however, rank then predominant, at the battle of Montaamongst the best lyric work ever produced. perti in 1260, he formed an alliance with Thirteen sonnets are also ascribed to Genoa and Venice. Thus both on the Guinicelli, and of these the greater num north and on the south the Papal States ber are probably genuine. They are to were threatened by a powerful coalition. be found in the "Raccolta di Rime Antiche The pope accordingly (Urban IV.) began Toscane" (Palermo, 1817). Three have to cast about for a foreign prince whom been exquisitely translated by Rossetti. he might induce to adventure the conquest It may not perhaps be altogether fanciful of the Sicilies in the Church's interest to suppose that in the sonnet which fol- and his own. Louis IX. of France was lows, dictated, as it clearly was, by a very sounded on the subject, but was found real anguish, we have the expression of too scrupulous, and his brother, Charles that late penitence, of which Dante tells of Anjou, was selected. Urban died in us (Purg. xxvi. 92), for the terrible sin 1264, but his policy was adopted by his with which Guinicelli's memory is stained. 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 sanguin. ary. 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.* Si son io angoscioso e pien di doglia, Sì ch'io non credo mai poter gioire, 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. 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 emperor is said to have married after the 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. 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 which is historically accurate. by the pope, Manfred's speech (Purg. ii. 118-132), ↑ Buhle's Aristotle, I. 199. says: 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. The following is the first stanza: * Lo pellegrino, ca sicuro andava Così m'a fatto Amore, a sua possanza. Guittone of Arezzo (1230-1294) strikes the historian of literature as the man who first attempted to nationalize the polished poetry of the Sicilian Court, and to strip the new style of its feudal pedantry. It was his aim, apparently, dismissing chivalrous conventions, to use the diction and the forms of literary art in an immediate appeal to the Italian people. He wrote, however, roughly. Though he practised vernacular prose and assumed in verse the declamatory tone which Petrarch afterwards employed with such effect in his addresses to the consciousness of Italy, yet Dante could speak of him with cold contempt; nor can we claim for him a higher place than that of a precursor. He attempted more than he was able to fulfil. But his attempt, when judged by the conditions of his epoch, deserves to rank among achievements. What Guittone's aims may have been we know not, but we are sure that the tendency of his work was not to nationalize but to vulgarize Italian poetry. The Some years before the battle of Bene-spirit of chivalry is indeed wanting in his vento the practice of versifying in the vulgar tongue seems to have spread far and wide throughout the northern and central provinces of Italy, not only Bologna, but Arezzo, Pisa, Pistoia, Florence, Lucca, Padua, Pavia, Ferrara, Faenza, be sides other towns, having each their poet or school of poets bent on developing the capabilities of the local dialect to the utmost. Of these the most popular seems to have been the Aretine Fra Guittone del Viva. Of Guittone's life we know only only that he deserted a wife and three children to become a member of the religious order known as the Knights of St. Mary, or sarcastically, from their love of ease and good living, the Frati Gaudenti (Jolly Friars) or Capponi di Cristo (Christ's Capons). He wrote sonnets and canzoni in considerable quantity, and also some epistles, partly in prose, partly in a rude kind of verse. He founded the monastery Degli Angeli at Florence in 1293, and died the following year. About one half of his canzoni will be found in the "Libro Reale," the rest, with his sonnets, in Valeriani. The letters must still be read in Bottari's edition of 1745.§ It is with the utmost astonishment that The citation is made from D'Ancona and Comparetti's edition of the "Libro Reale," where the old spelling is preserved. The poem, minus a stanza, and with some differences of reading more or less important, will be found in the collections of Valeriani and Nannucci under the name of "Semprebene da Bologna." + D'Ancona and Comparetti, vol. ii. 1828. Rime di Fra Guittone d'Arezzo. Firenze. erotic verse, but the old troubadour man. But The poet of Fiesole, Dante da Maiano, stands on a slightly higher level. He has more imagination than Guittone; but his style is wretchedly diffuse, and his tone usually falsetto. He conceived a Platonic passion — if so strong an expression can Italian Literature, Pt. I., pp. 45, 46. be rightly used of so extremely weakly a sentiment for Monna Nina, a Sicilian poetess. They appear never to have met, but they corresponded in vapid sonnets, a dreary spectacle to gods and men. A Bolognese physician, Messer Onesto, acquired a reputation as a writer of sonnets and canzoni during the latter half of the thirteenth century, which his extant work hardly, to our thinking, sustains. He was a learned man, and a bit of a philosopher, and his style has a certain dignity; but he had not the soul of a poet, and the lamentations of so grave a personage over the hardness of his mistress's heart are apt to seem a trifle ludicrous. Ugolino Ubaldino da Faenza wrote one charming little idyll, Passando con pensier per un boschetto" (vol. ii., p. 102), and Giovanni dall Orto d'Arezzo caught somewhat of the spirit of Guinicelli in his beautiful ballata | beginning, "Non si porria contare." But it is in Chiaro Davanzati, Rustico Filippo, Bondie Dietaiuti, and Folgore da San Gemignano that we see the clearest evidence of the new life that is stirring in Italian poetry. The beautiful image with which Bondie Dietaiuti opens his canzone, "Madonna m' è avvennuto simigliante" (Trucchi, i. 101), is indeed borrowed from a Provençal poet, and the theme is the old one of a suddenly inspired overmastering passion which the Sicilians were never tired of handling, but, with the exception of the concluding stanza, which is commonplace, the canzone has throughout an elevation of tone which is foreign to the Sicilians. Monte Andrea and Chiaro Davanzati make of the sonnet a vehicle of religious feeling and ethical thought. Cecco d'Angiolieri vents it in his sardonic, splenetic humor, Rustico Filippo converts it into a terrible engine of political warfare. Folgore da San Gemignano enshrines in it bright, daintily painted pictures of the town and country life of Tuscany. Of Lapo Gianni, Guido Cavalcanti, Dino Frescobaldi, and other Florentines, who finally disengaged the Italian love lyric from the trammels of Provençal tradition, we do not here speak. These men, with Cino da Pistoia and Dante, constitute a school of lyrists unique in the history of literature. Perhaps on some future occasion we may devote to them a separate study. *The former's address to the Virgin, "O madre di vertute luce eterna" (vol. ii. 42), may be contrasted with Guittone's "Donna del cielo, gloriosa madre" (vol. ii. 212). The one is the sincere utterance of a really noble piety; the latter is thoroughly commonplace in sentiment and rhetorical in tone. From The English Illustrated Magazine. SCHWARTZ: A HISTORY. CHAPTER I. I WAS expatriated by a man with an axe. The man and the axe were alike visionary and unreal, though it needed a very considerable effort of the will to hold them at mental arm's length. I had work on hand which imperatively demanded to be finished, and I was so broken down by a long course of labor that it was a matter of actual difficulty with me when I sat down at my desk of a morning to lay hold of the thread of last night's work, and to recall the personages who had moved through my manuscript pages for the past three or four months. The day's work always began with a fog, which at first looked impenetrable, but would brighten little by little until I could see my ideal friends moving in it, and could recognize their familiar lineaments. Then the fog would disperse altogether, and a certain indescribable, exultant, feverish brightness would succeed it, and in this feverish brightness my ideal friends would move and talk as it were of their own volition. But one morning-it was in November, and the sand-tinged foam flecks caught from the stormy bay were thick on the roadway before my window - the fog was thicker and more obdurate than common. I read and re-read the work of the day be. fore, and the written words conveyed no meaning. In a dim sort of way this seemed lamentable, and I remember standing at the window, and looking out to where the white crests of the waves came racing shorewards under a leaden-colored sky and saying to myself over and over again, "Oh, that way madness lies!" but without any active sentiment of dismay or fear, and with a clouded, uninterested wonder as to where the words came from. Quite suddenly I became aware of a second. presence in the chamber, and turned with an actual assurance that some one stood behind me. I was alone, as a single glance about the room informed me, but the sense of that second presence was so clearly defined and positive that the mere evidence of sight seemed doubtful. The day's work began in the manner which had of late grown customary, and in a while the fog gave way to a brilliance unusually flushed and hectic. The unin vited, invisible personage kept his place, until, even with the constant fancy that he was there looking over my shoulder, and so close that there was always a risk of contact, I grew to disregard him. All day long he watched the pen travelling over the paper, all day long I was aware of him, featureless, shadowy, expression less, with a vague cheek near my own. During the brief interval I gave myself for luncheon he stood behind my chair, and, being much refreshed and brightened by my morning's work, I mocked him quite gayly. "Your name is Nerves," I told him within myself, "and you live in the land of Mental Overwork. I have still a fortnight's stretch across the country you inhabit, and if you so please you may accompany me all the way. You may even follow me into the land of Repose which lies beyond your own territory, but its air will not agree with you. You will dwindle, peak, and pine in that exquisite atmosphere, and in a very little while I shall have seen the last of you." After luncheon I took a constitutional on the pier, not without a hope that my featureless friend might be blown away by the gusty wind, which came bellowing up from the Firth of Forth, with enough stinging salt and vivifying freshness in it, one might have fancied, to shrivel up a host of phantoms. I tramped him up and down the gleaming planks in the keen salt wind for half an hour, and he shadowed me unshrinkingly. With the worst will in the world I took him home, and all afternoon and all evening he stuck his shadowy head over my shoulder, and watched the pen as it spread its cobweb lines over the white desert of the paper. He waited behind my chair at dinner, and late at night when the long day's work at last was over he hung his intrusive head over my shoulder and stared into the moderate glass of much-watered whiskey which kept a final pipe in company. conscious second in which the axe was not in act to fall, and yet it never fell. It was always going to strike and never struck. "You cannot be supposed to know it, my phantom nuisance," I said, being ready to seek any means by which I might discredit the dreadful rapidity with which he seemed to be growing real; "you cannot be supposed to know it, but one of these days you will furnish excellent copy. As a literary man's companion you are not quite without your uses. One of these days I will haunt a rascal with you, and he shall sweat and shiver at you, as I decline to sweat and shiver. You observe I take you gayly. I am very much inclined to think that if I took you any other way, that axe might fall, and sever something which might be difficult to mend. So long as you choose to stay, I mean to make a study of you." Most happily I was able to adhere to that resolve, but I solemnly declare it made him no less dreadful. Sometimes I tried to ignore him, but that was a sheer impossibility. Very often I flouted him and jeered at him, mocked him with his own unreality, and dared him to carry out his constant threat and strike. But all day and every day, and in all the many sleepless watches of my nights, he kept me company, and every hour the threatened blow of the razor-edged axe seemed likelier to fall. But at last thank Heaven - the work was done, I touched the two or three hundred pounds which paid for it, and I was free to take a holiday. We had grown too accustomed to each other to part on a sudden, even then. I never saw him, for he was always behind me (and even when I stood before a mirror he was invisible but there), but he was He had grown already into an unutter- no longer featureless. His eyes shone able bore, and when he insisted upon pass-through a black vizard with one unwinking the night with me I could - but for the obvious inutility of the thing have lost my temper fairly. He took his place at the bedhead, and kept it till I fell asleep. He was there when I awoke in the night, and probably because the darkness, the quiet, and the sense of solitude were favorable to him, he began to grow clearer. Quite suddenly, and with a momentary, but genuine thrill of fear, I made a discovery about him. He carried an axe. This weapon was edged like a razor, but was unusually solid and weighty at the back. From the moment at which I first became aware of it to that happy hour when my phantom bore departed and took his weapon with him there was never a ing, glittering, ceaseless threat. He wore a slashed doublet with long hose reaching to the upper thigh, and he had a rosette on each instep. I can see quite clearly now the peculiar dull, cold gleam the razor-edged axe wore as he stood in some shadowed place behind me, and the brighter gleam it had in daylight in the streets. When I had borne with him until I felt that I could bear with him no longer, I took him, being back in town again, to a London physician of some eminence. The doctor took him somewhat gravely, insisted upon absolute mental rest, prescribed a tonic, laid down certain rules about diet, certain restrictions upon wine |