Dante puts us at the right point of view for estimating Guido's service. Though he recognized the Sicilians as the first masters of poetic style in Italy, Dante saluted the poet of Bologna as his father[45]:

Quando i' udi' nomar sè stesso il padre
Mio, e degli altri miei miglior, che mai
Rime d'amor usâr dolci e leggiadre.

On the authority of this sentence we hail in Guido the founder of the new and specifically national literature of the Italians. If not the master, he was the prophet of that dolce stil nuovo, which freed them from dependence on foreign traditions, and led, by transmutation, to the miracles of their Renaissance art. He divined that sincere source of inspiration, whereof Dante speaks[46]:

Io mi son un che quando
Amore spira, noto; ed a quel modo
Ch'ei detta dentro, vo significando.

The happy instinct which led him to use Tuscan, has secured his place upon the roll of poets who may still be read with pleasure. And of this, too, Dante prophesied[47]:

Li dolci detti vostri,
Che, quanto durerà l'uso moderno,
Faranno cari ancora i loro inchiostri.

Bologna could boast of many minor bards—of the excellent Onesto, of Fabrizio and Ghislieri, qui doctores fuerunt illustres et vulgarium discretione repleti.[48] Her erudition was further illustrated by the work of one Guidotto, who composed a treatise on the new vernacular, which he dedicated to King Manfred. Thus both by example and precept, by the testimony of Dante and the fair fame of her own writers, this city makes for us a link between Sicilian and Tuscan literature.

Manfred was slain at Benevento in 1266, and with him expired the prospects of Sicilian poetry. Dante, destined to inaugurate the great age, was born at Florence in 1265. Guido Guinicelli died in 1277, when Dante had completed his twelfth year. From 1249 until 1271, during the whole childhood of Dante, Enzo, King of Sardinia, Manfred's half-brother and Frederick II.'s son, remained a prisoner in the public palace of Bologna. In one of those years of preparation and transition, while the learned stanzas of Guido Guinicelli were preluding the "new sweet style" of Tuscany, this yellow-haired scion of the Suabian princes, the progenitor of the Bentivogli, sent a song forth from his dungeon's loggie to greet the provinces of Italy:—

Va, Canzonetta mia,
E saluta Messere,
Dilli lo mal ch'i' aggio.
Quella che m'ha in balia
Si distretto mi tene,
Ch'eo viver non poraggio.
Salutami Toscana,
Quella ched è sovrana,
In cui regna tutta cortesia;
E vanne in Puglia piana,
La magna Capitana,
Là dove è lo mio core notte e dia.

These lines sound a farewell to the old age and a salutation to the new. Enzo's heart is in the lowlands of Apulia and the great Capitanate, where his father built castles and fought mighty wars. He belongs, like his verses, like his race, like the chivalrous sentiments he had imbibed in youth, to the past; and now he is dreaming life away, a captive with the burghers of Bologna. Yet it is Tuscany for which he reserves the epithet of Sovereign—Tuscany where all courtesy holds sway. The situation is pathetic. The poem is a prophecy.