[20] See the notes to Chaucer, the works of Froissart, and Mémoires sur les Troubadours.
CHAPTER V.
GUIDO CAVALCANTI AND MANDETTA,
CINO DA PISTOJA AND SELVAGGIA.
Amatory poetry was transmitted from the Provençals to the Italians and Sicilians, among whom the language of the Troubadours had long been cultivated, and their songs imitated, but in style yet more affected and recherché. Few of the Italian poets who preceded Dante, are interesting even in a mere literary point of view: of these only one or two have shed a reflected splendour round the object of their adoration. Guido Cavalcanti, the Florentine, was the early and favourite friend of Dante: being engaged in the factions of his native city, he was forced on some emergency to quit it; and to escape the vengeance of the prevailing party, he undertook a pilgrimage to Sant Jago. Passing through Tolosa, he fell in love with a beautiful Spanish girl, whom he has celebrated under the name of Mandetta:
In un boschetto trovai pastorella
Più che la stella bella al mio parere,
Capegli avea biondetti e ricciutelli.
Some of his songs and ballads have considerable grace and nature; but they were considered by himself as mere trifles. His grand work on which his fame long rested, is a "Canzone sopra l'Amore," in which the subject is so profoundly and so philosophically treated, that seven voluminous commentaries in Latin and Italian have not yet enabled the world to understand it.
The following Sonnet is deservedly celebrated for the consummate beauty of the picture it resents, and will give a fair idea of the platonic extravagance of the time.