BOOK II. ITALIAN
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I. | [The Origins of Italian Literature] | 173 |
| II. | [Dante: Life and Minor Works] | 193 |
| III. | [The Divine Comedy] | 214 |
| IV. | [Petrarch] | 263 |
| V. | [Boccaccio] | 283 |
| VI. | [The Renaissance and Ariosto] | 297 |
| VII. | [Tasso] | 316 |
| VIII. | [The Period of Decadence and the Revival] | 337 |
STUDIES IN THE POETRY OF ITALY
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGINS OF ITALIAN LITERATURE
The first thing that strikes the attention of the student of Italian literature is its comparatively recent origin. In the north and south of France the Old French and Provençal languages had begun to develop a literature before the tenth century, which by the end of the twelfth had risen to a high degree of cultivation; indeed, by that time the Provençal had attained its highest point, and had already begun to decline. In Italy, however, we cannot trace the beginning of a literature, properly so-called, farther back than the thirteenth century.
Among the various causes which may be assigned for this phenomenon, the most important undoubtedly is the fact that the Italians have always looked upon themselves as of one race with the ancient Romans, and the heirs of all the glorious traditions attached to the names of the heroes, poets, and artists of the Eternal City. In similar manner they regarded Latin as their true mother-tongue, of which the vernacular was a mere corruption. Hence it came to pass that all the literature which we find in Italy before the thirteenth century, and a large proportion of that written in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, was in Latin and not in Italian, which seemed to the writers of those days unworthy of forming the medium of poetry and learning.