his cell at Assisi, unlearned and simple, with so much to say to the people round him, who knew no Latin any more than he himself did? The wild, quavering, primitive measure of St Francis's famous Canticle is enough to show in how elementary a stage was this popular unwritten poetry in its beginning; and had a Homer or a Chaucer developed out of this chaos, weaving heroic legends into consistency, singing the story of a crusade, as Tasso did afterwards, or shaping into epic completeness that tale of Lancelot and Ginevra which already existed in germ, nothing more natural could have been. But it was not this natural evolution that happened. As a matter of fact, the history of the imagination does not move by rule, as a mental process ought; and it was not by following, gathering up, amplifying, and setting in order the legendary lore and nascent poetry about him, that Dante created "the vulgar tongue" into a noble literary language. The manner in which he did this—giving to modern literature a new beginning and fresh starting-point independent of, and distinct from, the classic—will be shown, according to the best ability of the writer, in the following pages. What an entirely new idea it was, unfamiliar to the minds of his contemporaries, and unlikely of success, according to all their canons, may be proved even from his own works. His little treatise 'Sul Volgare Eloquio,' written in Latin for the benefit, no doubt, of those who held the contrary opinion, is an attempt to prove, by force of a simple downright argumentation, more remarkable for its intense directness and single-hearted unity of purpose than for force of reason, the uses of "the vulgar tongue," and the necessity for employing it. It is "more
