A history of Italian literature

Great literatures, like great rivers, seldom derive their origin from a single fountain, but rather ooze from the soil in a multitude of almost imperceptible springs. The litera...

It was inevitable that the light thus kindled at the Sicilian Court should spread to other parts of Italy, those especially where the vernacular tongue had already obtained the...

Creditable as were their essays in the new literary instrument of thought, Dante’s predecessors can be regarded as his forerunners only in so far as they had helped to create an...

To have assumed a position so far in advance of, and so decisively discriminated from, that of any of his contemporaries, as in the _Vita Nuova_, would alone have ensured Dante...

Although, hardly less than Shakespeare, born not for an age but for all time, Dante was nevertheless in an especial sense the poet of the mediæval period. The vast advance which...

Petrarch’s activity as a scholar claimed so much larger a portion of his time and thoughts than his _Canzoniere_, and the bulk of the latter, considerable as it is, is so small...

If the works of the third great Italian writer cannot be compared to Dante’s for sublimity, or to Petrarch’s for perfection of style, the most important of them is of even great...

A just remark of Coventry Patmore’s on the contrast between Dante and Shakespeare in their relation to their respective literatures might be extended to the Italian literature o...

In characterising the original authors, apart from critics and commentators, whom Italy produced during the first half of the fifteenth century, we have omitted the men who real...

The history of the Italian chivalric epic is one of the most interesting departments of the story of literature, both on its own account, and because it reveals as in a mirror t...

Boiardo had accomplished a great work. He had raised the old chivalric romance to epic dignity, and shown its capability of classic form. This, impeded by his provincial educati...

We have now traversed nearly three centuries of Italian literature without encountering one really great prose-writer, Boccaccio only excepted. Unquestionably the development of...

Italy now possessed a perfect standard of prose. She had already had one in the fourteenth century, when so rapid had been the development of the power of expression that the fo...

We have seen that the definite result of the literary ferment which accompanied the revival of vernacular Italian literature after the long torpor of the fifteenth century was t...

Numerous as are the poets we have briefly passed in review, many more might have been added whom it would have been agreeable to have met in the barren fifteenth century. The Re...

The novel presents one of the most remarkable examples in literary history of arrested development, and of all departments of literature is perhaps the only one which failed to...

Alone among the great nations of the modern world, Italy stands in the unenviable position of possessing no drama at the same time national and literary. From one point of view...

The year 1564 is memorable in the intellectual history of the world. It marks the beginning of the long ascent of the North, and of the slow depression of the South. In it Shake...

The seventeenth century is for Italy a period of stagnation, relieved only by the endeavour to conceal decay by fantastic extravagance, by a fortunate reaction near its terminat...

The blight that fell upon Italian literature near the close of the sixteenth century was in the main to be ascribed to tyranny, temporal and spiritual. Yet there was another sou...

The eighteenth century was a period of recovery for Italy. The ancient lustre of literature, indeed, was but feebly rekindled; and fine art, with the exception of music, which r...

The eighteenth century, if chiefly remarkable in Italian literary history for the dawn of national regeneration, and the assimilation of literature to the type prevailing in oth...

We have seen that the Italy of the eighteenth century had fully entered into the general intellectual movement of the rest of Europe. Scarcely any trace remained of the special...

That only one of the distinguished writers reviewed in the last chapter should have given free expression to the Italian craving for liberty and national unity, may be accounted...

Literature, as a rule, must ever be on the side of liberty, for one conclusive reason among others--that liberty is the life of literature. Hence every man of letters is instinc...

The present age of letters in Italy resembles its contemporary literary epochs in the one respect in which these agree among themselves and differ from most preceding ages; it i...