The Italian poets, before Dante, may be broadly divided into two classes.  The first was that of the troubadours, writing in the Provencal language, hardly to be distinguished from their contemporaries of the South of France, giving expression in their verses to the ideas of love, gallantry, and valor which formed the base of the complex and artificial system of chivalry, repeating constantly the same fancies and thoughts in similar formulas of words, without scope or truth of imagination, with rare exhibitions of individual feeling, with little regard for Nature.  Ingenuity is more characteristic of their poetry than force, subtilty more obvious in it than beauty.  The second and later class were poets who wrote in the Italian tongue, but still under the influence of the poetic code which had governed the compositions of their Provencal predecessors.  Their poetry is, for the most part, a faded copy of an unsubstantial original,—­an echo of sounds originally faint.  Truth and poetry were effectually divided.  In the latter half of the thirteenth century, however, a few poets appeared whose verses give evidence of some native life, and are enlivened by a freer play of fancy and a greater truthfulness of feeling.  Guido Guinicelli, who died in 1276, when Dante was eleven years old, and, a little later, Guido Cavalcanti, and some few others, trusting more than had been done before to their own inspiration, show themselves as the forerunners of a better day.[8] But as, in painting, Margheritone and Cimabue, standing between the old and the new styles, exhibit rather a vague striving than a fulfilled attainment, so is it with these poets.  There is little that is distinguishingly individual in them.  Love is still treated mostly as an abstraction, and one poet might adopt the others’ love-verses with few changes of words for any manifest difference in them of personal feeling.

Not so with Dante.  The “Vita Nuova,” although retaining many ideas, forms, and expressions derived from earlier poets, is his, and could be the work of no other.  Nor was he unaware of this difference between himself and those that had gone before him, or ignorant of its nature.  In describing himself to Buonagiunta da Lucca in Purgatory, he says, “I am one who, when Love breathes, mark, and according as he dictates within, I report”; to which the poet of Lucca replies, “O brother, now I see the knot which kept the Notary and Guittone and me back from that sweet new style which now I hear.  I see well how your pens have followed close on the dictator, which truly was not the case with ours."[9] As Love was the common theme of the verses from which Buonagiunta drew his contrast, the difference between them lay plainly in sincerity of feeling and truth of expression.  The following close upon the dictates of his heart was the distinguishing merit of Dante’s love-poetry over all that had preceded it and most of what has followed it.  There are, however, some among his earlier poems in which the “sweet