of a common literary tongue for Italy.  Though Dante was of course devoid of what we now call comparative philology, and had but little knowledge of the first beginnings of the languages which he discusses, yet it is not more than the truth to say that this essay applies the true method of critical analysis for the first time to the subject, and is the first attempt to reason scientifically upon the origin and nature of a modern language.

    [1] We must remember that our own annalists, Holinshed and Stow,
    were later by two centuries than the Villani.

While discussing the historical work of Dante and the Villani, it is impossible that another famous Florentine should not occur to our recollection, whose name has long been connected with the civic contests that resulted in the exile of Italy’s greatest poet from his native city.  Yet it is not easy for a foreign critic to deal with the question of Dino Compagni’s Chronicle—­a question which for years has divided Italian students into two camps, which has produced a voluminous literature of its own, and which still remains undecided.  The point at issue is by no means insignificant.  While one party contends that we have in this Chronicle the veracious record of an eye-witness, the other asserts that it is the impudent fabrication of a later century, composed on hints furnished by Dante, and obscure documents of the Compagni family, and expressed in language that has little of the fourteenth century.  The one regards it as a faithful narrative, deficient only in minor details of accuracy.  The other stigmatizes it as a wholly untrustworthy forgery, and calls attention to numberless mistakes, confusions, misconceptions, and misrepresentations of events, which place its genuineness beyond the pale of possibility.  After a careful consideration of Scheffer’s, Fanfani’s, Gino Capponi’s, and Isidoro del Lungo’s arguments, it seems to me clearly established that the Chronicle of Dino Compagni can no longer be regarded as a perfectly genuine document of fourteenth-century literature.  In the form in which we now possess it, we are rather obliged to regard it as a rifacimento of some authentic history, compiled during the course of the fifteenth century in a prose which bears traces of the post-Boccaccian style of composition.[1] Yet the authority of Dino Compagni has long been such, and such is still the literary value of the monograph which bears his name, that it would be impertinent to dismiss the ‘Chronicle’ unceremoniously as a mere fiction.  I propose, therefore, first to give an account of the book on its professed merits, and then to discuss, as briefly as I can, the question of its authenticity.