with minor notes by his supporters, are collected in the book quoted above, Note to p. 241.  Fanfani exceeds all bounds of decency in the language he uses, and in his arrogant claims to be considered an unique judge of fourteenth-century style.  These claims he bases in some measure upon the fact that he deceived the Della Crusca by a forgery of his own making, which was actually accepted for the Archivio Storico.  See op. cit. p. 181.

    [4] Die Chronik, etc., pp. 53-57.

    [5] Die Chronik, etc., p. 39.

    [6] See Hegel’s op. cit. p. 6.

[7] See Del Lungo, op. cit. vol. ii. pp. 19-23, and fac-simile, to face p. 1.  This MS. was bought by G. Libri from the Pucci family in 1840, and sold to Lord Ashburnham.  Del Lungo identifies it with a MS. which Braccio Compagni in the seventeenth century spoke of as ‘la copia piu antica, appresso il Signor senatore Pandolfini.’

Thus stands the question of Dino Compagni’s ‘Chronicle.’  The defenders of its authenticity, forced to admit Compagni’s glaring inaccuracies, fall back upon arguments deduced from the internal spirit of the author, from the difficulties of fabricating a personal narrative instinct with the spirit of the fourteenth century, from the hypotheses of a copyist’s errors or of a thorough-going literary process of rewriting at a later date, from the absence of any positive evidence of forgery, and from general considerations affecting the validity of destructive criticism.  One thing has been clearly proved in the course of the controversy, that the book can have but little historical value when not corroborated.  Still there is a wide gap between inaccuracy and willful fabrication.  Until the best judges of Italian style are agreed that the ‘Chronicle’ could not have been written in the second decade of the fourteenth century, the arguments adduced from an examination of the facts recorded in it are not strong enough to demonstrate a forgery.  There is the further question of cui bono? which in all problems of literary forgery must first receive some probable solution.  What proof is there that the vanity or the cupidity of any parties was satisfied by its production?  A book exists in a MS. of about 1450, acquires some notice in a MS. of 1514, but is not published to the world until 1726.  Supposing it to have been a forgery, the labor of concocting it must have been enormous.  With all its defects, the ‘Chronicle’ would still remain a masterpiece of historical research, imagination, sympathy with bygone modes of feeling, dramatic vigor, and antiquarian command of language.  But who profited by that labor?  Not the author of the forgery, since he was dead or buried more than two centuries before his fabrication became famous.  Not the Compagni family; for there is no evidence to show that they had piqued themselves upon being the depositaries of their ancestors masterpiece, nor did they make any effort, at a period