when the printing-press was very active, to give this jewel of their archives to the public.  If it be objected that, on the hypothesis of genuineness, the MS. of the ‘Chronicle’ must have been divulged before the beginning of the sixteenth century, we can adduce two plausible answers.  In the first place, Dino was the partisan of a conquered cause; and his family had nothing to gain by publishing an acrimonious political pamphlet during the triumph of his antagonists.  In the second place, MSS. of even greater literary importance disappeared in the course of the fourteenth century, to be reproduced when their subjects again excited interest in the literary world.  The history of Dante’s treatise De Vulgari Eloquio is a case in point.  With regard to style, no foreigner can pretend to be a competent judge.  Reading the celebrated description of Florence at the opening of Dino’s ‘Chronicle,’ I seem indeed, for my own part, to discern a post-Boccaccian artificiality of phrase.  Still there is nothing to render it impossible that the ‘Chronicle,’ as we possess it, in the texts of 1450(?) and 1514, may be a rifacimento of an elder and simpler work.  In that section of my history which deals with Italian literature of the fifteenth century, I shall have occasion to show that such remodeling of ancient texts to suit the fashion of the time was by no means unfrequent.  The curious discrepancies between the Trattato della Famiglia as written by Alberti and as ascribed to Pandolfini can only be explained upon the hypothesis of such rifacimento.  If the historical inaccuracies in which the ‘Chronicle’ abounds are adduced as convincing proof of its fabrication, it may be replied that the author of so masterly a romance would naturally have been anxious to preserve a strict accordance with documents of acknowledged validity.  Consequently, these very blunders might not unreasonably be used to combat the hypothesis of deliberate forgery.  It is remarkable, in this connection, that only one meager reference is made to Dante by the Chronicler, who, had he been a literary forger, would scarcely have omitted to enlarge upon this theme.  Without, therefore, venturing to express a decided opinion on a question which still divides the most competent Italian judges, I see no reason to despair of the problem being ultimately solved in a way less unfavorable to Dino Compagni than Scheffer-Boichorst and Fanfani would approve of.  Considered as the fifteenth century rifacimento of an elder document, the ‘Chronicle’ would lose its historical authority, but would still remain an interesting monument of Florentine literature, and would certainly not deserve the unqualified names of ‘forgery’ and ‘fabrication’ that have been unhesitatingly showered upon it.[1]