uses his own
name.

Whatever may be the date of Folgore, whether we assign his period to
the middle of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth
century, there is no doubt but that he presents us with a very
lively picture of Italian manners, drawn from the point of view of
the high bourgeoisie. It is on this account that I have thought it
worth while to translate five of his Sonnets on Knighthood, which
form the fragment that remains to us from a series of seventeen. Few
poems better illustrate the temper of Italian aristocracy when the
civil wars of two centuries had forced the nobles to enroll
themselves among the burghers, and when what little chivalry had
taken root in Italy was fast decaying in a gorgeous over-bloom of
luxury. The institutions of feudal knighthood had lost their sterner
meaning for our poet. He uses them for the suggestion of delicate
allegories fancifully painted. Their mysterious significance is
turned to gaiety, their piety to amorous delight, their grimness to
refined enjoyment. Still these changes are effected with perfect
good taste and in perfect good faith. Something of the perfume of
true chivalry still lingered in a society which was fast becoming
mercantile and diplomatic. And this perfume is exhaled by the petals
of Folgore's song-blossom. He has no conception that to readers of
Mort Arthur, or to Founders of the Garter, to Sir Miles Stapleton,
Sir Richard Fitz-Simon, or Sir James Audley, his ideal knight would
have seemed but little better than a scented civet-cat. Such knights
as his were all that Italy possessed, and the poet-painter was
justly proud of them, since they served for finished pictures of the
beautiful in life.

The Italians were not a feudal race. During the successive reigns of
Lombard, Frankish, and German masters, they had passively accepted,
stubbornly resisted feudalism, remaining true to the conviction that
they themselves were Roman. In Roman memories they sought the
traditions which give consistency to national consciousness. And
when the Italian communes triumphed finally over Empire, counts,
bishops, and rural aristocracy; then Roman law was speedily
substituted for the 'asinine code' of the barbarians, and Roman
civility gave its tone to social customs in the place of Teutonic
chivalry. Yet just as the Italians borrowed, modified, and
misconceived Gothic architecture, so they took a feudal tincture
from the nations of the North with whom the