he Italian mind dominated by the influence of ancient Rome that her
earliest writers sought to keep alive the Roman tradition. This spirit
of freedom led to the establishment of the Italian Republics, and after
the Lombard cities threw off the yoke of Frederick Barbarossa they
turned their chief attention to education and literature. The spirit of
chivalry and chivalric poetry never took such root in Italy as it did
in other European countries. Nevertheless, Italy was not uninfluenced
by the Crusades, and the Arabs, establishing a celebrated school of
medicine at Salerno, gave a new impetus to the study of the classics.
In Bologna was opened a school of jurisprudence, where Roman law was
studied, and these schools, or universities soon appeared in other
parts of Italy.

The Italians devoted more time to the study of law and history, and to
making translations from the Greek philosophers, than to the
cultivation of chivalric poetry, although many of the Italian poets
wrote in Provencal and French; and Italian Troubadours made journeys to
the European Courts.

It has been said that the only poetry that has any real power over a
people is that which is written or composed in their own language. This
is especially true of Italy. Following this early Latin period came
Dante, the most glorious, and inventive of the Italian poets, and
indeed one of the greatest masters of verse in the world. He perfected
the Tuscan, or Florentine dialect, which was gradually becoming the
literary language of Italy. Petrarch, who succeeded Dante, is greatest
in his Italian poems, and it is by these that he is best known, while
his Latin works, which he hoped would bring him fame, have been almost
forgotten.

In the fifteenth century the use of the national language in literature
entirely died out, through the rise of the Humanists, and the craze for
Greek and Latin classics; but toward the end of the fifteenth century,
under Lorenzo de'Medici and Leo X, interest in their own literature
among the Italians began to revive again. Ariosto and Tasso wrote their
magnificent epics; and once more Italian poetry was read and
appreciated, and reached the height of its renown. Again in the
seventeenth century it declined under the influence of the Marini
school; whose bad taste and labored and bombastic style, was
unfortunately imitated in both France and Spain. In the eighteenth
century, under the patronage of Benedict XIV, the Arcadian poets of the