inaccuracies of time and place and fact which his zeal and pertinacity
have discovered. On the other hand, Prof. Hiram B. Pawling, whose
contributions to the history of Italian literature form some of the
brightest jewels in the crown of Harvard University, is inclined, after
careful consideration, to believe that the manuscript is, on the whole,
a genuine work.

Undoubtedly the sheets of parchment upon which the remarkable document
is written are older than the fourteenth century, some time in whose
first half Lappo, if he be the author, must have written the book. The
keen scrutiny of powerful magnifying-glasses has revealed the fact that
much of it is inscribed on skins which had formerly been used for the
recording of a series of Lives of the Saints, whose almost effaced
letters belong, without question, to the latter part of the twelfth
century. Whoever wrote this story of Dante must have been at the
economical pains to erase carefully the ecclesiastical script, thus
curiously avenging so many palimpsests of Greek poets and Latin poets,
whose lyrics have been scrubbed away with pumice-stone to make room for
homilies and liturgies and hagiologies. If the writer of the story be
indeed Lappo Lappi, it would be quite in keeping with his character, as
we know it, to imagine him enjoying very greatly this process of
obliterating some saintly relation in order to set down upon the
restored surfaces his testimony to the greatest love-story of Italy. It
is, however, unfortunately impossible to maintain with certainty that
the writing is actually from the hand of Lappo. Though it appears to be
a clerkly calligraphy of the fourteenth century, such things have been
imitated too often to enable any but the rashest and most headstrong of
scholars to give a definite and unquestionable opinion. One may cherish
with reason a private belief that the thing is indeed Lappo's work in
Lappo's writing, but with the memory of some famous literary impositions
fresh upon us, very notably the additions to Petronius, we must pause
and pronounce warily. It may be, indeed, that although the book be
genuine enough in its creation, it was never intended to be regarded as
a serious statement of facts, but rather to be taken as an essay in
romance by one who wished the facts were as he pictured them. If this be
so, the narrative is even less historically reliable than the _Fiametta_
of Boccaccio.

In any case, the manuscript, whenever written, wh