ows his close relation to his times. It is
his fidelity to Nature which has made him a leader for all successive
generations. The "Vita Nuova" was the beginning of a new school of
poetry and of prose as completely as Giotto's O was the beginning of a
new school of painting.

The Italian poets, before Dante, may be broadly divided into two
classes. The first was that of the troubadours, writing in the
Provencal language, hardly to be distinguished from their
contemporaries of the South of France, giving expression in their
verses to the ideas of love, gallantry, and valor which formed the base
of the complex and artificial system of chivalry, repeating constantly
the same fancies and thoughts in similar formulas of words, without
scope or truth of imagination, with rare exhibitions of individual
feeling, with little regard for Nature. Ingenuity is more
characteristic of their poetry than force, subtilty more obvious in it
than beauty. The second and later class were poets who wrote in the
Italian tongue, but still under the influence of the poetic code which
had governed the compositions of their Provencal predecessors. Their
poetry is, for the most part, a faded copy of an unsubstantial
original,--an echo of sounds originally faint. Truth and poetry were
effectually divided. In the latter half of the thirteenth century,
however, a few poets appeared whose verses give evidence of some native
life, and are enlivened by a freer play of fancy and a greater
truthfulness of feeling. Guido Guinicelli, who died in 1276, when Dante
was eleven years old, and, a little later, Guido Cavalcanti, and some
few others, trusting more than had been done before to their own
inspiration, show themselves as the forerunners of a better day.[8] But
as, in painting, Margheritone and Cimabue, standing between the old and
the new styles, exhibit rather a vague striving than a fulfilled
attainment, so is it with these poets. There is little that is
distinguishingly individual in them. Love is still treated mostly as an
abstraction, and one poet might adopt the others' love-verses with few
changes of words for any manifest difference in them of personal
feeling.

Not so with Dante. The "Vita Nuova," although retaining many ideas,
forms, and expressions derived from earlier poets, is his, and could be
the work of no other. Nor was he unaware of this difference between
himself and those that had gone before him, or ignorant of its nature.
In desc