not remember the point of view from which the Italian humanists approached it. They regarded the ancient Romans as their forefathers, and Latin as their ancestral speech. During the dark ages, the old civilisation had been effaced, the language had been barbarized: if they could not restore the civilisation, they wished at least to regain the language which attested it. Medieval Italy had many dialects; the literary Tuscan had only a limited currency, while Latin was the universal language. Not long after Dante's death in 1321, the "Divine Comedy" was translated into Latin. The eminent humanist Francesco Filelfo, who died in 1481 at the age of eighty-three, could still say, "Tuscan is hardly known to all Italians, while Latin is spread far and wide throughout the whole world." Thus, in the effort to purify and elevate Latin style, patriotic sentiment and practical convenience conspired with the newborn zeal of scholarship.
During the interval between the middle of the fourteenth century and the earlier part of the sixteenth, a long series of humanists cultivated Latin prose-writing in every branch,—oratory, philosophical discourse, diplomatic or official correspondence, familiar letter-writing. The stress laid on the niceties of the art is shown by the reputation which Lorenzo Valla, best known as the translator of Thucydides, owed to his work called Elegantiae, published in 1432—1436. In the generation after his, Politian wrote Latin like a living language. Then the dictatorship passed to Bembo, prince of
