its outset. When poetry first assumed a form in the Peninsula, Europe was still, if not in a barbarous state, at least in the very infancy of civilisation; and Italy alone, among European nations, taught arts, science, and letters. The character of the youth of modern European civilisation, with all its defects and all its charms, is indelibly impressed on the literature of that age. The poetry of the first great Italian poets sprang from the complicated feelings which a new æra awoke in them. When you read their best productions, you feel that they are animated by the energy proper to the young; and even when they appear to guide themselves by ancient rules, the true soul of poetry, the youth of the spirit, breaks its way through every obstacle. The first Italian poets never obeyed, but on the contrary resisted, Aristotelian rules. Dante, the greatest of all—Petrarch and Ariosto, abandoned themselves to the genuine impulse of their minds, and were great;—great, because free. The history of Italian poetry confirms the truth, that the poet follows the real and the sublimest scope of art when he keeps in mind the character of his country and of his age. The highest Italian poetry is truly national.
The poets who followed were, with few exceptions, imitators; they bowed to the rules of Aristotle, and
