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In his treatise "De Vulgari Eloquentia" he talks with satisfaction of what he has done for Italian literature, of the purity and correctness of his style. Considering the difficulties with which Dante had to struggle, we may perhaps be more inclined than the French critic to allow him this praise. Still it is by no means his highest or most peculiar title to applause.

They cultivated a more guarded and concise style, which might indeed please the critic or the scholar, but was wholly unfitted to instruct or move a promiscuous audience; as was said of one of them, oratio doctis et attente audientibus erat illustris; a multitudine autem et a foro, cui nata eloquentia est, devorabatur.

Notice recepit 'recovered', Tarentum having been lost by the Romans to Hannibal in 212 B.C. SENEM ADULESCENS: observe the emphasis given by placing close together the two words of opposite meaning. ERAT ... GRAVITAS: 'that hero possessed dignity tempered by courtesy'. Expressions like erat in illo gravitas are common in Cicero; e.g. Mur. 58 erat in Cotta summa eloquentia.

With the turn of the century, he goes on to say, a great change was brought about by the publication of the classical critical writings, especially the Poetics of Aristotle. Then the mediaeval criteria of doctrina and eloquentia were superseded by many new ones.

Dante, in his De Vulgari Eloquentia, informs us concerning the structure of this musical setting: it might be continuous without repetition or division; or it might be in two parts, one repeating the other, in which case the stanza was also divided into two parts, the division being termed by Dante the diesis or volta; of these two parts one might be subdivided into two or even more parts, which parts, in the stanza, corresponded both in rimes and in the arrangement of the lines.

It is quite unproved then that Dante lectured in Ravenna as a professor of Civil Law. It might seem equally certain that he did lecture upon Poetry and the vulgar tongue, and it seems likely that we have the text of his lectures in the latter if not in the earlier part of the De Vulgari Eloquentia "in which in masterly and polished Latin he reproves all the vulgar dialects of Italy."

As a result Virgil might be either an orator or a poet. This was the rhetoric which the middle ages inherited. To them rhetoric was synonymous with stylistic beauty. Poetry was a compound of doctrina and eloquentia, in other words of theology and style, in verse. In England this mediaeval tradition persisted into the seventeenth century, as the school rhetorics and the treatises on poetry show.

Sapientia et magnitude animi, qua omnes res humanae tenues et pro nihilo putantur, et in cogitando vis quaedam ingenii, et ipsa eloquentia admirationis habet non minus, jucunditatis minus. Ipsos enim magis videntur, quos laudamus, quam illos, apud quos laudamus ornare ac tueri: sed tamen in laudenda jungenda sunt eliam haec genera virtutum.

Of his own theoretical view of the sonnet, we are unfortunately ignorant, since the last books of his work, 'De vulgari eloquentia, in which he proposed to treat of ballads and sonnets, either remained unwritten or have been lost. But, as a matter of fact, he has left us in his Sonnets and 'Canzoni' a treasure of inward experience. And in what a framework he has set them!

There is a cynical morsel among these precepts which is worth observing, "Cito enim arescit lachryma præsertim in alienis malis;" and another grandly simple, "Nihil enim est aliud eloquentia nisi copiose loquens sapientia."