Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/174



have now traversed nearly three centuries of Italian literature without encountering one really great prose-writer, Boccaccio only excepted. Unquestionably the development of Italian prose was retarded by the cultivation of Latin, which deprived it of ornaments in Petrarch, Pontano, and Æneas Sylvius—to say nothing of the buried talent which the example of such writers would have called into activity. With every allowance on these accounts, it is still remarkable how generally the path of the historian of early Italian literature lies amid the flowers of poetry and fiction. But the time had now come when, as in Greece, the national genius was about to assert itself in prose, and, also as in Greece, the movement was heralded by historians. After a long interval, due to the exclusive cultivation of ancient models, thef Italian Herodotus, Giovanni Villani, was to be followed by two men who might dispute the character of the Italian Thucydides, who at all events belonged to that invaluable class of historians who, like Thucydides, Polybius, and Procopius, are statesmen too, and participators in the events of which they are the narrators and the judges. This advantage was possessed in an eminent degree by, the historian of contemporary times; and though Rh