Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/19



literatures, like great rivers, seldom derive their origin from a single fountain, but rather ooze from the soil in a multitude of almost imperceptible springs. The literature of Greece may appear an exception, but we know that the broad stream of Homeric song in which we first behold it must have been fed by a number of rills which it has absorbed into itself, and whose original sources lie beyond the range of scrutiny. In no literature is this general maxim better exemplified than the Italian, if, at least, as the economy of this little history demands, we restrict this appellation to its modern period. It might be plausibly contended that the Latin and Italian literatures, like the Roman and Byzantine empires, are, in truth, a single entity, but the convenience of the student precludes a view in support of which much might be adduced by the critic and philologist. Defining Italian literature, therefore, so as to comprise whatsoever is written in any dialect of that "soft bastard