Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/21

Rh rules, which some of the least degenerate writers of the period apply with considerable skill. The explanation of this paralysis of Latin literature in Italy, while Greek was still an efficient organ of thought in the Eastern Empire, is no doubt to be found in the fact that it had never been a robust national growth. The property of the learned and cultivated, it had taken no deep hold upon the mass of the people; and when culture and learning perished amid the vicissitudes of barbarian conquest, it was only preserved, apart from the services of the Church, by the absolute necessity of maintaining some vestiges of law, physic, and divinity, and the impossibility of conveying instruction in the debased dialects into which the old Latin language was resolving itself.

It might have been expected, nevertheless, that these dialects would have become the vehicles of popular legend and poetry, and that, as anciently in Greece, a literature would at length have been evolved from the tales of the story-tellers and the songs of the minstrels. The very existence of vernacular minstrels and story-tellers is but matter of inference, the little which we possess in any sense referable to this department being in Latin. The instances laboriously accumulated by Rubieri to prove the existence of popular poetry throughout the Dark Ages seem to be all in this language; and centuries pass without any indication that the ancestors of Dante thought it possible to write in any other, and scarcely any that they cared for written composition at all, except as a medium for instruction in such knowledge as the age possessed, and the transaction of the ordinary business of life. The symptoms of vitality became more evident after the