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22 which in his day animated a large portion of the Italian common people. The same spirit inspired the Rappresentazioni of a rather later period, which will be more appropriately considered along with the Italian drama.

Dante's prose works demand separate treatment; of earlier examples of prose there is very little to be said. Historians and theologians continued to compose in Latin, and the few writings in the vernacular were chiefly translations from that language. The principal contemporary book in Italian, the Tesoro or great encyclopaedia of Brunetto Latini, is an important monument of culture, but not of literature. It was, moreover, originally composed in French.

Italian literature had sprung up from nothingness and made enormous progress during three-quarters of a century without having produced a poet of the first or even of the second rank. There was no want of singers; rather there seemed reason for apprehension lest, as Tansillo declared with truth in the Cinque Cento,

a complaint anticipated by the anonymous writer of a clever ballata in the thirteenth century: