Page:A translation of the Latin works of Dante Alighieri.djvu/136

Rh country, and possessed a MS. of the De Vulgari Eloquentia, the ideas of which he readily embraced. He became an ardent champion of the doctrine that the language of the great writers of Italy—Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—should be called Italian and not Tuscan; and with a view to the improvement of the written tongue proposed, after many years' consideration, as he tells us himself, that five new letters should be added, in order to remove certain ambiguities of pronunciation. This scheme (which he afterwards modified) Trissino recommended in a letter to the reigning Pope (Clement VII.). In January 1529, or according to Rajna a little later, Trissino published a dialogue called Il Castellano, in which the issue 'Tuscan versus Italian,' raised by implication in the letter to the Pope, is thrashed out. Trissino's views met with vehement opposition, and, as Rajna observes, the dialogue no doubt represents discussions actually held at Rome between Trissino and his opponents. In the dialogue he supports his contention that the highest form of the language should be called Italian and not Tuscan by quotations from the De Vulgari Eloquentia, his MS. of which he had very likely brought with him. In the same year, 1529, there appeared an anonymous Italian version of the De Vulgari Eloquentia, preceded by a dedicatory letter addressed by Giambattista Doria to Cardinal [Ippolito] dei Medici, in which the author of the version is merely referred to as 'somebody.' The circumstances of the publication were, however, such as to raise a strong presumption that the 'somebody' was