Page:A translation of the Latin works of Dante Alighieri.djvu/41

22 the climes of the world, and the habitable regions and corners of those climes. And as the original root of the human race was planted in the regions of the East, and our race also spread out from there on both sides by a manifold diffusion of shoots [10], and finally reached the boundaries of the West, it was then perhaps that rational throats first drank of the rivers of the whole of Europe, or at least of some of them. But whether these men then first arrived as strangers, or whether they came back to Europe as natives, they brought a threefold language with them, and of those who brought it some allotted to themselves the southern, others the northern part of Europe, while the third body, whom we [20] now call Greeks, seized partly on Europe and and partly on Asia. Afterwards, from one and the same idiom received at the avenging confusion, various vernaculars drew their origin, as we shall show farther on. For one idiom alone prevailed in all the country which from the mouths of the Danube, or marshes of Maeotis to the western boundary of England, is bounded by the frontierR of Italy and France and by the ocean; though afterwards through the [30] Sclavonians, Hungarians, Teutons, Saxons, English, and many other nations it was drawn ofT' into various vernaculars, this alone remaining to almost all of them as a sign of their common origin, that nearly all the above-named answer in affirmation iò.

Starting from this idiom, that is to say eastward from the Hungarian frontier, another language prevailed over all the territory in that direction comprised in Europe, and even ex-