Page:The Book of the Courtier.djvu/99

 "Indeed they would. And you Tuscan gentlemen ought to keep up your mother tongue, and not suffer it to decay, as you do,— so that now one may say that there is less knowledge of it in Florence than in many other parts of Italy."

Then messer Bernardo said:

"These words that are no longer used in Florence have survived among the country folk, and are rejected by the gentle as corrupt and spoiled with age."

32.— Then my lady Duchess said:

"Let us not wander from our main purpose, but have Count Ludovico teach the Courtier how to speak and write well, whether it be in the Tuscan or any other dialect."

"My Lady," replied the Count, "I have already told what I know about it; and I hold that the same rules which serve to teach the one, serve also to teach the other. But since you require it of me, I will make such response as I may to messer Federico, who has a different opinion from mine; and perhaps I shall have need to discuss the matter somewhat more diffusely than is right. However, it shall be all I can tell.

"And first I say that in my judgment this language of ours, which we call vulgar, is still tender and new, although it be already long in use. For since Italy was not only vexed and ravaged but long inhabited by the barbarians, the Latin language was corrupted and spoiled by contact with those nations, and from that corruption other languages were born: and like rivers that from the crest of the Apennines separate and flow down into the two seas, so also these languages divided, and some of them tinged with Latinity reached by diverse paths, one this country and one that ; and one of them remained in Italy tinged with barbarism. Thus our language was long unformed and various, from having had no one to bestow care upon it or write in it or try to give it splendour or grace: but afterwards it was somewhat more cultivated in Tuscany than in the other parts of Italy. And so its flower seems to have remained there even from those early times, because that nation more than the others preserved a sweet accent and a proper grammatical order, and have had three noble writers82 who expressed their thoughts ingeniously and in those words and