Early Italian Literature. Vol. I. Pre-Dante Poetical Schools: By Ernesto
Grillo. (Blackie. 10s. 6d. net.)—Dr. Grillo, of Glasgow University, is doing valuable work for Italian studies. He has followed up his critical anthologies of Italian prose and poetry with a volume on the early poets, writing before 1300, for whom Italian was by no means a fixed or standardized tongue. Dante is very properly omitted, for his example and his fame gave the Tuscan dialect a literary supremacy which became ever more commanding. His pied ecessors and many of his contem- poraries, who are represented in this collection, are little known in England, except Jacopone da Todi and the Tuscans like Brunette Latini and Compagnetto. The book begins with soma twelfth century pieces and goes on with the Sicilian school— including the Emperor Frederick the Second himself, the "wonder of the world "—the Umbrian, the Tuscan, the Bolognese, and the North Italian schools, the last of which offers the greatest linguistic difficulties. Dr. Grillo prefixes an excellent essay, in the course of which he vigorously repudiates the theory that early Italian poets were the docile followers of the Provençal troubadours.
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