It is in the last quarter of the twelfth century that we find Provençal troubadours established at the Courts of the North Italian princes, writing exactly such poems as they would have written at home, and apparently just as well understood and equally popular, a proof that neither in Provence nor in Italy had the culture of _belles lettres_ progressed beyond the highest circles. One or two of them occasionally mingled an Italian strophe with their Provençal substance, and at a somewhat later date Bonvesin da Riva and others wrote in a curiously mixed dialect of French and Italian. There is, however, no proper Italian literature until, about 1220, we suddenly find a school of vernacular poetry flourishing at Palermo under the patronage of Frederick II., Emperor of Germany, an Italian on his mother’s side, and by his tastes and sympathies more of an Italian than of a German prince. The character of its productions is in general wholly Provençal, but the language is Italian of the Tuscan type, and it is a highly interesting question whether this was the case from the first, or whether the pieces as we possess them are adaptations from the Sicilian dialect, which appears from contemporary prose monuments to have existed at the time nearly in its present form. We cannot attempt to decide the controversy, which does not affect the position of the pieces as the earliest undoubted examples of vernacular Italian literature. Their poetical merit cannot in general be rated very highly, and they contain hardly anything which might not have been written in Provence as well as in Sicily. Frederick himself was one of the principal writers, and his canzone on his Lady in Bondage might appear to the English reader to possess considerable merit, but for the suspicion that the great poet who translated it infused more poetical inspiration than he found. It would gain considerably in significance if Rossetti could be proved right in conjecturing that the immured lady is a symbol of Frederick’s empire in captivity to the Pope: _Each morn I hear his voice bid them That watch me, to be faithful spies Lest I go forth and see the skies; Each night to each he saith the same;-- And in my soul and in mine eyes There is a burning heat like flame._ _Thus grieves she now; but she shall wear This love of mine whereof I spoke About her body for a cloak, And for a garland in her hair, Even yet; because I mean to prove, Not to speak only, this my love._ --ROSSETTI.