The literary merits of the Italian language are more fully expounded in another work of Dante’s, which, however, he composed in Latin, that his arguments might reach those who would not have condescended to read the vernacular. The _De Vulgari Eloquio_, originally entitled _De Eloquentia Vulgari_, or _Of the Vulgar Tongue_, is shown by historical allusions to have been composed by 1304. Like the _Convito_ it is unfinished, only two books of the four of which it was to have consisted having been written. Dante’s conception of the capabilities of his native tongue does him honour, even though he restricts the number of subjects adapted to it, and would deny its use to all but gifted writers. It is a still higher honour to have recommended it more effectually by his example than by his reasonings, which, as was inevitable in his age, frequently rest upon entirely fanciful and visionary data. His account, nevertheless, of the Italian dialects as they existed in his day, and his precepts on the metrical structure of Italian poetry, which he seems not to have then contemplated as capable of existing apart from music, retain a substantial value for all time. The hopes founded upon the appearance of the Emperor in Italy in 1311 probably induced Dante to publish a work written some years previously, his treatise _De Monarchia_, embodying the best mediæval conception of the spheres of temporal and spiritual government upon earth. So powerfully had the universality of Roman sway impressed men’s minds, that the Roman people were believed to have obtained the empire of the earth by the donation of Heaven, and the Emperor of Germany was regarded as their lawful representative. This belief, so strange to us, was, nevertheless, salutary in its time, by repressing the champions of universal despotism who made the Pope the fountain of secular as well as spiritual authority. By numerous arguments satisfactory to himself, but which would now be considered entirely irrelevant, Dante proves that universal monarchy is a portion of the Providential scheme, that the Romans possessed by divine appointment jurisdiction over the entire earth. The inheritance of this prerogative by the Emperor of Germany is taken for granted, and it is next demonstrated that the Emperor does not derive his authority from the Church, any more than the Church hers from the Emperor. Yet Cæsar is to be reverent to Peter, as the first-born son to his father. There is no trace of religious heterodoxy in the treatise, though nothing can be more uncompromising than its limitation of the Papal authority to its legitimate sphere.