By Sannazaro’s time, then, it may be said that Italian literature was fairly despatched on the route which it was to follow throughout the golden Cinque Cento. Elegance, finish, polish were to be the chief aims; form was to be esteemed at least on a par with matter; the mediæval elements, as we find them in Dante, were to be kept in abeyance. The classical tradition was to be taken up, and Italy was to appear as the literary heiress of Rome; but not to the extent of corrupting her own language with Latinisms. Such a tacit resolution was admirable for raising and maintaining the standard of literary composition, but was hostile to the development of transcendent genius. FOOTNOTES: [10] The best collection of popular Italian belletristic literature is the _Canti e Racconti del Popolo Italiano_, in eight volumes, edited by E. Comparetti and A. D’Ancona. CHAPTER X CHIVALRIC POETRY The history of the Italian chivalric epic is one of the most interesting departments of the story of literature, both on its own account, and because it reveals as in a mirror the growth of the more important epic of the tale of Troy. It arose out of a real event of the deepest importance to Europe, but this it so disfigured by romance and imagination as to be hardly recognisable. Charles Martel, the deliverer of France from the Saracens, is confounded with another and still more illustrious Charles, whose relations with the Saracen monarchs were usually amicable; and, by what seems to be a universal law, this hero comes to occupy but a corner of the temple nominally dedicated to him, and his renown is transferred to creatures of pure imagination. As Agamemnon, who at all events personifies the most powerful state of primitive Greece, yields as a poetic hero to such historically subordinate, if not absolutely fictitious personages as Achilles and Ulysses; as the terrible Attila, the portent of his time, shrinks in the Nibelungen Lied into the insignificant figure of Etzel; so, in the romancer’s eye, the real glories of Charlemagne dwindle to nothing before the petty skirmish of Roncesvalles.