In literature Dante (1265-1321) is the first great figure. But, owing to his disproportional importance, we are liable to forget that he has his orderly place in the revival of poetry and literature which began in the brilliant court of Frederick II in Sicily. On the destruction of the Hohenstaufens, the poetic primacy passed to Bologna, where Guido Guinicelli and others composed poetry in a somewhat learned fashion, as befitted a university town, and then passed on to Tuscany, and in particular to Florence, where Dante was preceded by his friend Guido Cavalcanti. Dante, although distinctly mediaeval by his theology, his appeals to the authority of Virgil and Aristotle, and by his political views, has the characteristics of the new spiritual energy. He lays immense stress on individuality, and delineates real life with wonderful vividness. These traits mark him as belonging to the new world coming in rather than to the old world going out. From the point of view of history, Dante's most marked achievement, perhaps, was to raise the Tuscan (or more strictly speaking the Florentine) idiom, from among many competitors, to the dignity of being the Italian language. This was the consequence of writing the "Divine Comedy" in Tuscan, instead of in Latin. Dante's Tuscan verses were recited in the tavern and on the _piazza_, and were greeted with loud applause by apprentices and artisans, shopmen and tavern-keepers. He excited the enthusiasm of both educated and ignorant. At that time the spoken dialects were very numerous. A friend remonstrating with Dante for writing in an Italian dialect instead of in Latin, said that there were a thousand. Dante himself in his treatise "On the Vernacular Speech" enumerates Sicilian, Calabrian, Apulian, Roman, Tuscan, Genoese, Sardinian, Romagnol, Lombard, Venetian, and others. These dialects of the provinces were further subdivided among themselves. In Tuscany the people of Siena spoke one idiom, those of Arezzo another. In Lombardy the citizens of Ferrara spoke in one way, the citizens of Piacenza in another. Even in one city, as in Bologna, the dwellers in St. Felix Street and those in Greater Street did not speak alike. Besides the difficulties of many dialects, besides the immense prestige of Latin as the language of learning, of law, of the Church, French appeared as a possible literary language for Italy. Authors in Florence, Venice, Siena, and Pisa wrote books in French, "because the French language goes over the world, and is more delectable to read and to hear than any other." But Dante made the Florentine tongue immortal, and not only wrote the "Divine Comedy" in Florentine, but also "The New Life" and "The Banquet." Prior to his time the divers idioms had stood on an equality; after his time Tuscan became the language of polite speech and of literature, the real Italian language, and the others were degraded to the position of mere dialects. Petrarch and Boccaccio, both