enigmatical to the methodical investigations of the cold and cautious TIRABOSCHI. That grave critic submitted the interior feeling of the poet to the test of facts and dates. With more erudition than taste, he marked the mechanical gradations--the stages of every language, from rudeness to refinement. The mere historical investigator could conceive no other style than what his chronology had furnished. But the spirit of DANTE had penetrated beyond the palpable substances of the explorer of facts, and the arranger of dates. DANTE, in his musings, had thrown a mystical veil over the Italian language; but the poet presciently contemplated, amid the distraction of so many dialects, that an Italian style would arise which at some distant day would be deemed classical. DANTE wrote, and DANTE was the classic of his country. The third great master of the vernacular literature of Italy was BOCCACCIO, who threw out the fertility of his genius in the _volgare_ of nature herself. This Shakspeare of a hundred tales transformed himself into all the conditions of society; he touched all the passions of human beings, and penetrated into the thoughts of men ere he delineated their manners. Even two learned Greeks acknowledged that the tale-teller of Certaldo, in his variegated pages, had displayed such force and diversity in his genius, that no Greek writer could be compared with his "volgare eloquenza." The Italian literature thus burst into birth and into maturity; while it is remarkable of the other languages of Europe, that after their first efforts they fell into decrepitude. Our Saxon rudeness seems to have required more hewing and polishing to be modelled into elegance, and more volubility to flow into harmony, than even the genius of its earliest writers could afford. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the contemporaries of Gower, of Chaucer, and of "the Ploughman;" they delight their nation after the lapse of many centuries; while the critics of the reign of Elizabeth complained that Piers Ploughman, Chaucer, and Gower then required glossaries; and so, at a later period, did Ronsard, Baif, and Marot in France. In prose we had no single author till the close of the sixteenth century who had yet constructed a style; and in France Rabelais and Montaigne had contracted the rust and the rudeness of antiquity, as it seemed to the refinement of the following generation. It cannot be thought that the genius of the Italians always excelled that of other countries, but the material which those artists handled yielded more kindly to their touch. The shell they struck gave a more melodious sound than the rough and scrannel pipe cut from the northern forests.