Lastly, he has in this treatise the audacity to depict to us the sublimest sage, “il maestro di color che sanno,” as indulging in a burst of hypothetical laughter at the idea of a double origin of the human race. “Senza dubbio, forte riderebbe Aristotile”; and, he adds, “those who would divide mankind into two separate species like horses and asses are (with apologies to Aristotle) themselves the asses.”[152] In the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_, as we have already hinted, the “idioma incomptum et ineptum” of various localities, alike on the right and on the left of the Apennines, gives play for pleasantry of which does Dante not fail to take advantage. It is with evident relish that he puts on record typical uncouth phrases of each dialect: the Roman _Mezzure quinto dici_, the _Chignamente_, _frate_, _sc-tate_ of the Marches of Ancona, the Milanese _Mes d’ ochiover_, the _Çes fastú_ which men of Aquileja and Istria “crudeliter accentuando, eructuant.” The feminine softness of the Romagna, and especially of Forlì, with its _corada mea_;[153] the more than masculine roughness of the men of Verona, Vicenza, Brescia—all those who say “Magara”; the _nof_ and _vif_ of Treviso. In Chapter xi. he has his knife into mediaeval Rome, the proud and corrupt. “Sicut ergo Romani se cunctis preponendos extimant, in hac eradicatione sive discerptione non immerito eos aliis preponamus, protestantes eosdem in nulla vulgaris eloquentie ratione fore tangendos.” The primacy which the Romans claim in all things may certainly be theirs in this. In our eliminating process they shall be first to be rejected from the candidature to furnish a classical vernacular for all Italy! Their dialect (he goes on), like their morals, is the most degraded in the whole peninsula, and has spread its corrupting influence into neighbouring districts. It is indeed not worthy to be called a _vulgare_ (vernacular), but rather a depraved misuse of speech (_tristiloquium_), and is “italorum vulgarium omnium ... turpissimum.”[154] At the end of Chapter xiii. he tilts at the Genoese Z—an ugly sound in itself, but one which, if lost or mislaid by defect of memory, would leave the poor people of Genoa without a means of transmitting their thoughts! The loss of this one letter would leave them dumb, or impose on them the necessity of inventing an entirely new mode of speech. “Si per oblivionem Ianuenses ammitterent _z_ litteram, vel mutire totaliter eos vel novam reperare oporteret loquelam: est enim _z_ maxima pars eorum locutionis: que quidem littera non sine multa rigiditate profertur.”[155]