Dante did more than either his predecessors or contemporaries had done to improve, ennoble, and refine his native idiom; indeed he was wont to speak indignantly of those who would degrade it below the Provençal, the fashionable vehicle of verse in that age of transition, when the young languages of modern Europe, begotten between the stern tongues of the north and the classic ones of the south, were growing up together, on both sides of the Alps and the Pyrenees, like children in rivalry of each other, as the nations that spoke them respectively, so often intermingled in war or in peace. At the close of canto XXVI. of the "Purgatorio," Arnauld Daniel is introduced as the master-minstrel of the age gone by, singing some lines in a "Babylonish dialect," partly Provençal and partly Catalonian; pitting infamous French against the worst kind of Spanish (according to P. P. Venturi); and these certainly present a striking contrast of barbarous dissonance with the full-toned Tuscan of the context. Like our Spenser, Dante took many freedoms with the extant Italian, which no later writer could have used. For the sake of euphony, emphasis, or rhyme, he occasionally modified words and terminations to serve a present purpose only, and which he himself rejected elsewhere. In this he was justified: he ran through the whole compass of his native vocabulary, he tried every note of the diapason, and all that were most pure, harmonious, or energetic, he sanctioned, by employing them in his song, which gave them a voice through after ages, so that few, comparatively very few, have been entirely rejected by his most fastidious successors. It was well for the poetry of his country that he wrote his immortal work in its language; for neither Petrarch nor Boccaccio could have gone so far as they did in perfecting it, if they had not had so great a model, not to equal only but to excel. They, indeed, affected to think little of their vernacular writings, and pretended merely to amuse themselves with such compositions as every body could read. Dante himself began his poem in Latin; and if he had gone forward, the finishing stroke of the last line would have been a _coup-de-grace_, which it could never have survived.[20] Of the origin of the "Divina Commedia" it would be in vain to speculate here; the author himself, probably, could not have traced the first idea. Such conceptions neither come by inspiration nor by chance:--who can recollect the moment when he began to think, yet all his thoughts have been consecutively allied to that? Many visions and allegories had appeared before Dante's; and in several of these were gross representations of the spiritual world, especially of purgatory, the reality of which, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was urged upon credulity with extraordinary zeal and perseverance by a corrupt hierarchy. By all these rather than by one his mind might have been prepared for the work.