This is a question that has divided all the talents of Italy, and in which it appears presumptuous in a foreigner to express any decision. Still we may reason from general grounds, and from analogy. Every portion of Italy has a distinct dialect. Immediately on leaving the precincts of any town, an acute ear will detect in the person who lives outside the gate a difference in the form of speech and pronunciation. Many of the towns use a mere _patois_, which has never been written. The Neapolitan, Romagnole, Genoese, and Milanese, each have a dialect, devoid of grace, cacophonous, truncated of vowels, and unintelligible to any but themselves; the Venetian being the only one distinguished for its own peculiar charms. To a stranger the language of the Romans has a great charm: the _bocca Romana_, or Roman pronunciation, is clear, soft, and yet emphatic. Their language is unidiomatic, and therefore easily comprehended. You enter Tuscany, and come upon those terse and idiomatic forms of speech which enraptured Alfieri, and which give so much energy and animation to the expression of sentiment, so much clearness and precision to narration or reasoning. But even these are not admitted by the Della Crusca. The Florentine is still a dialect--the Pisan and the Siennese fall under the same denomination: the principal difference is that the grammar of all the Tuscans is pure, and that you may form your speech on that of the peasantry and servants, without running any risk of falling into errors and vulgarisms. Alfieri used to mingle in the crowds assembled in the market-place of Sienna, there to imbibe from unlearned lips the purest modes of the Italian language. The dictionary Della Crusca was founded therefore on Tuscan, omitting its peculiarities, and carefully registering any innovations that had crept in since the era of the Trecentisti. It is obvious, under this tutelage, that the Italian became, when written, virtually a dead language. No author could adopt the forms of speech he made use of in the common conversation. The language that they heard and spoke when moved by joy, by grief, by love, or anger, was to be modified, corrected, and, so to speak, translated, before it could be put in a book. The living impress of the soul was to be taken from it, and, instead of putting down the word that rose spontaneously to the lips, and ought to have flowed as easily from the pen, the author hunted in the Della Crusca dictionary for authorities, which shackled the free spirit of inspired genius with chains and bolts forged from the works of the old writers, who themselves wrote as they spoke, and created a language, simply by putting down the forcible and graceful expressions then in colloquial use.