--those wonderful poet discoverers, more wonderful as discoverers than as poets, who found out that a new music was to be made in a tongue, not Latin, nor yet Provencal--a tongue which had grown into life under the double foster-fathership of Arabian culture and Norman rule, the _lingua cortigiana_ of the palaces of Palermo, the "common speech" of Dante. When we recollect how the earliest written essays in Italian were composed in what once was styled Sicilian, it seems a trifle unfair for the practical adaptator--in this case as often happens in the case of individuals--to have so completely borne away the glory from the original inventor as to cause the latter to be all but forgotten. We now hear only of the "sweet Tuscan tongue," and even the pure pronunciation of educated Sicilians is not admitted without a comment of surprise. But whilst the people of Tuscany quickly assimilated the _lingua cortigiana_ and made it their own, the people of Sicily stuck fast to their old wild-flower language, and left ungathered the gigantic lily nurtured in Palermitan hot-houses and carried by the great Florentine into heaven and hell. They continued speaking, not the Sicilian we call Italian, but the Sicilian we call patois--the Sicilian of the folk-songs. The study of Italic dialects is one by no means ill-calculated to repay the trouble bestowed upon it, and that from a point of view not connected with their philological aspect. How far, or it may be I should say, how soon they will die out, in presence of the political unity of the country, and of the general modern tendency towards the adoption of standard forms of language, it is not quite easy to decide. Were we not aware of the astonishing rapidity with which dialects, like some other things, may give way when once the least breach is opened, we might suppose that those of Italy were good for many hundred years. Even the upper classes have not yet abandoned them: it is said that there are deputies at Monte Citorio who find the flow of their ideas sadly baulked by the parliamentary etiquette which expects them to be delivered in Italian. And the country-people are still so strongly attached to their respective idioms as to incline them to believe that they are the "real right thing," to the disadvantage of all competitors. Not long ago, a Lombard peasant-woman employed as nurse to a neuralgic Sicilian gentleman who spoke as correctly as any Tuscan, assured a third person with whom she chatted in her own dialect--it was at a bath establishment--that her patient did not know a single word of Italian! But it is reported that in some parts of Italy the peasants are beginning to forget their songs; and when a generation or two has lived through the aera of facile inter-communication that makes Reggio but two or three days' journey from Turin, when every full-grown man has served his term of military service in districts far removed from his home, the vitality of the