MONSIGNOR GIOVANNI DELLA CASA 66 THE GALATEO:—EXTRACT 68 THE TRATTATO DEGLI UFFICI COMMUNI:—EXTRACT 74 [Sidenote: EARLY REFINEMENT IN ITALY.] In connection with the many samples of English and some French and Latin Courtesy-Books which the pains of other Editors have set before the members of the Early English Text Society, I have been asked to do something to exhibit what Italian literature has to show for itself in the same line. The request is one which I gladly close with; only cautioning the reader at starting that he must not expect to find in my brief essay any deep or exhaustive knowledge of the subject, or anything beyond specimens of the works under consideration, picked out one here and one there. Italy, it is tolerably well known, was, together with Provence, in the forefront of civilization—or ‘civility,’ as it might here be more aptly phrased—in the middle ages; and I should not be surprised to learn that, in the refinements of life and niceties of method, the Italy of the thirteenth century, as traceable in her Courtesy-Books, was quite on a par with the France or Germany[1] of the fourteenth, or the England of the fifteenth, and so progressively on. This, however, is a matter which I must leave to be determined by more diligent and more learned researches than my own. The materials for the comparison are now, to some extent, fairly before the editing and reading members of our Society. As regards date, at all events, Italy is greatly in advance. What is the date of the earliest French Courtesy-Book included in our series? Not far, I presume, from the close of the fourteenth century. What of the earliest English one? About 1450. Against these we can set an Italian Courtesy-Book—or rather a Courtesy section of an Italian book—dating about 1265. Of a date prior to this (the birth-year of Dante), there is little of either prose or poetry in Italian. [Sidenote: BRUNETTO LATINI.] The author of our specimen is a man illustrious in the literature of Italy, though comparatively little read for some centuries past—Brunetto Latini; remembered chiefly among miscellaneous readers as the preceptor of Dante, and as consigned by that affectionate but unaccommodating pupil to a very ugly circle of his Hell. There, if we may believe the ‘Poet of Rectitude,’ Ser Brunetto, with a ‘baked aspect,’ is at this moment unremittingly walking under an unremitting rain of fire: were he to pause, he would remain moveless for a century, and the torture of the flames would persecute him in aggravated proportion. On the same authority (which it is futile to fence with), I am compelled to say that Brunetto is the last person from whom one need wish to learn the practice, or as a consequence the theory, of modern or European morals.