Indeed, I think that the tone prevalent throughout Barberino’s maxims of courtesy on all sorts of points is fairly to be called exquisite. Our extract from him brings us (it may be well to remember) into the closest contact with the social usages which Dante in his youth must have been cognisant of and conforming to; for, in passing from Bonvicino to Barberino, we have passed from Lombardy to Tuscany—the latter poet being a native of the Val d’Elsa, in the same district as Boccaccio’s birth-place, Certaldo. The date assigned to Barberino’s work, the _Documenti d’Amore_, is just about the same as that of Bonvicino’s, or from 1290 to 1296. Yet I apprehend we must receive this early date with some hesitation. In 1290 Barberino was but twenty-six years of age; whereas the _Documenti d’Amore_, a lengthy and systematic treatise on all kinds of moral and social duties and proprieties, seems to be rich with the hoarded experience of years. That so young a man should even have sketched out for himself a work of such axiomatic oracularity seems _à priori_ unlikely, though one has to accept the fact on authority: that he should towards that age have completed the poem as we now possess it appears to me barely compatible with possibility. His other long poem, still more singular on the like account, is referred to nearly the same date. I observe in it, however, one passage (Part 6) which _must_ have been written after 1308, and probably after 1312. It refers to a story which had been narrated to Barberino ‘one time that he was in Paris.’ Now his journey on a mission to Provence and France began in 1309, and ended in 1313. I shall here give place to my brother, and extract _verbatim_ the notice of Barberino contained in his book of translations, _The Early Italian Poets_.[30] ‘Francesco da Barberino: born 1264, died 1348. ‘With the exception of Brunetto Latini (whose poems are neither very poetical nor well adapted for extract), Francesco da Barberino shows by far the most sustained productiveness among the poets who preceded Dante, or were contemporaries of his youth. Though born only one year in advance of Dante, Barberino seems to have undertaken, if not completed, his two long poetic treatises some years before the commencement of the _Commedia_.