Unpolished as he is in poetic development, Fra Bonvicino is not to be altogether slighted from a literary point of view. Tiraboschi (_Storia della Letteratura Italiana_) believes that Bonvicino and one other were the two sole verse-writers of the Lombard or Milanese State in this opening period of Italian poesy; and Signor Biondelli, whom we have to thank for the publication of Bonvicino’s production after so many centuries of its hybernation in MS, can point to the choiceness of the old Friar’s vocabulary. In one couplet that well-qualified editor is able to find five expressions ‘which, for propriety and purity, would even at the present day beseem the most careful of writers;’ and hence he pronounces Bonvicino ‘the elegant writer of his time.’ It should be understood, however, that the MS reproduced by Signor Biondelli, and now again in the present volume, gives but an inadequate idea of the primitiveness of Bonvicino’s own actual idiom. Tiraboschi cites a harsher version of the first stanza from an earlier MS then existing in the Library of Santa Maria Incoronata in Milan, but which is now undiscoverable: the MS used by Signor Biondelli is of a much later date, the fifteenth century. It pertains to the Ambrosian Library in Milan. Bonvicino belonged to the third order of the Friars named Umiliati, and lived (as he himself informs us) in Legnano, a town of the Milanese district. Hence he went to Milan, and became a distinguished professor of grammar in the Palatine schools. The only other poem of his published in Signor Biondelli’s volume[12] is _On the dignity of the Glorious Virgin Mary_: but Tiraboschi specifies other productions in verse—Dialogues in praise of Almsgiving, between the Virgin and Satan, between the Virgin and the Sinner, between the Creator and the Soul, between the Soul and the Body, between the Violet and the Rose, between the Fly and the Ant; also the Legends of Job and of St Alexius; and various works in Latin, of which some have been published. DE LE ZINQUANTA CORTEXIE DA TAVOLA DE FRA BONVEXINO DA RIVA Fra bon Vexino da Riva, che stete in borgo Legniano De le cortexie da descho ne dixe primano; De le cortexie cinquanta che se den servare a descho Fra bon Vexino da Riva ne parla mo’ de frescho. 4 La primiera è questa: che quando tu è a mensa, Del povero bexognoxo imprimamente inpensa; Che quando tu pasci lo povero, tu pasci lo tó Segnore, Che te passerà, poxe la toa morte, in lo eternal dolzore. 8 La cortexia segonda: se tu sporze aqua alle man, Adornamente la sporze; guarda no sia vilan; Asay ghe ne sporze, no tropo, quando el è tempo d’estae; D’inverno per lo fregio in pizina quantitae. 12 La terza cortexia si è: no sì tropo presto De corre senza parola per asetare al descho; Se alchun te invida a noxe, anze che tu sie asetato, Per ti no prende quello axio, d’onde tu fuzi deschazato. 16