In passing down to Naples, we find a marked change in the external conditions under which literature flourished. Men of learning at the Courts of Italy occupied a position different from that of their brethren in the Papal Chancery. They had to suit their habits to the customs of the Court and camp, to place their talents at the service of their patron's pleasure, to entertain him in his hours of idleness, to frame compliments and panegyrics, and to repay his bounty by the celebration of his deeds in histories and poems. Their footing was less official, more subject to the temper and caprices of the reigning sovereign, than at Rome; while the peculiar advantages, both political and social, which, even under the sway of the Medicean family, made Florence a real republic of letters, existed in no other town of Italy. At Naples there was no such thing as native culture. The semi-feudal nobility of the South were addicted to field sports, feats of arms, and idleness. The people of the country were sunk in barbarism. In the cities there was no middle class analogous to that of the more northerly republics. Nevertheless, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies played an important part in the development of Italian literature. While the Mussulmans held sway at Palermo, Sicily was the most refined and enlightened state of Southern Europe. Under the Norman dynasty this Arabic civilisation began to influence North Italy, and during the reign of Frederick II. Naples bade fair to become the city of illumination for the modern world. The failure of Frederick's attempt to restore life to arts and letters in the thirteenth century belongs to the history of his warfare with the Church. What his courtiers effected for the earliest poetry of the Italians is told by Dante in the treatise 'De Vulgari Eloquio.' For our present purpose it is enough to notice that the zeal for knowledge planted by the Arabs, tolerated by the Normans, and fostered by the House of Hohenstauffen in the south of Italy, was an exotic which took no deep root in the people. No national poem was produced in the golden age of Frederick's brief supremacy; no stories are told of Neapolitan carters and boatmen reciting the sonnets of his courtiers. As culture began, so it continued to exist at Naples--flourishing at intervals in close connection with the sovereign's taste, and owing to local influences not life and vigour, but colour and complexion, suavity and softness, caught from the surrounding beauties of the sea and shore.