Latin, again, was far less a language of the past for the Italians than for other European nations. What risk the Tuscan dialect ran, when Dante wrote the first lines of the 'Divine Comedy' in Latin, and when Petrarch assumed the laurel crown by right of his 'Africa', is known to every student. The serious efforts of the greatest writers were for centuries devoted to Latin composition, because they believed that the nation, in the modern as in the ancient world, might freely use the speech of Cicero and Virgil. Their _volgari cose_ they despised as trifles, not having calculated the impotence of scholars or of kings to turn the streams of language from their natural courses. Nor was this blindness so inexplicable as it seems to us at first sight. Italy possessed no common dialect; Dante's 'Italiano Illustre,' or 'Cortegiano', was even less native to the race at large, less universal in its use, than Latin.[412] Fashioned from the Tuscan for literary purposes, selected from the vocabulary of cultivated persons, stripped of vernacular idioms, and studied in the works of a few standard authors, it was itself, upon the soil that gave it birth, a product of high art and conscious culture. The necessity felt soon after Dante's death for translating the 'Divine Comedy' into Latin, sufficiently proves that a Latin poem gained a larger audience than the masterpiece of Italian literature. While the singer of a dialect, however noble, appealed to his own fellow-citizens, the Latin poet gave his verses _urbi et orbi_. If another proof of the artificiality of Italian were needed, we should find it in the fact that the phrases of Petrarch are not less obsolete now than in the fourteenth century. The English require a glossary for Chaucer, and even Elizabethan usages are out of date; in other words, the language of the people has outgrown the style of its first poets. But Italian has undergone no process of transformation and regeneration according to the laws of organic growth, since it first started. The different districts still use different dialects, while writers in all parts of the peninsula have conformed their style as far as possible to early Tuscan models. It may be questioned whether united Italy, having for the first time gained the necessary conditions of national concentration, is not now at last about to enter on a new phase of growth in literature, which, after many years, will make the style of the first authors more archaic than it seems at present. [Footnote 412: Cf. Filelfo, quoted in a note to the next chapter, who says,'Tuscan is hardly known to all Italians, while Latin is spread far and wide throughout the whole world.']