We can only realize the attitude of Florence at this moment by its contrast with the rest of Europe. It was a time when Germany was sinking down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe le Bel was crushing freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression of its French conquerors. In the North the earlier communal freedom had already made way for the rule of tyrants when it was just springing into life in the city by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the cities of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa had been rivals in commercial activity a hundred years before the merchants of Florence were known out of Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song from the Provençal troubadours half a century before the Florentine singers. Too insignificant to share in the great struggle of the Empire and the Papacy, among the last to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline, Florence emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan or Bologna was already in decay. The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies in the impression of a distinct personality which is left on us by a simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt rises from the naïve simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a