Between the earliest Italian and the earliest Spanish literature, however, there are striking differences to be noted. Persons ignorant of the usual course of literary history might expect in Italian a regular and unbroken development, literary as well as linguistic, of Latin. But, as a matter of fact, the earliest vernacular literature in Italy shows very little trace of classical influence[187]: and though that influence appears strongly in the age immediately succeeding ours, and helps to produce the greatest achievements of the language, it may be questioned whether its results were wholly beneficial. In the earliest Italian, or rather Sicilian, poetry quite different influences are perceptible. One of them--the influence of the literatures of France, both Southern and Northern--is quite certain and incontestable. The intercourse between the various Romance-speaking nations surrounding the western Mediterranean was always close; and the development of Provencal literature far anticipated, both in date and form, that of any other. Moreover, some northern influence was undoubtedly communicated by the Norman conquests of the eleventh century. But two other strains--one of which has long been asserted with the utmost positiveness, while the latter has been a favourite subject of Italian patriotism since the political unification of the country--are much more dubious. Because it is tolerably certain that Italian poetry in the modern literary sense arose in Sicily, and because Sicily was beyond all doubt almost more Saracen than Frank up to the twelfth century, it was long, and has not quite ceased to be, the fashion to assign a great, if not the greatest, part to Arabian literature. Not merely the sonnet (which seems to have arisen in the two Sicilies), but even the entire system of rhymed lyrical verse, common in the modern languages, has been thus referred to the East by some. [Footnote 187: I have not thought it proper, considering the system of excluding mere hypothesis which I have adopted, to give much place here to that interesting theory of modern "Romanists" which will have it that Latin classical literature was never much more than a literary artifice, and that the modern Romance tongues and literatures connect directly, through that famous _lingua romana rustica_ and earlier forms of it, vigorous though inarticulate, in classical times themselves, with primitive poetry--"Saturnian," "Fescennine," and what not. All this is interesting, and it cannot be said, in the face of inscriptions, of the scraps of popular speech in the classics, &c., to be entirely guesswork. But a great deal of it is.] [Sidenote: _The "Saracen" theory._]