This matter can probably never be pronounced upon, with complete satisfaction to readers, except by a literary critic who is equally competent in Eastern and Western history and literature, a person who certainly has not shown himself as yet. What can be said with some confidence is, that the Saracen theory of Literature, like the Saracen theory of Architecture, so soon as it is carried beyond the advancing of a possible but slight and very indeterminate influence and colouring, has scarcely the slightest foundation in known facts, and is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with facts that are known, while it is intrinsically improbable to the very highest degree. As has been pointed out above, the modern prosody of Europe is quite easily and logically explicable as the result of the juxtaposition of the Latin rhythms of the Church service, and the verse systems indigenous in the different barbaric nations. That the peculiar cast and colour of early Italian poetry may owe something of that difference which it exhibits, even in comparison with Provencal, much more with French, most of all with Teutonic poetry, to contact with Arabian literature, is not merely possible but probable. Anything more must be regarded as not proven, and not even likely. [Sidenote: _The "folk-song" theory._] [Sidenote: _Ciullo d'Alcamo._] Of late, however, attempts have been made to assign the greater part of the matter to no foreign influence whatever, but to native folk-songs, in which at the present time, and no doubt for a long time back, Italy is beyond all question rich above the wont of European countries. But this attempt, however interesting and patriotic, labours under the same fatal difficulties which beset similar attempts in other languages. It may be regarded as perfectly certain that we do not possess any Italian popular poem in any form which can have existed prior to the thirteenth century; and only such poems would be of any use. To argue, as is always argued in such cases, that existing examples show, by this or that characteristic, that in other forms they must have existed in the twelfth century or even earlier, is only an instance of that learned childishness which unfortunately rules so widely in literary, though it has been partly expelled from general, history. "May have been" and "must have been" are phrases of no account to a sound literary criticism, which insists upon "was." And in reference to this particular subject of Early Italian Poetry the reader may be referred to the very learned dissertation[188] of Signor Alessandro d'Ancona on the _Contrasto_ of Ciullo d'Alcamo, which has been commonly regarded as the first specimen of Italian poetry, and has been claimed for the beginning of the thirteenth century, if not the end of the twelfth. He will, if the gods have made him in the least critical, rise from the perusal with the pretty clear notion that whether Ciullo d'Alcamo was "such a person," or whether he