There is no valid reason for doubting that these influences and materials were mainly French. As has been partly noted in a former chapter, the French _chansons de geste_ made an early and secure conquest of the Italian ear in the north, partly in translation, partly in the still more unmistakable form of macaronic Italianised French. It has indeed been pointed out that the Sicilian school was to some extent preceded by that of the Trevisan March, the most famous member of which was Sordello. It would appear, however, that this school was even more distinctly and exclusively a branch of Provencal than the Sicilian; and that the special characteristic of the latter did not appear in it. The Carlovingian poems (and to some, though a much less, extent the Arthurian) made a deep impression both on popular and on cultivated Italian taste as a matter of subject; but their form, after its first results in variation and translation, was not perpetuated; and when Italian epic made its appearance some centuries later, it inclined for the most part to burlesque, or at least to the tragi-comic, until the serious genius of Tasso gave it a new, but perhaps a not wholly natural, direction. [Sidenote: _Yet form and spirit both original._] In that earliest, really national, and vernacular school, however, which has been the chief subject of discourse, the direction was mainly and almost wholly towards lyric; and the supremacy of the sonnet and the _canzone_ is the less surprising because their rivals were for the most part less accomplished examples of the same kind. The _Contrasto_[191] of Ciullo itself is a poem in lyric stanzas of five lines--three of sixteen syllables, rhymed _a_, and two hendecasyllabics, rhymed _b_. The rhymes are fairly exact, though sometimes loose, _o_ and _u_, _e_ and _i_, being permitted to pair. The poem, a simple discourse or dispute between two lovers, something in the style of some French _pastourelles_, displays however, with some of the exaggeration and stock phrase of Provencal (perhaps we might say of all) love-poetry, little or nothing of that peculiar mystical tone which we have been accustomed to associate with early Italian verse, chiefly represented, as it is to most readers, by the _Vita Nuova_, where the spirit is slightly altered in itself, and speaks in the mouth of a poet greater in his weakest moments than the whole generation from Ciullo to Guittone in their strongest. This spirit, showing itself in the finer and more masculine form in Dante himself, in the more feminine and weaker in Petrarch, not merely gives us sublime or exquisite poetry in the fourteenth century, but in the sixteenth contributes very largely to launch, on fresh careers of achievement, the whole poetry of France and of England. But it is fair to acknowledge its presence in Dante's predecessors, and at the same time to confess that they themselves do not seem to have learned it