With the fall of the Roman empire Italy became the prey of Goths and Lombards in the north, and later of Saracens, Normans, and Spaniards successively in the south. Modern times have seen these elements also combining as best they can into one people, with a national sentiment and a national soul. The modern Italians are, therefore, descendants of ancient Romans and their kindred tribes, intermixed in intricate ways with Etruscans, Ligurians, and Gaulish Celts, with Goths and other Teutons, with Greeks, Spaniards, and a strain of Saracen. Nevertheless, among all these constituents, it is the Roman mental attitude which most prevails. Beyond doubt the literary ideal which possesses modern Italy is an inheritance from ancient Rome. The modern Italian speech is the child of Latin, in the sense in which French and Spanish are the children of Latin; or rather, like French and Spanish, it is a new shape which Latin has gradually put on after hundreds of years of use and misuse. Perhaps a word must be said in order to explain the chasm between Latin literature and the Italian literature of Dante. At no time, even in the zenith of Roman prosperity, did all parts of Italy speak the same Latin, even if they spoke Latin at all. Local peculiarities of grammar and pronunciation were numerous and marked. Moreover, in the most golden days of Latin speech, that Latin which we know and learn was the language of a literary and cultured class; the Latin of the people was different and more free. As generations went by, and the Roman empire grew, the difference between the literary and the popular speech became wider and wider still, until the one was scarcely recognizable in the other. And when Italy in the Dark Ages was ravaged, unsettled, and dismembered; when little state sprang up here and little state there; when the literary and cultured class almost disappeared, the upshot was that the speech of the people prevailed, just as Saxon-English prevailed over Norman-French. In each district its own dialect became the law, so that people at Naples, at Rome, at Florence, at Bologna, at Venice, and at Milan, were speaking in distinct manners of their own, while recognized Italian language there was none. Dialects exist in all these places, and in many more, even to-day; nevertheless there is an orthodox Italian language, the “Tuscan speech with the Roman utterance,” in which cultivated people endeavour to speak, and which is the only language recognized for serious literature. Many still imagine that it was Dante who made that language. On the contrary, no great literature can exist till the language is shaped. English had to be formed before Chaucer could come. An Italian tongue was necessary before Dante could build his masterpiece.