The merit of amatory poetry consists, almost entirely, in its expression. Its warmth and tenderness of sentiment is injured by any exertion of mere ingenuity and fancy, in the pursuit of which the poet, or the lover, seems to lose sight of his proper object. Little more is required from him than to represent with sensibility and with truth the feelings which are common to all who love. The harmony of language is the best means of expressing that of the heart. But this principle seems almost entirely to have escaped the notice of the first Sicilian and Italian writers. The example of the Arabs and of the Provençals induced them to prefer ostentation to simplicity, and to exercise a false and affected taste in the choice of their poetical ornaments. In the best specimens of this school, we should find little to reward the labour of translating them; and we feel less inclined to draw the inferior pieces from their deserved obscurity. It is, therefore, principally with a view to the history of the language, and of the versification, that we turn over the pages of Ciullo d’Alcamo the Sicilian, those of Frederick II, and of his chancellor, Pietro delle Vigne, of Oddo delle Colonne, of Mazzeo di Ricco, and of other poets of the same class. The language employed by the Sicilians in their poetical attempts was not the popular dialect, as it then existed among the natives of the island and as we still find it preserved in some Sicilian songs, scarcely intelligible to the Italians themselves. From the imperial court and that of the kings of Sicily, it had already received a more elegant form; and those laws of grammar which were originally founded upon custom had now obtained the ascendency over it, and prescribed their own rules. The _lingua cortigiana_, the language of the court, was already distinguished as the purest of the Italian dialects. In Tuscany it came into general use; and previous to the end of the thirteenth century it received great stability from several writers of that country, in verse as well as in prose, who carried it very nearly to that degree of perfection which it has ever since maintained. For elegance and purity of style, Ricordano Malaspina, who wrote the _History of Florence_ in 1280, may be pronounced, at the present day, to be in no degree inferior to the best writers now extant. THE MASTER POET, AND HIS THEME