had also a great influence on the formation of the Italian language, and this influence tended to unification not to differentiation, as many historians have taken for granted in consequence of their political individualism. Francesco de Sanctis says that intellectual culture necessarily stimulates new ideas, far superior to the material necessities of man, and thereby calls into existence a more educated and refined class of citizens, putting it in communication with foreign intellectual life. The ultimate consequence is a closer connection of languages that develops not their local, but their common elements. According to him the first effects of renewed Italian intellectual life were both to restore the purity of Latin and favour the formation of the vernacular. Thus we see how the classical revival started at the very moment when the new Italian consciousness should have been born. This revival was aided by the establishment of great international centres such as the Court of Palermo at first, and later the cities of Tuscany and Lombardy. As the studies of Latin improved, the local dialects became purer and more refined. The weakness of the contemporary writers for rhetoric, for verbosity, their exaggerated love for the mere word, to which they attributed an almost religious value, seems very often the naïve pleasure of reasserting a family claim on a cherished property. Both Guelphs and Ghibellines are followers of Rome, the former, as we have seen, finding in Roman Law the legality of their municipal institutions, the latter appealing to the traditions of Imperial Rome to justify the sovereign rights of Cæsar. The whole public life assumes a religious character as in all constructive periods of history and as is the case in Italy to-day, where the previous lack of seriousness has been considered by the greatest thinkers to have been the product of religious scepticism. At that time the object of the common veneration, the one universal feeling of the most factious of peoples in the most factious period of its history was the cult of Rome. And as Religion played such an immense part in their whole life, the Italians were obliged to christianise Rome and associate it with Christian idealism. For Dante, Christ, and Rome dominate the history of a thousand years. He views history as a vast moral and religious evolution, as an indissoluble whole, each portion of which converges irresistibly to its pre-ordained end. The Birth of Our Lord at the moment when Cæsar Augustus ordained that all the world should be taxed testified to God’s approval of the Empire. Christ, in submitting His Godhead to the judgment of a Roman magistrate, gave Divine sanction to Roman Law. Dante does not consider the miraculous origin of the Seven-Hilled City as the only proof of the privileges it holds from God, nor does he ascribe to it the more important favour of a special historical process. Rome for Dante is equivalent to Catholicity, to conformity